Critical Latin America – serie

En Cofradías Afrohispánicas: celebración, resistencia furtiva y transformación cultural, Manuel Apodaca Valdez ofrece un estudio de 42 cofradías de afrodescendientes del periodo colonial y seis cofradías contemporáneas aún vivas en cuatro zonas geográficas: España, Perú, México y República Dominicana. Esta investigación histórica y comparativa de corte trasatlántico analiza datos recogidos en archivos históricos e investigación de campo. El estudio muestra evidencias de las condiciones sociales, políticas, culturales y espirituales de las personas de origen africano que se integraron en cofradías durante el periodo colonial. Su legado trazó un camino caracterizado por la hibridación y la transformación, cimentando las bases para las cofradías afrohispánicas del presente, un fenómeno que el autor interpreta como resistencia furtiva y celebración de la identidad cultural.*****In Cofradías Afrohispánicas [Afro-Hispanic Confraternities], Manuel Apodaca Valdez offers an account of forty-two confraternities of African descendants of the colonial period, along with six contemporary confraternities still alive in four geographical regions: Spain, Perú, México, and the Dominican Republic. This historical and comparative trans-Atlantic study analyzes data gathered from archives and field work research. The work shows evidence of the social, political, cultural, and spiritual conditions of the peoples of African descent integrated in confraternities during the colonial time. Their legacy traced a path historically marked by hybridism and transformation laying the foundation for contemporary Afro-confraternities, a phenomenon interpreted by the author as furtive resistance and celebration of cultural identity. Cofradías Afrohispánicasis now available in paperback for individual customers.

Imagining Latinidad examines how Latin American migrants use technology for public engagement, social activism, and to build digital, diasporic communities. Thanks to platforms like Facebook and YouTube, immigrants from Latin America can stay in contact with the culture they left behind. Members of these groups share information related to their homeland through discussions of food, music, celebrations, and other cultural elements. Despite their physical distance, these diasporic virtual communities are not far removed from the struggles in their homelands, and migrant activists play a central role in shaping politics both in their home country and in their host country.Contributors are: Amanda Arrais, Karla Castillo Villapudua, David S. Dalton, Jason H. Dormady, Carmen Gabriela Febles, Álvaro González Alba, Yunuen Ysela Mandujano-Salazar, Anna Marta Marini, Diana Denisse Merchant Ley, Covadonga Lamar Prieto, María del Pilar Ramírez Gröbli, David Ramírez Plascencia, Jessica Retis, Nancy Rios-Contreras, and Patria Román-Velázquez. Imagining Latinidad: Digital Diasporas and Public Engagement Among Latin American Migrants is now available in paperback for individual customers.

How did overseas Europeans participate in the two world wars’ effort? Which were the tensions around mobilization? How did the war affect their identity and their descendants? What were their mobilization’s effects on the relationship with the adopted homelands? These closely intertwined issues connect to the central argument of the book: war exerted a crucial influence on the configuration – and reconfiguration – of those European communities’ national or ethnic identities and made evident their transnational nature. Through different case studies, this volume approached the multi-faceted, complex, and fluid nature of immigrant collective identities under the pressures and challenges of total wars.Contributors are: Juan Pablo Artinian, Juan Luis Carrellán Ruiz, Hernán M. Díaz, Norman Fraser Brown, Marcelo Huernos, Milagros Martínez-Flener, Norman Fraser Brown, Germán C. Friedmann, María Inés Tato, and Stefan Rinke.Transatlantic Battles: European Immigrant Communities in South America and the World Wars is now available in paperback for individual customers.

En Cofradías Afrohispánicas: celebración, resistencia furtiva y transformación cultural, Manuel Apodaca Valdez ofrece un estudio de 42 cofradías de afrodescendientes del periodo colonial y seis cofradías contemporáneas aún vivas en cuatro zonas geográficas: España, Perú, México y República Dominicana. Esta investigación histórica y comparativa de corte trasatlántico analiza datos recogidos en archivos históricos e investigación de campo. El estudio muestra evidencias de las condiciones sociales, políticas, culturales y espirituales de las personas de origen africano que se integraron en cofradías durante el periodo colonial. Su legado trazó un camino caracterizado por la hibridación y la transformación, cimentando las bases para las cofradías afrohispánicas del presente, un fenómeno que el autor interpreta como resistencia furtiva y celebración de la identidad cultural.*****In Cofradías Afrohispánicas [Afro-Hispanic Confraternities], Manuel Apodaca Valdez offers an account of forty-two confraternities of African descendants of the colonial period, along with six contemporary confraternities still alive in four geographical regions: Spain, Perú, México, and the Dominican Republic. This historical and comparative trans-Atlantic study analyzes data gathered from archives and field work research. The work shows evidence of the social, political, cultural, and spiritual conditions of the peoples of African descent integrated in confraternities during the colonial time. Their legacy traced a path historically marked by hybridism and transformation laying the foundation for contemporary Afro-confraternities, a phenomenon interpreted by the author as furtive resistance and celebration of cultural identity.

How did overseas Europeans participate in the two world wars’ effort? Which were the tensions around mobilization? How did the war affect their identity and their descendants? What were their mobilization’s effects on the relationship with the adopted homelands? These closely intertwined issues connect to the central argument of the book: war exerted a crucial influence on the configuration – and reconfiguration – of those European communities’ national or ethnic identities and made evident their transnational nature. Through different case studies, this volume approached the multi-faceted, complex, and fluid nature of immigrant collective identities under the pressures and challenges of total wars.Contributors are: Juan Pablo Artinian, Juan Luis Carrellán Ruiz, Hernán M. Díaz, Norman Fraser Brown, Marcelo Huernos, Milagros Martínez-Flener, Norman Fraser Brown, Germán C. Friedmann, María Inés Tato, and Stefan Rinke.Transatlantic Battles: European Immigrant Communities in South America and the World Wars is now available in paperback for individual customers.

Imagining Latinidad examines how Latin American migrants use technology for public engagement, social activism, and to build digital, diasporic communities. Thanks to platforms like Facebook and YouTube, immigrants from Latin America can stay in contact with the culture they left behind. Members of these groups share information related to their homeland through discussions of food, music, celebrations, and other cultural elements. Despite their physical distance, these diasporic virtual communities are not far removed from the struggles in their homelands, and migrant activists play a central role in shaping politics both in their home country and in their host country.Contributors are: Amanda Arrais, Karla Castillo Villapudua, David S. Dalton, Jason H. Dormady, Carmen Gabriela Febles, Álvaro González Alba, Yunuen Ysela Mandujano-Salazar, Anna Marta Marini, Diana Denisse Merchant Ley, Covadonga Lamar Prieto, María del Pilar Ramírez Gröbli, David Ramírez Plascencia, Jessica Retis, Nancy Rios-Contreras, and Patria Román-Velázquez. Imagining Latinidad: Digital Diasporas and Public Engagement Among Latin American Migrants is now available in paperback for individual customers.

A class of child artists in Mexico, a ship full of child refugees from Spain, classrooms of child pageant actors, and a pair of boy ambassadors revealed facets of hemispheric politics in the Good Neighbor era. Culture-makers in the Americas tuned into to children as producers of cultural capital to advance their transnational projects. In many instances, prevailing conceptions of children as innocent, primitive, dependent, and underdeveloped informed perceptions of Latin America as an infantilized region, a lesser "Other Americas" on the continent. In other cases, children's interventions in the cultural politics, economic projects, and diplomatic endeavors of the interwar period revealed that Latin American children saw themselves as modern, professional, participants in forging inter-American relationships.Listen to the interview with author Elena Jackson Albarrán about her book on New Books Network!This book has received an Honorable Mention from the Society for the History of Children and Youth (SHCY) for the 2025 Grace Abbott Prize."Good Neighbor Empires is a skillfully crafted study of children as actors and as symbolic centerpieces in the infantilized image of Latin America. Marrying deep research in transnational archives with engaging storytelling, Albarrán examines the social meaning of children by crafting a story where they emerge as powerful artists, exiles and diplomats in open-air art schools, dormitories and classrooms. By vividly demonstrating how children’s experiences and the metaphors surrounding them both reaffirmed and contested diplomacy and hemispheric understandings in the Americas, the book asserts the relevance of childhood studies and transnational history to understandings of Latin American politics and culture." - Sonia Robles, author of Mexican Waves: Radio Broadcasting along Mexico's Northern Border, 1930-1950 (The University of Arizona Press: 2023)."Elena Albarrán is an internationally renowned authority on the history of childhood in Latin America, and especially Mexico. Good Neighbor Empires masterfully tells a transnational history of children, their cultural production, and their public perception in Latin America during the 1930s and 1940s, a time in which the United States discarded military intervention and heavy-handed diplomacy in favor of an approach focused on the soft power of commerce, media, and migration. At the heyday of U.S. imperialism, cartoons had often represented the Latin American republics as children in need of Uncle Sam's guidance, and Latin Americans (both adults and children) remained infantilized in the U.S. imagination throughout the Good Neighbor era. Focusing on the agency of children in three contexts, from Mexican folklore to Spanish Republican refugees to Pan-Americanism as an effort to foster hemispheric "solidarity" during an era of totalitarian threats, the author shows that children and the families they belonged to emerged as part of a new populist rhetoric that reinforced both international capitalist cooperation and patriarchy. A cutting-edge contribution to the history of the Americas in the twentieth century."- Jürgen Buchenau, Dowd Term Chair of Capitalism Studies, UNC Charlotte"Albarrán makes significant contributions to the scholarship on both childhood studies and the history of cultural relations in Good Neighbor Empires. As well as examining the discourses of childhood that built upon colonial and neocolonial legacies and shaped Pan Americanism, Albarrán gives voice to the children who sometimes refashioned these discourses in surprising ways, based on their own understandings of childhood, Latin America, and the United States. Grounded in Mexican cultural history, but providing insights that demonstrate the usefulness of children as a category of analysis for understanding the entire hemisphere, she deftly weaves captivating tales of children’s agency as non-governmental actors in inter-American affairs with a fascinating account of the contested construction of U.S. neocolonial hegemony in the twentieth century."- Amelia M. Kiddle, University of Calgary, author of Mexico’s Relations with Latin America during the Cárdenas Era (University of New Mexico Press, 2016)Good Neighbor Empires:Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas is now available in paperback for individual customers.