A brilliant blend of graphic and literary narration and a lovely work of art in itself. --Kirkus, STARRED Review

Rendered in gorgeously carved wood blocks and buffeted with historical supplemental material, John Vasquez Mejias's The Puerto Rican War tells the story of the the 1950 insurrection on the island that resulted in 38 deaths and a failed assassination attempt against President Harry S. Truman. Told as a fable, in which the leaders of the movement are visited by the ghosts of Michael Collins and Gandhi, this book showcases an important and often overlooked moment in American history and a historical touchstone for the Puerto Rican independence movement.

Tracing five centuries of exploitation in Latin America, a classic in the field, now in its twenty fifth year

Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx.

Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation. Thus he is concerned with gold and silver, cacao and cotton, rubber and coffee, fruit, hides and wool, petroleum, iron, nickel, manganese, copper, aluminum ore, nitrates, and tin. These are the veins which he traces through the body of the entire continent, up to the Rio Grande and throughout the Caribbean, and all the way to their open ends where they empty into the coffers of wealth in the United States and Europe.

Weaving fact and imagery into a rich tapestry, Galeano fuses scientific analysis with the passions of a plundered and suffering people. An immense gathering of materials is framed with a vigorous style that never falters in its command of themes. All readers interested in great historical, economic, political, and social writing will find a singular analytical achievement, and an overwhelming narrative that makes history speak, unforgettably.
This classic is now further honored by Isabel Allende's inspiring introduction. Universally recognized as one of the most important writers of our time, Allende once again contributes her talents to literature, to political principles, and to enlightenment.

The first of its kind, From Columbus to Castro is a definitive work about a profoundly important but neglected and misrepresented area of the world. Quite simply it's about millions of people scattered across an arc of islands -- Jamaica, Haiti, Barbados, Antigua, Martinique, Trinidad, among others -- separated by the languages and cultures of their colonizers, but joined together, nevertheless, by a common heritage.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

Extremely wide-ranging and well researched . . . In a tradition of protest literature rooted more in William Blake than in Marx. --Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

The epic story of how coffee connected and divided the modern world

Coffee is an indispensable part of daily life for billions of people around the world. But few coffee drinkers know this story. It centers on the volcanic highlands of El Salvador, where James Hill, born in the slums of Manchester, England, founded one of the world's great coffee dynasties at the turn of the twentieth century. Adapting the innovations of the Industrial Revolution to plantation agriculture, Hill helped turn El Salvador into perhaps the most intensive monoculture in modern history--a place of extraordinary productivity, inequality, and violence. In the process, both El Salvador and the United States earned the nickname Coffeeland, but for starkly different reasons, and with consequences that reach into the present.

Provoking a reconsideration of what it means to be connected to faraway people and places, Coffeeland tells the hidden and surprising story of one of the most valuable commodities in the history of global capitalism.

A newly updated edition of the best-selling primer on the social, political, and economic challenges facing Central and South America

Ten years after its first publication, Michael Reid's best-selling survey of the state of contemporary Latin America has been wholly updated to reflect the new realities of the Forgotten Continent. The former Americas editor for the Economist, Reid suggests that much of Central and South America, though less poor, less unequal, and better educated than before, faces harder economic times now that the commodities boom of the 2000s is over. His revised, in-depth account of the region reveals dynamic societies more concerned about corruption and climate change, the uncertainties of a Donald Trump-led United States, and a political cycle that, in many cases, is turning from left-wing populism to center-right governments. This essential new edition provides important insights into the sweeping changes that have occurred in Latin America in recent years and indicates priorities for the future.

Few milestones in human history are as momentous as the meeting of three great civilizations on American soil in the sixteenth century. The fully revised textbook Latin America in Colonial Times presents that story in an engaging but informative new package, revealing how a new civilization and region - Latin America - emerged from that encounter. The authors give equal attention to the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors and settlers, to the African slaves they brought across the Atlantic, and to the indigenous peoples whose lands were invaded. From the dawn of empires in the fifteenth century, through the conquest age of the sixteenth and to the end of empire in the nineteenth, the book combines broad brushstrokes with anecdotal details that bring the era to life. This new edition incorporates the newest scholarship on Spain, Portugal, and Atlantic Africa, in addition to Latin America itself, with indigenous and African views and women's experiences and contributions to colonial society highlighted throughout.

Winner, American Library Association Booklist's Top of the List, 2019 Adult Nonfiction

Acclaimed writer Marie Arana delivers a cultural history of Latin America and the three driving forces that have shaped the character of the region: exploitation (silver), violence (sword), and religion (stone). Meticulously researched, this] book's greatest strengths are the power of its epic narrative, the beauty of its prose, and its rich portrayals of character...Marvelous (The Washington Post).

Leonor Gonzales lives in a tiny community perched 18,000 feet above sea level in the Andean cordillera of Peru, the highest human habitation on earth. Like her late husband, she works the gold mines much as the Indians were forced to do at the time of the Spanish Conquest. Illiteracy, malnutrition, and disease reign as they did five hundred years ago. And now, just as then, a miner's survival depends on a vast global market whose fluctuations are controlled in faraway places.

Carlos Buergos is a Cuban who fought in the civil war in Angola and now lives in a quiet community outside New Orleans. He was among hundreds of criminals Cuba expelled to the US in 1980. His story echoes the violence that has coursed through the Americas since before Columbus to the crushing savagery of the Spanish Conquest, and from 19th- and 20th-century wars and revolutions to the military crackdowns that convulse Latin America to this day.

Xavier Alb is a Jesuit priest from Barcelona who emigrated to Bolivia, where he works among the indigenous people. He considers himself an Indian in head and heart and, for this, is well known in his adopted country. Although his aim is to learn rather than proselytize, he is an inheritor of a checkered past, where priests marched alongside conquistadors, converting the natives to Christianity, often forcibly, in the effort to win the New World. Ever since, the Catholic Church has played a central role in the political life of Latin America--sometimes for good, sometimes not.

In this timely and excellent volume (NPR) Marie Arana seamlessly weaves these stories with the history of the past millennium to explain three enduring themes that have defined Latin America since pre-Columbian times: the foreign greed for its mineral riches, an ingrained propensity to violence, and the abiding power of religion. Silver, Sword, and Stone combines learned historical analysis with in-depth reporting and political commentary... and] an informed and authoritative voice, one that deserves a wide audience (The New York Times Book Review).

The first hemispheric study to trace how women in the Americas obtained the right to vote, Women's Suffrage in the Americas pushes back against the misconception that women's movements originated in the United States. The volume brings Latin American voices to the forefront of English-language scholarship. Suffragists across the hemisphere worked together, formed collegial networks to support each other's work, and fostered advances toward women gaining the vote over time and space from one country to the next. The collection as a whole suggests several models by which women in the Americas gained the right to vote: through party politics; through decree, despite delays justified by women's supposed conservative politics; through conservative defense of traditional roles for women; and within the context of imperialism. However, until now historians have traditionally failed to view this common history through a hemispheric lens.

Weaving together thousands of archival fragments, this study explores a shared Black Atlantic world where the meanings of slavery and freedom were fiercely contested and claimed. It recreates the worlds of extraordinary individuals and communities in the long sixteenth century, whilst mapping the development of early modern Black thought about slavery and freedom. From a free Black mother's embarkation license to cross the Atlantic Ocean, to an enslaved Sevillian woman's epistles to her freed husband in New Spain, to an enslaved man's negotiations with prospective buyers on the auction block in Mexico City, to a Black man's petition to reclaim his liberty after his illegitimate enslavement, Chloe L. Ireton explores how Africans and their descendants reckoned with laws and theological discourses that legitimized the enslavement of Black people and the varied meanings of freedom across legal jurisdictions. Their intellectual labor reimagined the epistemic worlds of slavery and freedom in the early modern Atlantic.

During the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, countless slaves from culturally diverse communities in the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia journeyed to Mexico on the ships of the Manila Galleon. Upon arrival in Mexico, they were grouped together and categorized as chinos. Their experience illustrates the interconnectedness of Spain's colonies and the reach of the crown, which brought people together from Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe in a historically unprecedented way. In time, chinos in Mexico came to be treated under the law as Indians, becoming indigenous vassals of the Spanish crown after 1672. The implications of this legal change were enormous: as Indians, rather than chinos, they could no longer be held as slaves. Tatiana Seijas tracks chinos' complex journey from the slave market in Manila to the streets of Mexico City, and from bondage to liberty. In doing so, she challenges commonly held assumptions about the uniformity of the slave experience in the Americas.

Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece by Three Initiates offers a profound exploration of ancient wisdom. This enigmatic text unveils the timeless principles of Hermeticism, shedding light on the nature of reality and the power of thought. Delve into its pages to discover the enduring secrets that have fascinated seekers for centuries, and embark on a journey of enlightenment and self-discovery.

Honorable Mention, Latin American Studies Association Haiti-Dominican Republic Section Isis Duarte Book Prize Immigrants make up the largest proportion of federal prisoners in the United States, incarcerated in a vast network of more than two hundred detention facilities. This book investigates when detention became a centerpiece of U.S. immigration policy, revealing why the practice was reinstituted in 1981 after being halted for several decades and how the system expanded to become the world's largest immigration detention regime. From the Krome Detention Center in Miami to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and to jails and prisons across the country, Haitians have been at the center of the story of immigration detention. When an influx of Haitian migrants and asylum seekers came to the U.S. in the 1970s, the government responded with exclusionary policies and detention, setting a precedent for future waves of immigrants. Carl Lindskoog details the discrimination Haitian refugees faced and how their resistance to this treatment--in the form of legal action and activism--prompted the government to reinforce its detention program and create an even larger system of facilities. Drawing on extensive archival research, including government documents, advocacy group archives, and periodicals, Lindskoog provides the first in-depth history of Haitians and immigration detention in the United States. Lindskoog asserts that systems designed for Haitian refugees laid the groundwork for the way immigrants to America are treated today. Detain and Punish provides essential historical context for the challenges faced by today's immigrant groups, which are some of the most critical issues of our time.

Now thoroughly updated and revised--with a new chapter on the Dreamer movement and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program (DACA)--this book offers North Carolinians a better understanding of their Latino neighbors, illuminating rather than enflaming debates on immigration. In the midst of a tumultuous political environment, North Carolina continues to feature significant in-migration of Mexicans and Latin Americans from both outside and inside the United States. Drawing on the voices of migrants as well as North Carolinians from communities affected by migration, Hannah Gill explains how larger social forces are causing demographic shifts, how the state is facing the challenges and opportunities presented by these changes, and how migrants experience the economic and social realities of their lives.

Gill makes connections between our hometowns and the globalization of people, money, technology, and culture by shedding light on the many diverse North Carolina residents who are such a vital part of the state's population but are often unrecognized in many ways. This book is essential for everyone, including students and teachers, who wants to understand what is at stake for all parties and wants to work toward solutions.

Susan Kellogg's history of the Aztecs offers a concise yet comprehensive assessment of Aztec history and civilization, emphasizing how material life and the economy functioned in relation to politics, religion, and intellectual and artistic developments. Appreciating the vast number of sources available but also their limitations, Kellogg focuses on three concepts throughout - value, transformation, and balance. Aztecs created value, material, and symbolic worth. Value was created through transformations of bodies, things, and ideas. The overall goal of value creation and transformation was to keep the Aztec world--the cosmos, the earth, its inhabitants--in balance, a balance often threatened by spiritual and other forms of chaos. The book highlights the ethnicities that constituted Aztec peoples and sheds light on religion, political and economic organization, gender, sexuality and family life, intellectual achievements, and survival. Seeking to correct common misperceptions, Kellogg stresses the humanity of the Aztecs and problematizes the use of the terms 'human sacrifice', 'myth', and 'conquest'.

For forty years and more Alma Guillermoprieto has wandered tirelessly over the countries of Latin America, interviewing assassins and the families of their victims, talking to street sweepers and artists, rowdy carnival makers and thoughtful politicians (and plenty of rowdy politicians as well). Guillermoprieto draws out common threads in different contexts, like the effects of The War on Drugs in rural and poverty-stricken regions and the experiences of people mixed up in the fray of state- or cartel-sponsored violence. At the same time, she shows how Latin American art translates nostalgia and pain into great beauty. In The Years of Blood, the third volume of her collected reporting, she completes her complex and always compelling portrait of the Latin America of our times, in all its tragedy and glory, as it enters a new era of populism and demagoguery, and tries, yet again, to answer the great unsolved question: How do we change our future so that it does not so exhaustingly resemble our past?

La frontera salvaje es un libro monumental. Frederico Füllgraf
Simplemente, poderoso. Noam Chomsky
La frontera salvaje es un libro escrito con coraje y deslumbrante lucidez. De lo mejor que he leído en mi vida. Víctor Hugo Morales
A los cincuenta años de la publicación de Para leer al Pato Donald, me alegra leer un libro como La frontera salvaje que explora detalladamente las formas menos sutiles en que Estados Unidos, durante doscientos años, ha buscado influir y torcer el destino de nuestra América Latina. Ariel Dorfman

La frontera salvaje no es sólo un recorrido por los eventos más importantes de los últimos doscientos años que marcaron la expansión de las Trece colonias sobre sobre las naciones indígenas y ese territorio que hoy llamamos América latina, sino también la revelación de la lógica de sus guerras infinitas, de su expansión y de sus sistemáticas intervenciones, directas o secretas en los diversos pueblos del sur. Estas prácticas militares y narrativas fueron el inicio y la continuación del imperialismo de Washington en el resto del mundo, siempre bajo otros La frontera salvaje no es sólo un recorrido por los eventos más importantes de los últimos doscientos años que marcaron la expansión de las Trece colonias sobre las naciones indígenas y sobre ese vasto territorio que hoy llamamos América latina, sino también la revelación de la lógica de sus guerras infinitas, de su expansión y de sus sistemáticas intervenciones, directas o secretas en los diversos pueblos del sur. Estas prácticas militares y narrativas (basadas en el interés económico de los de arriba, en el fanatismo religioso y en el racismo inoculado en los de abajo) fueron el inicio y la continuación del imperialismo de Washington en el resto del mundo, siempre bajo otros nombres y otras excusas. Ese pasado profundo, como en otros momentos de la historia, explica el presente y predice el futuro de la mayor potencia económica y militar del mundo. Ese pasado profundo explica el presente y predice el futuro de la mayor potencia económica y militar del mundo.

Spanning the history of the island from pre-Columbian times to the present, this highly acclaimed survey examines Cuba's political and economic development within the context of its international relations and continuing struggle for self-determination. The dualism that emerged in Cuban ideology--between liberal constructs of patria and radical formulations of nationality--is fully investigated as a source of both national tension and competing notions of liberty, equality, and justice. Author Louis A. Pérez, Jr., integrates local and provincial developments with issues of class, race, and gender to give students a full and fascinating account of Cuba's history, focusing on its struggle for nationality.

This narrative history of Latin America surveys five centuries in less than five hundred pages. The first third of the book moves from the Americas before Columbus to the wars for independence in the early nineteenth century. The construction of new nations and peoples in the nineteenth century forms the middle third, and the final section analyzes economic development, rising political participation, and the search of identity over the last century. The collision of peoples and cultures--Native Americans, Europeans, Africans--that defines Latin America, and gives it both its unity and diversity, provides the central theme of this concise, synthetic history.

It is impossible to fully understand Cuba today without also understanding
the economic sanctions levied against it by the United
States. For over fifty years, these sanctions have been upheld by
every presidential administration, and at times intensified by individual
presidents and acts of Congress. They are a key part of
the U.S. government's ongoing campaign to undermine the Cuban
Revolution, and stand in egregious violation of international
law. Most importantly, the sanctions are cruelly designed for their
harmful impact on the Cuban people.
In this concise and sober account, Salim Lamrani explains everything
you need to know about U.S. economic sanctions against
Cuba: their origins, their provisions, how they contravene international
law, and how they affect the lives of Cubans. He examines
the U.S. government's own official documents to expose what is
hiding in plain sight: an indefensible, vicious, and wasteful blockade
that has been roundly condemned by citizens around the
world.