Challenging anthropocentric perspectives by highlighting cultural representations of plants and animals across Latin American history  
 
“A beautiful book, one that centers grass, yerba mate, chicozapote, migrating animals, and the mooing of cows! This book is a major step for multispecies studies in Latin America. It offers groundbreaking and original research in plant and animal studies across a wide range of geographies, periods, and media.”—Sophie Esch, author of Modernity at Gunpoint: Firearms, Politics, and Culture in Mexico and Central America
 
“A thoughtful and original contribution to the dynamic field of Latin American ecocriticism and environmental humanities. Its originality resides in the diversity of approaches to jointly think through critical plant studies and critical animal studies from the vantage point of Latin American literary and visual cultural production. The discussions are painstaking and timely, and the examinations of cultural expressions and linguistic contexts that include production in Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Indigenous languages, are most inclusive.”—Ilka Kressner, coeditor of Ecofictions, Ecorealities, and Slow Violence in Latin America and the Latinx World  
 
The first book to integrate both critical plant studies and critical animal studies within the context of Latin American culture, this collection explores the relationships between plants, animals, and humans across various countries and historical periods and through various kinds of media. Acknowledging nonhuman species as coproducers of culture, this volume offers a deeper understanding of the region’s natural environment and humanity’s place in it. 
 
Contributors analyze a wide range of cultural production, including recent science films on monarch butterfly migration, nineteenth-century photographs of Panama, the eighteenth-century diary of a nun in New Granada, 1920s Brazilian landscape paintings, contemporary Zapotec poetry, and twentieth-century vegetarian cookbooks from Uruguay and Mexico. By focusing on plants and animals, these essays uncover the entanglements of nonhuman lives with issues such as race, gender, labor, and coloniality, while highlighting other-than-human ways of living, knowing, and communicating.
 
Plants and Animals in Latin American Cultural Production promotes a deeper understanding of cultural forms in Latin America and breaks down disciplinary divides—both between critical animal studies and critical plant studies and between fields such as literary studies, film studies, and art history. Ultimately, this collection challenges anthropocentric perspectives as it offers new pathways to think about and with plants and animals.  
 
Cristina E. Pardo Porto is assistant professor of Latin American and Latinx visual cultures at Syracuse University. Oscar A. Pérez is professor of Spanish at Skidmore College and the author of Medicine, Power, and the Authoritarian Regime in Hispanic Literature.
 
Contributors: Patricia Isabel Lontro Marder Vieira | Jorge Quintana Navarrete | Beatriz Rivera-Barnes | Brian T. Chandler | Oscar A. Pérez | Niall A. Peach | Pilar Espitia | Jonathan Mulki | Cristina E. Pardo Porto | Thomaz Amancio | Micah McKay | Ana Carolina Carmona-Ribeiro | Vanesa Miseres | Víctor Sierra Matute | Kate Ostrom | Emily Celeste Vázquez Enríquez | Dr. Mauricio Espinoza

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