Browse by Subject: Latin American Studies

Beautifully illustrated with colorful photographs, this volume traces the living heritage of locally made pottery in the English-speaking Caribbean.

In this extensively researched book, Anna Clayfield challenges contemporary Western views on the militarization of Cuba. She argues that, while the pervasiveness of armed forces in revolutionary Cuba is hard to refute, it is the guerrilla legacy, ethos, and image—guerrillerismo—that has helped the Cuban revolutionary project survive. The veneration of the guerrilla fighter has been crucial to the political culture’s underdog mentality.  

In Brazilian Propaganda, Nina Schneider examines the various modes of official, and unofficial, propaganda used by an authoritarian regime.

This book explores the many ways in which the island of Cuba has been immortalized in ceramic pieces. While the works of several Cuban ceramists are present in these pages, this is not a book about Cuban ceramics featuring Cuban artists working in that medium. The protagonist of this book is Cuba itself, seen through the eyes of ceramists—native and foreign.

In Exile and Revolution, Gerald Poyo provides a comprehensive account of how his great-great-grandfather spurred the working-class community of Key West to transform their roles as supporting cast to become critical actors in the struggle for Cuban independence.

This collection of essays offers a comprehensive overview of colonial legacies of racial and social inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean. Rich in theoretical framework and close textual analysis, these essays offer new paradigms and approaches to both reading and resolving the opposing forces of race, class, and the power of states. 

Sugar, coffee, corn, and chocolate have long dominated the study of Central American commerce, and researchers tend to overlook one other equally significant commodity: alcohol. Often illicitly produced and consumed, aguardiente (distilled sugar cane spirits or rum) was central to Guatemalan daily life, though scholars have often neglected its fundamental role in the country's development. 

Abundantly illustrated, this volume is a pioneering survey of the ancient art of the entire Caribbean region. While previous studies have focused on the Greater Antilles—Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica—this is the first book also to include the islands of the eastern Caribbean and their ties to pre-Columbian Venezuela.  

This book tells the little-known story of how the United States used modern art as a cultural defense strategy in South America during World War II. 

The work of the 1960s Caracas-based art collective El Techo de la Ballena (The Roof of the Whale) was called “subversive” and “art terrorism” and seen as a threat to Venezuela’s national image as an emerging industrial power. This volume details the historical and social contexts that shaped the collective, exploring how its anti-art aesthetic highlighted the shortcomings of the country’s newfound oil wealth and transition to democracy.