Books like Cacicas

This book is a classic of Latin American women’s history, telling the story of how Andean women’s relative gender equity (what the author calls “gender parallelism,” a concept that applies to gender structures in many Latin American societies, especially the Aztecs—known as Nahuas—about whom I’ve also written) became transformed first by the Inca, then by the Spanish.

Written with feeling about forms of both complementarity and exploitation, Silverblatt shows women of the past, non-elite and noble, to have been productive, creative, and responsive to the social and economic conditions around them.

Like Silverblatt’s book on native women in prehispanic and colonial Peru, this edited volume on early Mexico was and remains a gamer changer in bringing to light women’s work, including ways women accumulated and distributed wealth, their varieties of social and political identities they held, and their power and influence.

With chapters by experts in Aztec/Nahua women’s, social, and cultural history, the chapters represent a variety of approaches and methodologies to women’s and gender history even in areas where the documentation on women is sparser than in central Mesoamerica, especially for northern Mexico and Maya women further south.

This superb book is a culturally and indigenous-language-focused study of women in four central Mesoamerican native societies—Aztecs (Nahuas), Mixtec, Zapotec, and Mixe.

In addition to a deep dive into texts dealing with all facets of women’s lives, Sousa uses visual evidence to great effect, showing how images contain much information about women’s and gender history, a history in which women struggled over centuries to maintain agency and authority despite efforts by a newly imposed colonial state to erode their power and status and exploit their labor.

This rich ethnography explores women’s lives between the 1980s and early 2000s in the Zapotec community of Teotitlán del Valle in southern Mexico.

Oaxacan-produced textiles are enormously popular transnationally, and this demand has reshaped production, the gendered division of labor, and economic and social relations in many native communities, a theme explored in depth by Stephen.

She begins to draw attention to a theme that becomes more prominent in her later work and that is the impact of migration and the creation and growth of what she calls “transborder” communities.

A picture of how women respond to economic change while rooted in the practices of a deeply rooted indigenous culture, this book represents a model of narrative and methodological approaches that connect women’s history to wider patterns of globalization.

As an undergraduate student I was lucky enough to take Professor Earle’s class on the history of food in Latin America and this book encapsulates the expansive outlook and conceptual complexity that made that class so mind-bogglingly brilliant and enjoyable. By examining the systems of thought through which European colonizers and Indigenous peoples of the Americas understood different foods, ways of cooking and eating, and the influence of diet on people’s bodies, The Body of the Conquistador helped me to think about the axiom “you are what you eat” in a whole new way. 

This book uses a transpacific, decolonial, and interdisciplinary approach to study the connections between Latin America and East Asia, concentrating on contemporary commodity extraction and exchanges. The book explores South-South exchanges without Global North metropolitan mediations, thus recentering East Asia-Latin America as an epistemological lens through which to consider these sophisticated networks and produce new knowledge. In my view, the originality of this book resides first in the interdisciplinary connection it makes between the decolonial project and transpacific studies, and secondly, in the two-pronged approach from two unfortunately often disconnected academic perspectives: Latin American and East Asian Studies. 

I loved Making Waves because it changed the way I think about democratization.

I was particularly struck by the story of the Danish king in 1848, watching revolution spread from France through the German states and deciding that the safest response was to concede power and introduce representative democracy.

Weyland’s many examples from Europe and Latin America made me see much more clearly how political ideas, institutional blueprints, and fears of revolution travel across borders. I found the argument both persuasive and memorable.

More than most books on democracy, it convinced me that I cannot understand political change by looking at countries in isolation.

I don’t think Garcia Marquez needs a review or introduction. Reading any of his books is a pleasure, with easy and delightful writing and striking sentences.

These sentences often describe things or people in a way that feels natural and perfectly captured. For instance, he describes the world as so new that many things lack names. His eloquent descriptions, like that of ice, create vivid images. The characters are relatable, and you feel a happy exhaustion after finishing the book, reminiscent of great works like Steinbeck’s East of Eden.

Those who find the stories too unbelievable should learn about Colombian history, as they provide real context. I simply love the book!

The author spent many years in Brazil and Peru, editing the Americas’ section of The Economist and knows the region well. He does a great job of providing the reader with a broad, contemporary view of modern-day Central and South America, weaving together their many historical threads. If you want an insider’s account of Latin America by someone who thoroughly knows the area, then this is the book for you.

In this methodologically creative approach, Rossana Barragán narrates the history of colonial Andean silver through images. The slim, 90-page book is organized around 12 images and their global movements. Barragán expertly analyzes scenes of underground mining that other European empires used to justify their own violence, depictions of the Cerro Rico that appealed to Ottoman sensibilities, and the architecture of the mint of Antwerp, the city responsible for coining much of Potosí’s silver and printing many of the books and images that shaped early modern understandings of the Andes. Readers looking for an accessible history of the global consequences of Potosí will be well-served by Barragán’s work.