Books like Public Lives, Private Secrets

We don't know very much about Indigenous women's lives before and during the Spanish conquest. Camilla Townsend let me imagine how Malintzin, an enslaved Indigenous girl who was presented as a gift to the conquistador Hernando Cortés, experienced and made sense of that world.

I was transported to central Mexico and Yucatán through Townsend's careful but lively reading of art, poetry, and historical writings, her lush building of landscapes and lifeways created a space where I could place Malintzin and understand her choices. Those choices were complicated: she transformed herself from a slave into Cortés' most important interpreter and ally, translating Indigenous diplomats and leaders so that Cortés knew whom to trust, speaking back to them as his mouthpiece. I was convinced that Malintzin was both a brilliant strategist and also a woman with few options and not the outright villain or hero that a lot of the literature wishes… show more.

Luxury is not usually associated with slavery. But in the colonial Americas, it could be. Sometimes, because some enslaved men and women were tailors and seamstresses, and some of the clothing they created was costly. More often, however, because some enslaved people got their hands on expensive, fashionable clothing.

Historians have begun to tell this story, and few do it better than the young scholar Tamara Walker. In this superb study, Walker tracks down all sorts of sources, written and pictorial, to describe the many ways that enslaved individuals acquired fine clothing in Lima, Peru, a Spanish-American colonial capital renowned for its residents’ opulent apparel.

Exquisite Slaves adds a fresh dimension to the exciting scholarship that is revealing how marginalized groups have obtained goods usually forbidden to them.

I've always wondered why Latin American colonial cities had so many convents, surely there were not enough nuns to populate them in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?

Kathryn Burns not only clears up this mystery but shows us that convents were more or less the banks of their era, taking in funds in the form of nuns' entrance fees and gifts and bequests and then investing and lending them out (at interest) to local notables, often relatives of the women inside.

Convents were not simply homes for religious women, but were places where young women were formed, Spaniards, Indigenous, and Black, for the sake of the new colonial society. I would not have thought I would find the history of convents a page-turner, but I loved the scandals, the race relations, and the unexpected economic history.

Truly one of the most exhilarating and surprising books I have read in a long time!

Abercrombie found a cache of documents left from the trial of Antonio Yta, born María Yta, who lived as a man after being tossed out of five different Spanish convents in the late eighteenth century. Yta ended up in South America, where he became a petty bureaucrat and married a Spanish woman who eventually turned him in to authorities. Along the way, Yta received permission from the Vatican to live and dress as a man. The story is not only full of ups and downs, but Abercrombie has transcribed a lot of the documentary record to show readers how Yta's family, friends, and colleagues struggled with who he was.

The book is divided into parts that tell the story, engage with different academic literature, and imagine Yta's life so that a reader can tailor… show more.

Focusing on the Spanish Empire, this book explores two of the most imported goods from the Americas. Norton carefully examines the deep cultural significance of Tobacco and Chocolate amongst the indigenous peoples of the Americas and how the goods were adopted and adapted in Europe, ultimately highlighting the profound impact imperialism had on European cultures.

Colombia links the Andes to the Caribbean, and Ricardo Raúl Salazar Rey’s book shows how central the story of the African Diaspora is to how the Spanish Empire was built and governed for so long (much, much longer than the US has existed or the British were able to govern in the Americas). And this book shows how in the 1600s, Black people were building enduring places for themselves in that Spanish Empire that initially only viewed them as enslaved laborers, but was forced by their legal actions and alliances to recognize them as much more and much more diverse. Colombia has just elected its first Black vice president; and this wonderful book tells us how black people made themselves part of the foundation of that Andean nation.

Professor McPherson’s stellar history paints an incredibly rich portrait of protracted U.S. interventions—the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua, most critically—during the so-called Banana Wars in the first decades of the 20th century. This painstaking researched and lucidly penned tome demands that we take the Latin American side of the story when we study the searing history of Uncle Sam interventionism. 

This is an original, close-focus, and fully comparative account of the democratic politics of Latin America that demonstrates beyond any doubt that no analysis of its democracies can succeed without equal attention to the processes of State formation in the region. I do not say that I find its analytical approach well founded in every respect or that I agree with all of its conclusions, but it’s an argument that poses and wrestles with the difficult questions and engages with a wide range of theoretical and empirical inquiry into order to do so.

Weavers of Revolution is still my favorite "history from below” book to use in classes about Latin American revolutions.

It reads like a novel, bringing readers into the story by focusing on the workers of Chile’s largest cotton mill and highlighting their activities before and during the socialist Salvador Allende regime (1970-73). The Lebanese Yarur family used ethnic networks to build a successful economic enterprise that endured for many decades, but when the socialist Allende was elected, workers rejected paternalism and took over the factory to run it themselves.

Winn, building on interviews with workers as well as Allende regime officials, beautifully communicates the complexities of the era. Allende and his advisors urged workers to wait for gradual change—also urging rural workers who were seizing plantations to await formal land reform—but urban and rural workers executed factory take-overs and land occupations, radicalizing the revolution from below.

Weavers of Revolution joins… show more.

This sprawling, two-volume collection of essays approaches the history of political economy in Latin America not as a chapter of intellectual history, but rather as an extension of the practices of state-building pursued in the continent.

The first volume, Republics of the Possible, covers the period from the early days of independence to the turbulent 1930s, touching on subjects as diverse as militarization, fiscal systems, educational institutions, national statistics, and ideological disputes.

The second volume, The Rise and Fall of the Developmental State, explores the 20th-century Latin American experiment on state-led development: its ideological underpinnings, the design of appropriate institutions, and the ambiguous aftermath of the developmental era in different national settings.

A third volume is still in the works to complete this state-of-the-art trilogy.