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New Books in Mexican Studies

New Books in Mexican Studies

By: New Books Network
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 Interviews with scholars of Mexico about their new bookNew Books Network Art Literary History & Criticism Science Social Sciences World
Episodes
  • Elena Jackson Albarran, "Good Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas" (Brill, 2024)

    Elena Jackson Albarran, "Good Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas" (Brill, 2024)
    Jun 26 2025
    A class of child artists in Mexico, a ship full of child refugees from Spain, classrooms of child pageant actors, and a pair of boy ambassadors revealed facets of hemispheric politics in the Good Neighbor era. Good Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas (Brill, 2024) by Dr. Elena Jackson Albarran explores how and why culture-makers in the Americas tuned into to children as producers of cultural capital to advance their transnational projects. In many instances, prevailing conceptions of children as innocent, primitive, dependent, and underdeveloped informed perceptions of Latin America as an infantilized region, a lesser "Other Americas" on the continent. In other cases, children's interventions in the cultural politics, economic projects, and diplomatic endeavors of the interwar period revealed that Latin American children saw themselves as modern, professional, participants in forging inter-American relationships. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    43 mins
  • Fernando Pérez-Montesinos, "Landscaping Indigenous Mexico: The Liberal State and Capitalism in the Purépecha Highlands" (U Texas Press, 2025)

    Fernando Pérez-Montesinos, "Landscaping Indigenous Mexico: The Liberal State and Capitalism in the Purépecha Highlands" (U Texas Press, 2025)
    Jun 7 2025
    Fernando Pérez-Montesinos's first book, Landscaping Indigenous Mexico: The Liberal State and Capitalism in the Purépecha Highlands (University of Texas Press, 2025), focuses on the Purépecha people of Michoacán, Mexico, and examines why and how long-standing patterns of communal landholding changed in response to liberal policies, railroad expansion, and the rise of the timber industry in Mexico. A history of the Purépecha people's survival amid environmental and political changes. Fernando Pérez-Montesinos holds that landscapes are more than geological formations; they are living records of human struggles. Landscaping Indigenous Mexico unearths the history of Juátarhu, an Indigenous landscape shaped and nurtured by the Purépecha—a formidable Mesoamerican people whose power once rivaled that of the Aztecs. Although cataclysmic changes came with European contact and colonization, Juátarhu’s enduring agroecology continued to sustain local life through centuries of challenges. Contesting essentialist narratives of Indigenous penury, Pérez Montesinos shows how Purépechas thrived after Mexican independence in 1821, using Juátarhu’s diverse agroecology to negotiate continued autonomy amid waves of national economic and political upheaval. After 1870, however, autonomy waned under the pressure of land privatization policies, state intervention, and industrial logging. On the eve of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, Purépechas stood at a critical juncture: Would the Indigenous landscape endure or succumb? Offering a fresh perspective on a seemingly well-worn subject, Pérez Montesinos argues that Michoacán, long considered a peripheral revolutionary region, saw one of the era’s most radical events: the destruction of the liberal order and the timber capitalism of Juátarhu. Fernando Pérez-Montesinos is a historian of modern Mexico with a focus on the nineteenth century and the Mexican revolution at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His research combines environmental, social, and indigenous history to study the connections between processes of land privatization, class and state formation, and ecological change. At UCLA, he teaches courses on modern Latin America and Mexico, as well as environmental and indigenous history. I am currently one of the senior editors of the Hispanic American Historical Review. A chilango at heart, he enjoys tacos al pastor, the Mexican summer rains, and playing fingerstyle guitar. Hugo Peralta-Ramírez is a doctoral student in Colonial Mexican History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where he works on the intersection of land, labor, and law among the indigenous communities of Oaxaca. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 16 mins
  • Emily Colbert Cairns and Nieves Romero-Diaz, "Early Modern Maternities in the Iberian Atlantic" (Amsterdam UP, 2024)

    Emily Colbert Cairns and Nieves Romero-Diaz, "Early Modern Maternities in the Iberian Atlantic" (Amsterdam UP, 2024)
    May 17 2025
    Emily Colbert Cairns of Salve Regina University and Nieves Romero-Díaz of Mount Holyoke join Jana Byars to talk about Early Modern Maternities in the Iberian Atlantic (Amsterdam University Press, 2024). It is the first volume to emphasize women's personal experiences and their life trajectories as mothers within the Peninsula and across the Atlantic. Although an official discourse that defined the conditions of motherhood emerged in the eighteenth century, before this period there were many different articulations of motherhood through which women negotiated hierarchical relationships, power struggles and alliances. While the individual experiences were unique and depended upon the positionality of race and class, the complexities of being a mother were universal. The wide variety of written and visual documents included in this volume highlight women's voices in the first person along with more subtle references to motherhood as well as silences. This collection broadens our understanding of the complexities of motherhood, addressing the pressures of becoming a mother, miscarriage, the acts of giving birth and lactation and the ordeals of raising children. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    49 mins

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