Latin America

In this expansive and engaging narrative William Acree guides readers through the deep history of popular entertainment before turning to circus culture and rural dramas that celebrated the countryside on stage.

Christopher Conway’s lavishly illustrated Heroes of the Borderlands tells the surprising story of the Mexican Western for the first time, exploring how Mexican authors and artists reimagined US film and comic book Westerns to address Mexican politics and culture.

Contested Nation argues that with Chilean independence, Araucanía—because of its status as a separate nation-state—became essential to the territorial integrity of the new Chilean Republic.

This work reconstructs the history of Mexico’s forgotten “Religionero” rebellion of 1873–1877, an armed Catholic challenge to the government of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada.

Breath and Smoke explores the uses of tobacco among the Maya of Central America, revealing tobacco as a key topic in pre-Columbian art, iconography, and hieroglyphics.

Mariquita’s and Juan Manuel’s lives corresponded with the major events and processes that shaped the turbulent beginnings of the Argentine nation, many of which also shaped Latin America and the Atlantic World during the Age of Revolution (1750–1850).

In this thoroughly researched work David M. Gitlitz traces the lives and fortunes of three clusters of sixteenth-century crypto-Jews in Mexico’s silver mining towns.

This book examines La Santa Muerte’s role in people’s daily lives and explores how popular religious practices of worship and devotion developed around a figure often associated with illicit activities.

In this book Leisa A. Kauffmann takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the writings of one of Mexico’s early chroniclers, Fernando de Alva Ixtilxochitl, a bilingual seventeenth-century historian from Central Mexico.

Lipsett-Rivera traces the genesis of the Mexican macho by looking at daily interactions between Mexican men in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.