Originally published in Puerto Rico in 1956 as Los derrotados, Cesar Andreu Iglesias's novel about a fateful Nationalist assault on a U.S. military installation in Puerto Rico is now available for the first time in English.

This tautly written story uncovers the personal histories of three middle-aged revolutionaries as they plan to kill a U.S. general. Andreu's cool treatment of their political objectives does not obscure his compassionate recognition of their human limitations. Andreu makes clear his view that the Nationalist answer to Puerto Rico's problems had become an...

Exploring the history and importance of corn worldwide, Arturo Warman traces its development from a New World food of poor and despised peoples into a commodity that plays a major role in the modern global economy.

The book, first published in Mexico in 1988, combines approaches from anthropology, social history, and political economy to tell the story of corn, a "botanical bastard" of unclear origins that cannot reseed itself and is instead dependent on agriculture for propagation. Beginning in the Americas, Warman depicts corn as colonizer. Disparaged by the conquistadors, this...

This award-winning social history of death and funeral rites during the early decades of Brazil's independence from Portugal focuses on the Cemiterada movement in Salvador, capital of the province of Bahia. The book opens with a lively account of the popular riot that ensued when, in 1836, the government condemned the traditional burial of bodies inside Catholic church buildings and granted a private company a monopoly over burials.

This episode is used by Reis to examine the customs of death and burial in Bahian society, explore the economic and religious conflicts behind the move...

One of Latin America's leading sociologists, Manuel Antonio Garreton explores contemporary challenges to democratization in Latin America in this work originally published in Spanish in 1995. He pays particular attention to the example of Chile, analyzing the country's return to democracy and its hopes for continued prosperity following the 1973 coup that overthrew democratically elected president Salvador Allende.
Garreton contends that the period of democratic crisis and authoritarian rule that characterized much of Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s was symptomatic of a larger...

In a landmark study of history, power, and identity in the Caribbean, Pedro L. San Miguel examines the historiography of Hispaniola, the West Indian island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He argues that the national identities of (and often the tense relations between) citizens of these two nations are the result of imaginary contrasts between the two nations drawn by historians, intellectuals, and writers.

Covering five centuries and key intellectual figures from each country, San Miguel bridges literature, history, and ethnography to locate the origins of racial,...

In this revisionary study, Barbara Foley challenges prevalent myths about left-wing culture in the Depression-era U.S. Focusing on a broad range of proletarian novels and little-known archival material, the author recaptures an important literature and rewrites a segment of American cultural history long obscured and distorted by the anti-Communist bias of contemporaries and critics.
Josephine Herbst, William Attaway, Jack Conroy, Thomas Bell and Tillie Olsen, are among the radical writers whose work Foley reexamines. Her fresh approach to the U.S. radicals' debates over experimentalism,...

Senora Rodriguez dips into her purse and there's no telling what she'll come up with--a sticky lollipop, a phone bill, or a rosary; a reminder of daily life, a bit of family history, a personal talisman, or . . . who knows? . . . a token into another world altogether. Such are the surprises and possibilities, the unpredictability and warm familiarity of Martha Cerda's magical novel. Senora Rodriguez and her family are placed shoulder-to-shoulder and page-to-page with strangers, acquaintances, and a host of importune, if not impertinent, stories: the profound distortions wrought in a woman's...

Hailed as a literary relative of Kafka and Poe by his Italian and Cuban contemporaries, Calvert Casey and his enthralling work have until now remained eclipsed in the United States. This collection brings all of Casey s powerful short stories and a fragment of an unfinished novel to an English-speaking audience for the first time. Exploring the human condition through poetically unique yet torturous views of the mind, Casey was a renegade artist whose work perceives reality as a smoke screen behind which Truth is hidden. He intended his fiction to disturb and subvert standard, plot-driven...

A translation of Schwarz's study of the work of Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis (1839-1908).

Excessively European, refreshingly European, not as European as it looks, struggling to overcome a delusion that it is European. Argentina in all its complexity has often been obscured by variations of the "like Europe and not like the rest of Latin America" cliche. "The Argentina Reader" deliberately breaks from that viewpoint. This essential introduction to Argentina s history, culture, and society provides a richer, more comprehensive look at one of the most paradoxical of Latin American nations: a nation that used to be among the richest in the world, with the largest middle class in...