Category: Publications

Associate Professor Lily Pearl Balloffet’s 2020 publication Argentina in the Global Middle East, for Stanford University Press, connects modern Latin American and Middle Eastern history through their shared links to global migration systems. By following the mobile lives of individuals with roots in the Levantine Middle East, Balloffet sheds light on the intersections of ethnicity,…

Professor and Chair Catherine S. Ramírez and Associate Professor Sylvanna M. Falcón co-edited Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship, a 2021 publication for Rutgers University Press. The book examines how the movement of people and their incorporation, marginalization, and exclusion—under epochal conditions of labor and social precarity affecting both citizens and noncitizens—have challenged older…

In his 2021 publication, The Left Hand of Capital, for The State University of New York Press, Professor Fernando I. Leiva provides a theoretically grounded analysis of Chile’s last 30 years of socioeconomic policies, beginning at the end of the Pinochet military regime in 1990. He skillfully probes how innovative center-left politico-economic initiatives transformed the…

Professor and Chair Catherine Ramírez wrote Assimilation: An Alternative History for the University of California Press in 2020. The book explores the history of the concept of assimilation in the United States. A pillar of the US nation-making project, assimilation is widely regarded as an outcome of immigration: it is the process by which immigrants…

Associate Professor Jeffrey Erbig’s 2020 publication, Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America, for the University of North Carolina Press,  examines Indigenous responses to the largest imperial mapmaking expedition ever sent to the Americas. The book explores the Luso-Hispanic effort to create a border between Brazil and Spanish South America in…

Professor Jessica Taft’s 2019 publication, The Kids Are in Charge: Activism and Power in Peru’s Movement of Working Children, for New York University Press, uncovers the Peruvian movement of working children, who have fought to redefine age-based roles in society. Examining movements from 1976 to today, she defends children’s right to work and place in…

Professor Patricia Pinho’s 2018 publication, Mapping Diaspora: African American Roots Tourism in Brazil, for the University of North Carolina Press, traces the origins of roots tourism to the late 1970s, when groups of black intellectuals, artists, and activists found themselves drawn to Bahia, the state that previously absorbed the largest number of enslaved Africans. African…

Associate Professor Sylvanna Falcón’s 2016 publication, Power Interrupted: Antiracist and Feminist Activism inside the United Nations, for University of Washington Press, was the winner of the 2016 NWSA Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Award. In this book, Falcón redirects the conversation about UN-based feminist activism toward UN forums on racism. Her analysis of UN antiracism spaces,…

Associate Professor Cecilia Rivas’s 2014 publication, Salvadoran Imaginaries: Mediated Identities and Cultures of Consumption, for Rutgers University Press, examines how the country  ravaged by civil war throughout the 1980s and 1990s has emerged as a study in contradictions, and where urban call centers and shopping malls exist alongside rural poverty. It is a land now…

Associate Professor Gabriela Arredondo’s 2008 publication, Mexican Chicago: Race, Identity, and Nation, 1916-1939 for the University of Illinois Press, builds on previous studies of Mexicans in the United States while challenging static definitions of “American” and underlying assumptions of assimilation. Arredondo contends that because of the revolutionary context from which they came, Mexicans in Chicago…