Dispatches from the Latin American Studies Association International Congress in Peru

By Kerry Webb, Senior Editor

Acquisitions areas: Latin American and Pre-Columbian studies, Latin American history, Latino/a studies

Series: Border Hispanisms, Historia USA, Inter America

Recently, my colleague Inés ter Horst and I attended the 2017 Latin American Studies Association meeting in Lima, Peru. We quickly got into the swim of things with a walk along the famed Malencón, situated on the edge of cliffs overlooking beautiful views of the beaches of Lima and the Pacific Ocean, and a lunch of some delicious ceviche. To set up our book exhibit, after lunch we made our way to Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, the site for most of the panels at the conference and which was also celebrating its 100th anniversary.

Despite the hustle and bustle of the city, it was hard not to be constantly reminded of the deep and rich history of Lima and Peru, from the archaeological sites of many little-known, pre-Incan civilizations to Lima’s unique history as a colonial stronghold of the Spanish Empire in South America. In fact, there was an Incan site right on the edge of campus and adjacent to the book exhibit hall. When I asked one of our authors who was from Lima what it was, he said that it was one of the Incan roads that was part of a massive transportation network that stretched the length of the Incan Empire at it’s height, from Colombia all the way down to Chile and Argentina.

It was the perfect place to showcase our books, including several recent additions to the list that are focused on Peruvian and Andean studies such as The Peculiar Revolution: Rethinking the Peruvian Experiment Under Military Rule, Kevin Young’s Blood of the Earth: Resource Nationalism, Revolution, and Empire in Boliva, and Gary Urton’s Inka History in Knots: Reading Khipus as Primary Sources. We were also happy to learn that three of our recent books won major awards at LASA: Barbara Mundy’s The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, The Life of Mexico City won the Bryce-Wood award and Mark Christensen’s book The Teabo Manuscript: Mayan Christian Copybooks, Chilam Balams, and Native Text Production in Yucatan won the Mexico section’s award, while Inez Hernandez-Avila and Norma Cantú’s anthology of Tejana cultural production Entre Guadalupe Y Malinche: Tejanas in Literature and Art won the prize for the Latino studies section, further highlighting published work from other important parts of our publishing lists for LASA.

This conference is always a special opportunity to meet with current and potential authors, and we were especially pleased to be one of the US presses that were able to showcase our books and meet with authors, many of whom reside outside of the States, at a conference that, more than ever, has a truly international flavor.

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'Amazonia in the Anthropocene' Q&A with Nicholas Kawa

Our latest author Q&A features Nicholas Kawa talking about his new book Amazonia in the Anthropocene: People, Soils, Plants, Forests. Professor Kawa researches biodiversity management and agricultural sustainability in the Amazon region at the Ohio State University. This timely study explores how pre-Columbian Amerindians and contemporary rural Amazonians have shaped their environment and how that environment sometimes resists human manipulation and control. With implications for the human role in global environmental

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change, Amazonia in the Anthropocene engages the concept of the Anthropocene by tackling its problems and paradoxes from the vantage point of the world’s largest tropical rainforest. We asked him about his work, what we can learn from contemporary rural Amazonians, and the complicated identity politics of indigenous rights.


This week in New York City, Latin Americanists from all over the world will gather to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). We'll be there to salute LASA for 50 years of fostering intellectual discussion, research, and teaching on Latin America, the Caribbean, and its people throughout the Americas. We invite attendees to stop by our booth at the 2016 annual meeting for our newest titles, to pick up a subject catalog, and for an exclusive LASA offer.

Explain the concept of the Anthropocene and how your work wrestles with defining this “new” geological epoch.

The Anthropocene is rooted in the idea that human activity on the planet has been so impactful and pervasive that we have ushered in a new epoch in geological time. Paul Crutzen, the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist, is recognized for popularizing the term in 2000. However, in the past five years or so, it has really gained traction. It is not just being adopted by natural and physical scientists but also social scientists and scholars in the humanities. This is what I really appreciate about the concept of the Anthropocene: it’s encouraging truly interdisciplinary and even transdisciplinary dialogue. As a consequence, it has also generated considerable debate and controversy. One of the current debates centers on the origins of the Anthropocene. When did it begin? Crutzen and a few of his colleagues have traced it back to European industrialization while other scholars have suggested that it began with the development of agriculture. Still others have promoted later origin points including World War II and the radiological signatures left by the atom bomb. Most recently, a team of geologists has claimed that industrial plastics will stratigraphically define this new epoch. Regardless of when the Anthropocene began (which is a debate that will likely carry on), most scholars link it to the rise of modern industrialization and global capitalism.

In this book, I look at the Anthropocene from the vantage point of the rural Brazilian Amazon. In doing so, I highlight some of the problems with its current conceptualization. One problem I point out is its subtle Eurocentrism. In tracing the origins of the Anthropocene to industrial Europe, it is overlooked that people across the world have been implicated in and directly linked to the broader processes driving the Anthropocene. I show, for example, that many of rural Amazonia’s contemporary inhabitants are descendants of migrants who moved to the region to tap natural rubber, which fueled the burgeoning tire and automobile industries in North America and Europe. Another problem I highlight is the anthropocentrism embedded within the concept of the Anthropocene. While it’s suggested that humans are coming to dominate the planet, every day we get news about how various forces and life-forms that make up our environment are constantly pushing back against us: hurricanes, tsunamis, the Zika virus, flesh-eating microbes, and CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere. The Anthropocene should remind us that while our technologies have expanded our ability to impact the planet, a much broader array of life-forms and forces is constantly thwarting our attempts to wrest control of the world around us.

Barbara Mundy wins the 2016 LASA Colonial Book Prize

Barbara Mundy’s The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City has been awarded the 2016 Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Colonial Book Prize! Read what the prize committee has to say about Professor Mundy's work below.

The University of Texas Press salutes the Latin American Studies Association for 50 years of fostering intellectual discussion, research, and teaching on Latin America, the Caribbean, and its people throughout the Americas.

We invite attendees to stop by our booth at the 2016 annual meeting for our newest titles, to pick up a subject catalog, and for an exclusive LASA offer. Stay tuned to this blog for author guest posts, including Nicholas Kawa on his new book Amazonia in the Anthropocene: People, Soils, Plants, Forests.

LASA Colonial Book Prize Announcement

The winner of this year's prize from the LASA Colonial Section awarded to the best book in

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Colonial Studies is:

Barbara Mundy, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015.

Mundy has written a gorgeously illustrated book drawing on her training as an art historian, referencing as well architectural and urban history, and pre-Hispanic and colonial Spanish American history and narrative. Using the city as an organizing metaphor, she ‘reads’ a range of texts including maps, sculpture, architecture, indigenous language manuscripts, Spanish language chronicles and sermons…and even contemporary Mexico City subway maps.

Eschewing rupture (such as pre/post periodizations) for continuities, Mundy links pre-Hispanic Tenochtitlan and colonial Mexico City in compelling and nuanced ways. Her deft employment of theory (DeCerteau and Lefebvre, primarily) informs but never overwhelms her reading as she roots Mexica elite and commoner, preConquest and colonial agency in the performances of the city over time. Through her analysis, Mundy makes sculpture, imagery, and architecture move to dynamically represent the transformations of the city, marking the Mexica but also recalling the radical changes that have occurred. The committee found her central argument that indigenous peoples played a key role in shaping the post-conquest city in ways that scholars have overlooked to be quite persuasive.

Mundy's discussion of environmental issues (water), translation and nomenclature, and migration history will make her book significant for those outside the field of colonial studies. Common threads with her earlier work are the close attention to place-names as signifiers of rich cultural and historical meaning, recognition of collaborations between indigenous and European actors, and the wonderfully close readings of glyphs and maps, but this book represents a huge new project that draws on but in no way repeats that previous work.

By inviting her reader to "swim" through space, representation, and events, Mundy convinces us of the presence of an indigenous city into the colonial period and beyond through the intersections of water, markets, and indigenous leadership.

The Committee:

Chair, Mónica Díaz, Dept. of Hispanic Studies and History, University of Kentucky
Rachel O’Toole, Dept. of History, University of California, Irvine
Karen Stolley, Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, Emory University

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