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In El Techo de la Ballena, María C. Gaztambi depresents an account of the visual arts production of the Caracas-based collective El Techo de la Ballena (active 1961−69). In spite of evident convergences with other global art tendencies, these radicalized artists from Venezuela anchored their multidisciplinary interventions in a fundamental retrograde stance which, in the author’s view, represented a deliberate inversion of an internationallyaligned modernity hinging on the need for constant evolution and progress in the visual arts. El Techo’s against-the-grain position became the basis for a disorderly project of grief that counteracted the swiftness by which Venezuela fast-tracked its modernization (in the sense of material and technological progress) and consumed international modernism (its cultural production). Against this fragmentary development, El Techo deployed an integrated approach to art-making that included artworks with multiple meanings, alternative exhibition spaces, politicized actions, as well as highly confrontational printed materials. All these elements came together into a single, indivisible body of work merging the visual, the poetic, the performative, and the political. Yet Venezuela’s eroded local environment required an outright unsettling through extreme scatological content and strategies that the balleneros qualified as “a biological art, violently exuded from our bowels…” Theirs was a total output that tested the limits of art to provoke an anesthetized local public under the motto of cambiar la vida, transformar la sociedad(to change life, to transform society).

Labor Politics in Latin America assesses the capacity of working-class organizations to represent and advance working people’s demands in the era of globalization and neoliberalism, in which capital has reasserted its power on a global scale. The book’s premise is that the longer-term sustainability of development strategies for the region is largely connected to the capacity of working-class organizations to secure a fairer distribution of the gains from growth through labor legislation reform. Its analysis suggests the need to take into consideration the wider structural changes that reconfigured the political maps of the countries examined (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Venezuela), for example, globalization and its impact on democratic transformation in the region, operating within longer time frames. It is precisely this wider structural analysis and historical narrative that allows the book’s case studies to show that, even in the uncovering of substantial variation, what becomes evident in the study of Latin America over the last three decades is the overwhelming reality that for most workers in the region, labor reform—or the lack thereof —in essence increased precarity and informality and weakened labor movements.

Mexico’s traumatic Revolution (1910–1917) attested to stark divisions that had existed in the country for many years. Following the conflict, postrevolutionary leaders attempted to unify the country’s diverse (particularly indigenous) population under the umbrella of official mestizaje. Indigenous Mexicans would have to assimilate to the state by undergoing projects of “modernization” that entailed industrial growth through the imposition of a market-based economy. One of the most remarkable aspects of this nation-building project was the postrevolutionary government’s decision to use art to communicate discourses of official mestizaje. Until at least the 1970s, state-funded cultural artists whose work buoyed official discourses by positing mixed-race identity as a key component of an authentic Mexican identity. State officials viewed the hybridity of indigenous and female bodies with technology as paramount in their attempts to articulate a new national identity. As they fused the body with technology through medicine, education, industrial agriculture, and factory work, state officials believed that they could eradicate indigenous “primitivity” and transform Amerindians into full-fledged members of the nascent, mestizo state. This book discusses the work of José Vasconcelos, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, Emilio “El Indio” Fernández, El Santo, and Carlos Olvera. These artists—and many others—held diametrically opposed worldviews and used very different media while producing works during different decades. Nevertheless, each of these artists posited the fusion of the body with technology as key to forming an “authentic” Mexican identity.

The contributors to Transnational Hispaniola: New Directions in Haitian and Dominican Studies elaborate new methodologies and forge new questions in research about Haiti and the Dominican Republic. They use history, anthropology, literature, and interdisciplinary studies to move toward new directions in studies of Hispaniola.

In Migrants and Political Change in Latin America, Luis Jiménez looks at how migrants are changing the politics of their country of origin. It argues that migrants can do this in three distinct ways: through social remittances, economic remittances, and the presence of return migrants. In the first case, they can alter political outcomes in their country of origin as they channel ideas that are different than those present at home. In the second case, they can influence how their compatriots, who never left, behave in an indirect manner through the channeling of resources. This is because wealth, as well as education (which itself has an indirect effect on how people behave politically), is associated with higher political participation. Finally, return migrants combine these two aspects, but their physical presence both expands and limits how it manifests itself in the country of origin. All migrants have the potential to influence the politics of their country of origin, but how and when this occurs depends on several critical aspects: the size and density of the diaspora’s social networks and the specific social context of the migrants’ homeland in terms of both political structure and broader local circumstances. This text tests this theory in three cases—Mexico, Colombia, and Ecuador. The author selected these countries carefully because of the size and type of diaspora, the place individuals opted to migrate to, and the different types of political structure. The book finds that migration contributed to an increase in political participation and electoral competitiveness, including the specific individuals that became President among other various political outcomes.

Key to the New World is the first comprehensive English-language history of early colonial Cuba published in the last 100 years. It is divided into eight chapters that cover a range of topics since the island’s geological formation up to 1700, including geography; the indigenous inhabitants; first encounters between Europeans and Amerindians (otherwise known as the discovery of the New World); the conquest and colonization of Cuba; demographic realities such as race, gender, and social structure; cultural developments such as transculturation; piracy and other forms of aggression; slavery; and sugar production.

Dancing in Blackness: A Memoir explores a black female dancer’s personal journey over four decades across three continents and numerous countries. The author situates herself in the 1960s Black Arts Movement in the S.F. Bay Area, the dynamics of being a black woman dancing in Europe in the late 1960s, and dancing professionally in New York City in the early 1970s, while participating in racial inroads into important arts venues like Lincoln Center. She recounts friendships and collaborations with major artistic figures like Katherine Dunham, Ntozake Shange, Rod Rodgers, Diane McIntyre, Donald McKayle, Dr. Kwabena Nketia, and many others. She explores dancing in Ghana for almost a year, the inspiration for her return to the Oakland Bay Area in the late 1970s to help create the city’s black dance scene while being an adjunct dance lecturer at Stanford University. She also considers how her arts activism helped to engender more cultural equity in the arts nationally. She remembers the 1980s national multicultural arts movement and regional community dance activism, including her own national dance initiative, Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century. Finally, she ponders her self-reinvention in her 50s into a noted black studies and hip-hop scholar in academia.

Istwa across the Water draws on the historian and poet Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of tidalectics as cultural exchange that is patterned after the back and forth movement of the ocean’s waves, to explore Haitian cultural production through the lenses of history and memory by way of the Vodou concept of the Marasa or twinned entities. Istwa across the Water takes on Haiti’s complementary or twinned sites of cultural production in the West African area of Dahomey/Benin Republic and the Central West African Kôngo region from which many Haitians originate. It discusses oral and visual art traditions from both sides of the Atlantic divide as a means to explore the dynamic and constantly evolving exchange of physical and spiritual energies between Haiti and its “motherlands” (sites of origin) as Spirit seeks to restore the balance that was lost during the transatlantic trade and slave era.

Who Owns Haiti addresses a provocative and complex question, one arguably at the heart of Haitian studies and Haiti’s history. This edited volume calls into question the role of external actors in Haiti’s sovereign affairs, while highlighting the ways in which Haitians continually enact their own independence and sovereignty. Chapters consider Haiti’s sovereign roots and the contemporary encroachment on them by international actors, as well as the corresponding response, acquiescence, or resistance by Haitian institutions, including ‘sovereignty from below’ as wielded by grassroots organizations and religious ritual. Contributing authors consider how external actors and institutions have interacted historically with Haitian elites and government actors. Importantly, the volume examines parallel responses from historically marginalized urban and rural populations. The volume takes up issues long at the heart of Haitian studies and argues that otherwise disparate discussions of ownership and independence are in fact central to historical and contemporary considerations of Haiti and Haitians.

Driven by exacting methods and hard data, this volume reveals gender dynamics within the dance world in the twenty-first century. It provides concrete evidence about how gender impacts the daily lives of dancers, choreographers, directors, educators, and students through surveys, interviews, analyses of data from institutional sources, and action research studies. Dancers, dance artists, and dance scholars from the United States, Australia, and Canada discuss equity in three areas: concert dance, the studio, and higher education. The chapters provide evidence of bias, stereotyping, and other behaviors that are often invisible to those involved, as well as to audiences. The contributors answer incisive questions about the role of gender in various aspects of the field, including physical expression and body image, classroom experiences and pedagogy, and performance and funding opportunities. The findings reveal how inequitable practices combined with societal pressures can create environments that hinder health, happiness, and success. At the same time, they highlight the individuals working to eliminate discrimination and open up new possibilities for expression and achievement in studios, choreography, performance venues, and institutions of higher education. The dance community can strive to eliminate discrimination, but first it must understand the status quo for gender in the dance world.