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This book examines the experiences of São Paulo’s diverse working class as they encountered rapid urbanization and industrialization brought on by the coffee boom during Brazil’s Old Republic (1891–1930). It places the rank-and-file at the center of its analysis to understand how macroeconomic trends connected to daily life and individual and family responses to labor market discrimination, inflation, and fluctuating (im)migration. The study emphasizes the family-centered nature of immigration to São Paulo in comparison to other immigrant cities like Buenos Aires and New York City. It shows how World War I exacerbated existing working-class hierarchies and cut short important standard-of-living advancements. The study demonstrates how despite its intended purpose to funnel agricultural laborers into the coffee interior, the city’s immigrant receiving station also played a decisive role in shaping the city of São Paulo, serving both as a safety net for residents and labor supplier for employers. Methodologically, this book embraces both social and economic history, deconstructing the population along racial, ethnic, national, and gender lines. Combining statistical analysis alongside close readings of immigrant letters provides a nuanced analysis of recently arrived Paulistanos from Italy, Portugal, Germany, Lebanon, and Japan and from northeastern Brazil. The research demonstrates how Portuguese, women, and Afro-Brazilians all faced significant labor market discrimination, impacting individual and family decisions about where to work and live and whether to join labor movements. The approach provides a powerful tool to address archival silences, recover embedded narratives, and understand historic underdevelopment.

Wage-Earning Slaves is the first systematic study of coartación, a process by which slaves worked toward purchasing their freedom in installments, long recognized as a distinctive feature of certain areas under Spanish colonial rule in the nineteenth century. Focusing on Cuba, this book reveals that instead of providing a “path to manumission,” the process was often rife with obstacles that blocked slaves from achieving liberty. Claudia Varella and Manuel Barcia trace the evolution of coartación in the context of urban and rural settings, documenting the lived experiences of slaves through primary sources from many different archives. They show that slave owners grew increasingly intolerant and abusive of the process and that the laws of coartación were not often followed in practice. The process did not become formalized as a contract between slaves and their masters until 1875, after abolition had already come. Varella and Barcia discuss how coartados did not see an improvement in their situation at this time but essentially became wage-earning slaves as they continued serving their former owners. The exhaustive research in this volume provides valuable insight into how slaves and their masters negotiated with each other in the ever-changing economic world of nineteenth-century Cuba, where freedom was not always absolute and where abuses and corruption most often prevailed.

The first completely researched history of U.S. Spanish-language television traces the rise of two foremost, if widely unrecognized, modern American enterprises—the Spanish-language networks Univision and Telemundo. It is a standard scholarly history constructed from archives, original interviews, reportage, and other public materials. Occasioned by the public’s wakening to a “Latinization” of the U.S., the book demonstrates that the emergence of Spanish-language television as a force in mass communication is essential to understanding the increasing role of Latinos and Latino affairs in modern American society. It argues that a combination of foreign and domestic entrepreneurs and innovators who overcame large odds resolves a significant and timely question: In an English-speaking country, how could a Spanish-speaking institution have emerged? Through exploration of significant and colorful pioneers, continuing conflicts and setbacks, landmark strides, and ongoing controversies—and with revelations that include regulatory indecision, behind-the-scenes tug-of-war, and the internationalization of U.S. mass media—the rise of a Spanish-language institution in the English-speaking U.S. is explained. Nine chapters that begin with Spanish-language television’s inception in 1961 and end 2012 chronologically narrate the endeavor’s first 50 years. Events, passages, and themes are thoroughly referenced.

Finding Balanchine’s Lost Ballets: Exploring the Early Choreography of a Master allows the reader to learn about one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists in a way that has not before been possible. Balanchine’s Russian ballets did not survive in the repertory, but this book demonstrates how some of these lost works need not be relegated to the pages of history but can and should be reconstructed, giving us a vision of our past as artists, scholars, and audiences. The book details the work of setting Balanchine’s first group ballet, Funeral March (Choreography by George Balanchine © The George Balanchine Trust), on the dancers of the Grand Rapids Ballet. It follows this project from archival studies to studio research with the dancers to a final performance. Through careful research on Balanchine’s earliest ballets, traditional research is brought from the archive into the studio, and finally, onto the stage. This visceral approach enables dance history to be studied in its most natural state, kinesthetically, through movement, allowing us to explore, examine, and above all, experience the earliest works of this master.

A Revolution in Movement is the first book to illuminate how collaborations between dancers and painters shaped Mexico’s postrevolutionary cultural identity. K. Mitchell Snow traces this relationship throughout nearly half a century of developments in Mexican dance—the emulation of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in the 1920s, the adoption of U.S.-style modern dance in the 1940s, and the creation of ballet-inspired folk dance in the 1960s. Snow describes the appearances in Mexico by Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova and Spanish concert dancer Tortóla Valencia, who helped motivate Mexico to express its own national identity through dance. He discusses the work of muralists and other visual artists in tandem with Mexico’s theatrical dance world, including Diego Rivera’s collaborations with ballet composer Carlos Chávez; Carlos Mérida’s leadership of the National School of Dance; José Clemente Orozco’s involvement in the creation of the Ballet de la Ciudad de México; and Miguel Covarrubias, who led the “golden age” of Mexican modern dance. Snow draws from a rich trove of historical newspaper accounts and other contemporary documents to show how these collaborations produced an image of modern Mexico that would prove popular both locally and internationally and continues to endure today.

This in-depth examination of one of the most controversial episodes in U.S.-Cuba relations sheds new light on the program that airlifted 14,000 unaccompanied children to the United States in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. Operation Pedro Pan is often remembered within the U.S. as an urgent “rescue” mission, but Deborah Shnookal points out that a multitude of complex factors drove the exodus, including Cold War propaganda and the Catholic Church’s opposition to the island’s new government. Shnookal illustrates how and why Cold War scare tactics were so effective in setting the airlift in motion, focusing on their context: the rapid and profound social changes unleashed by the 1959 Revolution, including the mobilization of 100,000 Cuban teenagers in the 1961 national literacy campaign. Other reforms made by the revolutionary government affected women, education, religious schools, and relations within the family and between the races. Shnookal exposes how, in its effort to undermine support for the revolution, the U.S. government manipulated the aspirations and insecurities of more affluent Cubans. She traces the parallel stories of the young “Pedro Pans” separated from their families—in some cases indefinitely—in what is often regarded in Cuba as a mass “kidnapping” and the children who stayed and joined the literacy brigades. These divergent journeys reveal many underlying issues in the historically fraught relationship between the U.S. and Cuba and much about the profound social revolution that took place on the island after 1959.

In this book, Eli Carter explores the ways in which the movement away from historically popular telenovelas toward new television and internet series is creating dramatic shifts in how Brazil imagines itself as a nation, especially within the context of an increasingly connected global mediascape. For more than half a century, South America’s largest over-the-air network, TV Globo, produced long-form melodramatic serials that cultivated the notion of the urban, upper-middle-class white Brazilian. Carter looks at how the expansion of internet access, the popularity of web series, the rise of independent production companies, and new legislation not only challenged TV Globo’s market domination but also began to change the face of Brazil’s growing audiovisual landscape. Combining sociohistorical, economic, and legal contextualization with close readings of audiovisual productions, Carter argues that a fragmented media has opened the door to new voices and narratives that represent a more diverse Brazilian identity.

Handmade in Cuba is an in-depth examination of Ediciones Vigía, an artisanal press that published exquisite books crafted from everyday supplies during some of Cuba’s most dire economic periods. Vividly illustrated, this volume shows how the publishing collective responded to the nation’s changing historical and political situation from the margins of society, representing Cuban culture across the boundaries of race, age, gender, and genre. In this volume, poets and scholars reflect on the unique artistic work of Rolando Estévez, who oversaw the creation of over 500 handmade books and magazines between 1985 and 2014. They highlight the beautiful designs and unusual materials selected, including fabric, metals, wood, feathers, and discarded items. Through diverse perspectives, including an interview with Estévez himself, the essays showcase the unlimited inventive possibilities of books as objects, as sculptural pieces, and as installations. Even in the age of digital technology, Estévez generated enormous excitement and admiration for these hand-crafted books, and this volume offers the first inside view of this important alternative publishing space.

Staging Discomfort examines how queer bodies are theatrically represented on the Cuban stage in order to re-evaluate the role of categorization as one of the state’s primary revolutionary tools. These performances concentrate on an aesthetics of fluidity, and thus upset traditional understandings of performer and spectator, and what constitutes the ideal Cuban citizenry. New affective modes are produced when performing bodies highlight—often in uncomfortably intimate, grotesque, or raw ways—the unavoidability of spectators’ bodies, and their capacity for queerness. Here the imagining of new continuities and subjectivities can lead to a reconfiguration of forms of Cuban citizenship. The affective responses from the closeness experienced in the performances in Staging Discomfort are challenges to the Cuban state’s self-designated role as primary provider for the needs of its citizens’ bodies. Through the lens of queer theory, the manuscript explores the body’s centrality to the state’s deployment of fear to successfully marginalize gay life, which this group of works seeks to defuse through an articulation of intimacies, shame, the death drive, cruising, and failure. These affective experiences shape Cuban subjectivities that emerge out of queerness, but whose focus on inclusivity necessarily involves all Cubans. Several of the central questions that guide Staging Discomfort are: How is Cuban theater agile in its critiques considering the state’s limitations on expression? How do queer performances allow for new understandings about the effects of the state’s failing socialist utopian contract with its citizens? And, can Cuban bodies that come together in queer ways re-imagine Cuban citizenship?

Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human curates an important series of case studies of the posthuman imaginaries and nonhuman tropes employed in a broad range of Latin American cultural texts, from the narratives of Las Casas to new media and installation art in contemporary Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina. The book’s introduction highlights the ways the figure of the “limit” has functioned as an important site of aesthetic, ontological, and political experimentation and reworking in Latin American cultural production, and underlines the potentialities and possible risks associated with the use of posthuman frameworks in the region. The different chapters examine the ways human borders and boundaries have been tested, undermined, and reformulated in relation to issues including dictatorial violence and drug war necropolitics, ecological storytelling, indigenous thought systems, gender, race, history, and new materialism. The book as a whole marshals a wide range of theoretical frameworks and points to the complex ways Latin American culture intersects with and departs from global formulations of humanism and the posthuman.