Featuring the original primary research of a number of leading scholars, this innovative volume integrates gender and sexuality into the main currents of historical interpretation concerning Latin America. The book argues that gender and sexuality-rather than simply supplementing existing explanations of political, social, cultural, and economic phenomena-are central to understanding these processes. Focusing on subjects as varied as murder, motherhood and the death penalty in early Republ...

In the generations after emancipation, hundreds of thousands of African-descended working-class men and women left their homes in the British Caribbean to seek opportunity abroad: in the goldfields of Venezuela and the cane fields of Cuba, the canal construction in Panama, and the bustling city streets of Brooklyn. But in the 1920s and 1930s, racist nativism and a brutal cascade of antiblack immigration laws swept the hemisphere. Facing borders and barriers as never before, Afro-Caribbean ...

In the late nineteenth century, migrants from Jamaica, Colombia, Barbados, and beyond poured into Caribbean Central America, building railroads, digging canals, selling meals, and farming homesteads. On the rain-forested shores of Costa Rica, U.S. entrepreneurs and others established vast banana plantations. Over the next half-century, short-lived export booms drew tens of thousands of migrants to the region. In Port Limon, birthplace of the United Fruit Company, a single building might ho...

This collection brings together recent scholarship that examines how understandings of honor changed in Latin America between political independence in the early nineteenth century and the rise of nationalist challenges to liberalism in the 1930s. These rich historical case studies reveal the uneven processes through which ideas of honor and status came to depend more on achievements such as education and employment and less on the birthright privileges that were the mainstays of honor dur...

A young girl's world spins out of control when her mother's alcoholism pushes her to the edge in this poignant young adult story of family, forgiveness, and romance.Seventeen-year-old Jane McAllister, fleeing a troubled relationship with her alcoholic mom, spends a summer in the plains chasing—of all things—tornadoes. Somehow, the chaos of tornadoes seems a lot more manageable than her very messy life back home. But whether Jane returns home to a life of caring for...

**In a small town filled with secrets, Aggie Winchester is a girl facing a myriad of challenges beyond typical teenage drama.“Proms and sparkly crowns are awesome, but finding out who you really are—with the help of friends and fam—is the best ‘last dance’ of all.”—Lauren Myracle, New York Times bestselling author of TTYL**Sixteen-year-old Aggie Winchester is that rare mix of Goth girl and principal’s kid—a rebel—or so she’d like to think. The truth is, sh...

This book provides a much-needed study of the lived experience of militarization in the Caribbean from 1914 to the present. It offers an alternative to policy and security studies by drawing on the perspectives of literary and cultural studies, history, anthropology, ethnography, music, and visual art. Rather than opposing or defending militarization per se, this book focuses attention on how Caribbean people negotiate militarization in their everyday lives. The volume explores topics such...