|9780822948605|Hotels and Politics in the Hispanic Caribbean|Underneath picturesque views of palm trees, fruity cocktails in hotel lounges, and day trips to preserved colonial zones lies a history of tourism design that intersects with larger projects of development and national and cultural identity formation. Locating modernity and coloniality as the key framework within which tourism development takes place, Development Design focuses on hotel design and its relation to larger urban and rural landscapes to uncover the way these seemingly carefree spaces are bound to local politics and international relations. Focusing on three sites in the Hispanic Caribbean—San Juan, Ciudad Trujillo, and…

|9780822948339|Counterweights to Five Centuries of Eurocentrism| Longlist, 2025 Architecture Book Awards – Architectural Theory To study the built environment of the Americas is to wrestle with an inherent contradiction. While the disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape, and planning share the fundamental belief that space and place matter, the overwhelming majority of canonical knowledge and the vernacular used to describe these disciplines comes from another, very different, continent. With this book, Fernando Luiz Lara discusses several theories of space—drawing on cartography, geography, anthropology, and mostly architecture—and proposes counterweights to five centuries of Eurocentrism. The first part of Spatial Theories for…

|9780822948070|Omar Torrijos, Panama, and the Non-Aligned Movement in the World|Panama is a country whose geopolitical importance outweighs its size because of the volume of trade that passes the Central American isthmus through the canal. For nearly a century, the United States occupied and controlled the Panama Canal Zone and its shipping operations. In 1999, control was passed to Panama’s Canal Authority. This peaceful transfer was a result of the 1977 Torrijos-Carter Treaties. The Weak and the Powerful studies how a weak country negotiated the Cold War and how a strongman navigated between competing power blocs. Omar Torrijos took power in…

|9780822957003|Commercial Agriculture and the Politics of Peasant Communities in El Salvador, 1823–1914|With unprecedented use of local and national sources, Lauria-Santiago presents a more complex portrait of El Salvador than has ever been ventured before. Using thoroughly researched regional case studies, Lauria-Santiago uncovers an astonishing variety of patterns in land use, labor, and the organization of production. He finds a diverse, commercially active peasantry that was deeply involved with local and national networks of power. An Agrarian Republic challenges the accepted vision of Central America in the nineteenth century and critiques the “liberal oligarchic hegemony” model of El Salvador. Detailed discussions…

|9780822985914| The first work in English to discuss the social and political history of lawyers in a Latin American country, Honorable Lives presents a portrait of lawyers in late colonial and early modern Colombia. Uribe-Uran focuses on the social origins, education, and careers of those qualified to practice law before the highest colonial courts—Audiencias—and the republican courts after the 1820s. In the course of his study, Uribe-Uran answers many questions about this elite group of professionals. What were the social origins and families of lawyers? Their relation to the state? Their participation in political movements and parties, revolutions, civil wars,…