Subject: History / Latin America / South America

Subject: History / Latin America / South America

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Inka Bird Idiom

|9780822947592|Amazonian Feathers in the Andes|From majestic Amazonian macaws and highland Andean hawks to tiny colorful tanagers and tall flamingos, birds and their feathers played an important role in the Inka empire. Claudia Brosseder uncovers the many meanings that Inkas attached to the diverse fowl of the Amazon, the eastern Andean foothills, and the highlands. She shows how birds and feathers shaped Inka politics, launched wars, and initiated peace. Feathers provided protection against unpredictable enemies, made possible communication with deities, and brought an imagined Inka past into a political present. Richly textured contexts of feathered objects recovered from Late Horizon archaeological…

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Mirrors of Whiteness

|9780822947523|Media, Middle-Class Resentment, and the Rise of the Far Right in Brazil|In Mirrors of Whiteness, Mauro P. Porto examines the conservative revolt of Brazil’s white middle class, which culminated with the 2018 election of far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro. He identifies the rise of a significant status panic among middle-class publics following the relative economic and social ascension of mostly Black and brown low-income laborers. The book highlights the role of the media in disseminating “mirrors of whiteness,” or spheres of representation that allow white Brazilians to legitimate their power while softening or hiding the inequalities and injustices that such power…

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Capitalist Outsiders

|9780822947639|Oil’s Legacies in Mexico and Venezuela| Honorable Mention, 2025 Paul Sweezy Outstanding Book Award from the Marxist Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association | Winner, 2024 Barrington Moore Book Award from the Section on Comparative Historical Sociology of the American Sociological Association | Co-winner, 2024 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award from the Political Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association | Honorable Mention, 2024 Immanuel Wallerstein Memorial Book Award from the Political Economy of the World-System Section of the American Sociological Association Social polarization has roiled neoliberal political establishments but has rarely culminated in electoral victories for anticapitalist…

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Building Power to Shape Labor Policy

|9780822947691|Unions, Employer Associations, and Reform in Neoliberal Chile|During Chile’s shift to neoliberalism, the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet passed a swath of probusiness labor legislation. Subsequent labor reforms by democratically elected progressive administrations have sought to shift power back to workers, but this task has proven difficult. In Building Power to Shape Labor Policy, Pablo Pérez Ahumada explains why. Focusing on reforms to collective labor law, Pérez Ahumada argues that analyzing how both workers and employers mobilize power to influence government policies is crucial for understanding labor reform outcomes. He examines the relational character of power to explain how different types…

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Now We Are in Power

|9780822947783|The Politics of Passive Revolution in Twenty-First-Century Bolivia|During the first decade of the century, Evo Morales and other leftists took control of governments across Latin America. In the case of Bolivia, Morales was that country’s first Indigenous president and was elected following five years of popular insurrection after decades of neoliberal governance. Now We Are in Power makes the argument that the so-called Pink Tide should be understood as a passive revolution, a process that has two phases: a period of subaltern struggle from average citizens strong enough to culminate in a political crisis, which is followed by a time…

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