“It is our hope that students will remember how a Brazilian small farmer raised cassava, or the tortuous efforts of Chilean copper miners. Perhaps readers will remember the smells of the streets of nineteenth-century cities or the noises of late twentieth-century megalopolises” (p. xxviii). In trying to convey to undergraduate students why Latin America has been compelling to those who study and teach its history, Cheryl Martin and Mark Wasserman have composed a survey of Latin America that centers on the lives of “ordinary people” who helped construct the history of the region from the pre-Columbian era to the early twenty-first century. Such a thematic approach requires the incorporation of the latest scholarship in subaltern studies, and the authors do so in a highly readable and accessible manner. While themes such as the impact of war, changing gender roles, and the persistence of poverty also inform the textbook, the ways in which popular groups have ceaselessly struggled to exercise some measure of control over their daily lives shape the book’s organization and serve as its interpretive focus.The text, offered in two volumes for use in either colonial or national-period surveys, reviews the political and economic developments that help contextualize the actions of popular groups. In addition, Martin and Wasserman include a number of embellishments that enhance the attractiveness of the textbook for classroom use, including a time line at the beginning of most chapters, excellent maps and illustrations, and helpful tables of useful information, such as listings of nineteenth-century domestic and foreign wars, dates of female enfranchisement, and changing quality-of-life indicators since the 1970s. Most appealing to me are the special features that highlight issues and developments discussed in each chapter. “Slice of Life” vignettes capture particular moments in history, such as the safra in colonial Brazil, the 1828 Parián Riot, and conditions on a Colombian coffee farm in the 1920s. “Latin American Lives” offers minibiographies of diverse people, including Bartolomé de Las Casas, Frida Kahlo, Juana de Cobos (a baker in colonial Chihuahua), and Adolfo Scilingo (an Argentine military officer who confessed to murdering civilians during the Dirty War). A section on “How Historians Understand” offers students opportunities to appreciate how their professors conduct research and how contemporary perspectives redefine the ways scholars use and inter pret historical data. Topics covered in this segment include the reconstruction of colonial society through analysis of parish registers, Malinche and the uses of historical memory, and the changing understandings of why people rebel. Many questions posed at the end of these three features encourage students to understand the past from the perspective of the present. The authors ask students to consider whether a seventeenth-century Peruvian miner might feel at home in today’s business climate, to explore parallels in how indigenous speakers under Spanish colonialism and people today incorporate words from other languages, and to discuss the ways in which today’s artists and musicians impact political discourse. These and other issues the authors skillfully raise can help students better understand how history, especially Latin American history, is relevant to their lives.Textbook adoption is, of course, a highly personal matter, and by their nature, all introductory survey books are lacking in some fashion. While largely successful at conveying a sense of how Latin Americans responded to the countless challenges they confronted over the centuries, this textbook suffers from some shortcomings. The most glaring omission, from this instructor’s perspective, is the scant attention paid to exogenous factors that have shaped Latin America since the mid – twentieth century. The United States generally merits only brief consideration in the context of the histories of various countries, and globalization also tends to get short shrift. The IMF-induced movement toward a free-market model is not mentioned, migration to the United States — a significant factor in family strategies in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean in the last generation — is treated as a relatively minor phenomenon, and examples of recent popular resistance to both U.S. policies and neoliberalism, such as the Zapatista uprising, are overlooked. People struggle to control their lives in response to international, and not just domestic, challenges, and my students would benefit from this understanding as well. Instructors obviously can compensate for such omissions, but given the relative succinctness of space devoted to the national period, there is room to develop these recent developments more fully in a future edition, if authors and publisher were so inclined.This does not seriously detract, however, from the book’s student-friendly approach and ability to convey a sense of how the peoples of Latin America have crafted their families, communities, and nations. In all, Martin and Wasserman have produced a well-conceived and valuable addition to the increasingly crowded field of Latin American history survey textbooks.
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Feb 1, 2008
Brian Hosmer 
Open Access