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A selection of poems that blend raw imagery with experimental forms, offering a vivid exploration of the body, language and shifting identities.

Nóra Ružičková’s poetry merges bodily experience with linguistic experimentation, evolving from self-reflection to an exploration of the complexities of gender and Central European identity. Her work deftly weaves personal narratives with political and social commentary, forging poems that are both intellectually provocative and deeply embodied.

This selection spans nearly 25 years, tracing her work from a late-millennium debut to her latest, most socially engaged collection, which explores novelty within the grand narratives of modern history and critiques humanity's obsession with progress. Through her poems, she challenges the boundaries of language, blending physicality with abstraction through a combination of potent imagery and philosophical reflection. Her poetry treats the body as a space where meaning is simultaneously created and dismantled, probing themes of identity, existence and the instability of interpretation. By experimenting with materiality, bodily experience and the ever-changing mediascape, Ružičková captures the complexities of contemporary human life and dissolves the divide between language and physical reality. In its concluding section, the selection confronts pivotal historical moments and humanity’s relentless pursuit of progress, making for a powerful, thought-provoking engagement with the present.

Since the early twentieth century, technological transfers from the United States to Latin American countries have involved technologies of violence for social control. As the chapters in this book illustrate, these technological transfers have taken various forms, including the training of Latin American military personnel in surveillance and torture and the provision of political and logistic support for campaigns of state terror. The human cost for Latin America has been enormous—thousands of Latin Americans have been murdered, disappeared, or tortured, and whole communities have been terrorized into silence.

Organized by region, the essays in this book address the topic of state-sponsored terrorism in a variety of ways. Most take the perspective that state-directed political violence is a modern development of a regional political structure in which U.S. political interests weigh heavily. Others acknowledge that Latin American states enthusiastically received U.S. support for their campaigns of terror. A few see local culture and history as key factors in the implementation of state campaigns of political violence. Together, all the essays exemplify how technologies of terror have been transferred among various Latin American countries, with particular attention to the role that the United States, as a "strong" state, has played in such transfers.

The 1970s in Mexico were turbulent from the start. Insurgent voices converged across cities and rural peripheries. Militant labor, urban popular sectors, and Indigenous collectives erupted in expressions of broad social exhaustion. Rebellion, rooted in the layered betrayals of the postrevolutionary state and the fractures of a deteriorating modernity under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), fermented and boiled over.

At the core of this moment, Mexican youth found their way to political-military organizations, coalescing around shared ecologies of dissent and embedded in broader currents of revolutionary struggle. When Working Class Youth Dreamt in Red reconstructs these insurgent youth cultures and guerrilla imaginaries, reorienting the historiographical lens to center radical working class youth—especially urban students—as protagonists in a wider saga of revolutionary experimentation and political rupture. 

At its conceptual core, this book offers a bold new interpretation of a turbulent moment in Mexican history. It shows how class shaped the epistemic horizons through which proletarian youth understood themselves and makes visible their role as central actors at the vanguard of a revolutionary time.

During the years between 1980 and 1999, in the midst of war and economic crisis, a record number of women were elected to national legislatures in Central American republics. Can quantitative increases in the presence of elected women in Central America produce qualitative political changes?

In this detailed study, Michelle A. Saint-Germain and Cynthia Chavez Metoyer explore the reasons for this unprecedented political rise of women, and what effect it has had on the region. Focusing on Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, the authors analyze national and regional indicators to evaluate various hypotheses concerning the reasons for women's electoral success in the region, as well as to make comparisons with findings from other world regions. They find that the election of more women depends on three things: the presence of a crisis, a pool of politically experienced women, and a culture of gender consciousness. They also compare the characteristics of Central American women legislators to women in other national legislatures around the world.

The authors document how elected women have used their policy-making power to begin to change the lives of all Central Americans, women and men alike. In more than seventy-five in-depth, personal interviews, these women legislators reflect on their lives, political careers, and gender identities in their own words, providing deep insights into recent events in this region.

What does it take for a woman to succeed as a writer? In these revealing interviews, first published in 1988 as Historias íntimas, ten of Latin America's most important women writers explore this question with scholar Magdalena García Pinto, discussing the personal, social, and political factors that have shaped their writing careers.

The authors interviewed are Isabel Allende, Albalucía Angel, Rosario Ferré, Margo Glantz, Sylvia Molloy, Elvira Orphée, Elena Poniatowska, Marta Traba, Luisa Valenzuela, and Ida Vitale. In intimate dialogues with each author, García Pinto draws out the formative experiences of her youth, tracing the pilgrimage that led each to a distinguished writing career.

The writers also reflect on their published writings, discussing the creative process in general and the motivating force behind individual works. They candidly discuss the problems they have faced in writing and the strategies that enabled them to reach their goals.

While obviously of interest to readers of Latin American literature, this book has important insights for students of women's literature and cultural studies, as well as for aspiring writers.

Since the mid-1980s, a dramatic opening in Mexico's political and electoral processes, combined with the growth of a new civic culture, has created unprecedented opportunities for women and other previously repressed or ignored groups to participate in the political life of the nation. In this book, Victoria Rodríguez offers the first comprehensive analysis of how Mexican women have taken advantage of new opportunities to participate in the political process through elected and appointed office, nongovernmental organizations, and grassroots activism.

Drawing on scores of interviews with politically active women conducted since 1994, Rodríguez looks at Mexican women's political participation from a variety of angles. She analyzes the factors that have increased women's political activity: from the women's movement, to the economic crises of the 1980s and 1990s, to increasing democratization, to the victory of Vicente Fox in the 2000 presidential election. She maps out the pathways that women have used to gain access to public life and also the roadblocks that continue to limit women's participation in politics, especially at higher levels of government. And she offers hopeful, yet realistic predictions for women's future participation in the political life of Mexico.

In 2010, Dilma Rousseff was the first woman to be elected President in Brazil. She was re-elected in 2014 before being impeached in 2016 for breaking budget laws. Her popularity and controversy both energized and polarized the country. In Women’s Empowerment and Disempowerment in Brazil, dos Santos and Jalalzai examine Rousseff’s presidency and what it means for a woman to hold (and lose) the country’s highest power. 

The authors examine the ways Rousseff exercised dominant authority and enhanced women’s political empowerment. They also investigate the extent her gender played a role in the events of her presidency, including the political and economic crises and her ensuing impeachment. Emphasizing women’s political empowerment rather than representation, the authors assess the effects of women executives to more directly impact female constituencies—how they can empower women by appointing them to government positions; make policies that advance women’s equality; and, through visibility, create greater support for female politicians despite rampant sexism. 

Women’s Empowerment and Disempowerment in Brazil uses Rousseff’s presidency as a case study to focus on the ways she succeeded and failed in using her authority to empower women. The authors’ findings have implications throughout the world.

As part of the larger, ongoing movement throughout Latin America to reclaim non-Hispanic cultural heritages and identities, indigenous writers in Mexico are reappropriating the written word in their ancestral tongues and in Spanish. As a result, the long-marginalized, innermost feelings, needs, and worldviews of Mexico's ten to twenty million indigenous peoples are now being widely revealed to the Western societies with which these peoples coexist. To contribute to this process and serve as a bridge of intercultural communication and understanding, this groundbreaking, three-volume anthology gathers works by the leading generation of writers in thirteen Mexican indigenous languages: Nahuatl, Maya, Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Tojolabal, Tabasco Chontal, Purepecha, Sierra Zapoteco, Isthmus Zapoteco, Mazateco, Ñahñu, Totonaco, and Huichol.

Volume Three contains plays by six Mexican indigenous writers. Their plays appear first in their native language, followed by English and Spanish translations. Montemayor and Frischmann have abundantly annotated the Spanish, English, and indigenous-language texts and added glossaries and essays that introduce the work of each playwright and discuss the role of theater within indigenous communities. These supporting materials make the anthology especially accessible and interesting for nonspecialist readers seeking a greater understanding of Mexico's indigenous peoples.

As part of the larger, ongoing movement throughout Latin America to reclaim non-Hispanic cultural heritages and identities, indigenous writers in Mexico are reappropriating the written word in their ancestral tongues and in Spanish. As a result, the long-marginalized, innermost feelings, needs, and worldviews of Mexico's ten to twenty million indigenous peoples are now being widely revealed to the Western societies with which these peoples coexist. To contribute to this process and serve as a bridge of intercultural communication and understanding, this groundbreaking, three-volume anthology gathers works by the leading generation of writers in thirteen Mexican indigenous languages: Nahuatl, Maya, Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Tojolabal, Tabasco Chontal, Purepecha, Sierra Zapoteco, Isthmus Zapoteco, Mazateco, Ñahñu, Totonaco, and Huichol.

Volume Two contains poetry by Mexican indigenous writers. Their poems appear first in their native language, followed by English and Spanish translations. Montemayor and Frischmann have abundantly annotated the Spanish, English, and indigenous-language texts and added glossaries and essays that discuss the formal and linguistic qualities of the poems, as well as their place within contemporary poetry. These supporting materials make the anthology especially accessible and interesting for nonspecialist readers seeking a greater understanding of Mexico's indigenous peoples.

The 1910 Mexican Revolution saw Francisco "Pancho" Villa grow from social bandit to famed revolutionary leader. Although his rise to national prominence was short-lived, he and his followers (the villistas) inspired deep feelings of pride and power amongst the rural poor. After the Revolution (and Villa's ultimate defeat and death), the new ruling elite, resentful of his enormous popularity, marginalized and discounted him and his followers as uncivilized savages. Hence, it was in the realm of culture rather than politics that his true legacy would be debated and shaped.

Mexican literature following the Revolution created an enduring image of Villa and his followers. Writing Pancho Villa's Revolution focuses on the novels, chronicles, and testimonials written from 1925 to 1940 that narrated Villa's grassroots insurgency and celebrated—or condemned—his charismatic leadership. By focusing on works by urban writers Mariano Azuela (Los de abajo) and Martín Luis Guzmán (El águila y la serpiente), as well as works closer to the violent tradition of northern Mexican frontier life by Nellie Campobello (Cartucho), Celia Herrera (Villa ante la historia), and Rafael F. Muñoz (¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa!), this book examines the alternative views of the revolution and of the villistas. Max Parra studies how these works articulate different and at times competing views about class and the cultural "otherness" of the rebellious masses. This unique revisionist study of the villista novel also offers a deeper look into the process of how a nation's collective identity is formed.