The best books about workers, peasants, populism, and revolution in Latin America

To get through over a hundred books on my History PhD comprehensive exams list, I allowed myself a maximum of one reading day plus a maximum of one double-sided cue card per book.

Jeff Gould crammed so much super cool theory about populism and revolution, workers, and women into his beautifully written book that he got four cue cards and three days! Gould explains that the first Somoza (named “Anastasio”) rose to power largely thanks to US influence, but, once there, he built his own following and passed some remarkably progressive reforms, at least on paper.

The book changed the way I think about populism and revolution in Latin America, completely inspiring the PhD research that became my first book and my current project on rural populism in Brazil.
To Lead as Equals shows how powerful sugar workers can be when rural sugar-cane cutters unite with industrial sugar-factory workers, and it proves that populists—in this case the Somoza family—can set the stage for their own revolutionary undoing when they turn against their humble allies. 

I came across Margaret Randall’s Sandino’s Daughters Revisited while researching my MA thesis on women in the 1979 Nicaraguan Revolution, and I love to use it with students since it tells a fascinating history through individuals’ stories.

The book is a really interesting follow-up to Sandino’s Daughters, which was based on interviews Randall did before the triumph of the revolution. Here, Randall is interviewing many of the same women after the Sandinistas lost democratic elections in 1990, offering lots of insights to readers about the complex causes for the triumph and downfall of the revolution.

The twelve women came from many different backgrounds, including: Diana Espinoza, who worked for an employee-owned factory during the revolutionary period; Daisy Zamora, a poet who served as vice-minister of culture during the revolution, and Dora Maria Vidaluz Meneses, the daughter of a Somozan official who shares some really moving stories about her time living with nuns in Ecuador (I still remember a beautiful anecdote about how the river softens rocks over time).

Another interviewee, Dora Maria Tellez, was second-in-command guerrilla fighter for the Sandinistas against Somoza in the 1970s. As Health Minister during the revolutionary period Tellez, alongside other female doctors and lawyers interviewed by Randall, helped Nicaragua win a United Nations prize for exceptional improvement in public health.

Tellez was actually jailed for 20 months in 2021, then exiled to the United States, by the born-again former revolutionary-then-president Daniel Ortega. Ortega, like other male “revolutionaries” described in Randall’s book, made the huge mistake of focusing on class to the exclusion of the gender and ethnic inequalities that were exacerbated by the US-funded Contra War.

This was a really amazing book to read with students in my graduate course on the social history of commodities.

It contributes some really original theory about power and race, the peasantry, politics, and other major topics that those more inclined towards sociology or political science would appreciate. It is a little like the Dominican Republic version of Jeff Gould’s To Lead as Equals on Nicaragua or Gladys McCormick’s The Logic of Compromise: Authoritarianism, Betrayal, and Revolution in Rural Mexico, 1935-1965.

I am constantly telling students and colleagues about the fascinating arguments presented in Foundations of Despotism, which echoes Gould’s evidence that dictators cannot remain in power through violence, alone.

Turits’ interviews with peasants and letters that he found in the Dominican national archives from humble rural peoples show that after first coming to power in the early 1930s—ostensibly purely because of US support—the Trujillo regime built a rural base and passed some important land and labor reforms (just as Gould found for Nicaragua’s Somoza regime, McCormick found for the PRI in Mexico, and I found for Cuba’s first Batista regime).

That base included the rural workers and peasants granted access to land in exchange for loyalty to the regime in the 1930s and ‘40s. Again, like the Somoza regime, Trujillo made the mistake of moving away from his humble supporters, taking over these lands in the 1950s to expand his own sugar company and sell to US-owned sugar companies.

Turits documents how the mobilization of sugar workers, alongside opposition from the multiple classes alienated by Trujillo’s greed, contributed to the regime’s downfall in 1961. 

Weavers of Revolution is still my favorite "history from below” book to use in classes about Latin American revolutions.

It reads like a novel, bringing readers into the story by focusing on the workers of Chile’s largest cotton mill and highlighting their activities before and during the socialist Salvador Allende regime (1970-73). The Lebanese Yarur family used ethnic networks to build a successful economic enterprise that endured for many decades, but when the socialist Allende was elected, workers rejected paternalism and took over the factory to run it themselves.

Winn, building on interviews with workers as well as Allende regime officials, beautifully communicates the complexities of the era. Allende and his advisors urged workers to wait for gradual change—also urging rural workers who were seizing plantations to await formal land reform—but urban and rural workers executed factory take-overs and land occupations, radicalizing the revolution from below.

Weavers of Revolution joins the other books in this list to demonstrate that US policy contributed to the rise of a dictatorship (in this case, Augusto Pinochet, from 1973-1990), but many different domestic interests weakened the revolution from within, as well.

How could you not love a book that explores the at times hilarious, at times tragic, but always fascinating impact of the banana in the United States and Latin America?

From the changing faces of Chiquita Banana to cookbooks and popular jingles like, “Yes, we have no bananas!” Soluri shows us how the banana became one of the most common fruits in the US diet. At the same time, he shows how US importers and marketers took control over, manipulated, and expanded, much of the production in tropical areas like Honduras.

On the production side, Soluri explores ironies like the fact that the United Fruit Company created the perfect breeding ground for pathogens by shrinking banana gene pools and shoving the same type of banana trees all in a row... or the tragic fact that “macho” banana workers became sterile after refusing to wear protective clothing.

John Soluri’s book is a brilliant combo of insights on why we should study the relationship between the culture surrounding the demand for commodities like bananas, sugar, and coffee in places like the United States and Europe alongside the communities that produce these commodities in tropical climates.

Soluri follows in the footsteps of the original historical anthropological geniuses like Sidney Mintz (Sweetness and Power), Eric Wolf (Europe and the People Without History), and William Roseberry (Coffee and Power in Latin America) who pointed to the relationships between commodity consumption and production.

Soluri also emphasizes the importance of studying the history of workers in tandem with the history of environment, since rural workers were, and are, at the front lines, getting pesticides sprayed on them and suffering from floods or droughts brought on by “modern” agriculture’s manipulation of rivers, nature, and pathogens.