I became curious about US imperialism and Latin American history after reading Gabriel García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. While pursuing a BA in History and Spanish at Dalhousie and an MA and PhD in Latin American Studies and History at Georgetown, I learned that Marquez's fictional banana worker massacre really happened in 1928 Colombia. What made me focus on sugar, rather than bananas, is the fact that sugar’s not really food... it often takes over land where food was planted, and the lack of food leads to a potentially revolutionary situation. I've used the following books in my classes about Revolution, Populism, and Commodities in Latin America at York University's Glendon College.
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Blazing Cane: Sugar Communities, Class, and State Formation in Cuba, 1868-1959
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.
This book is a carefully argued study of peasants and labor during the Somoza regime, focusing on popular movements in the economically strategic department of Chinandega in western Nicaragua. Jeffrey Gould traces the evolution of group consciousness among peasants and workers as they moved away from extreme dependency on the patron to achieve an autonomous social and political ideology. In doing so, he makes important contributions to peasant studies and theories of revolution, as well as our understanding of Nicaraguan history.
According to Gould, when Anastasio Somoza first came to power in 1936, workers and peasants took the Somocista reform…
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.
Sandino's Daughters, Margaret Randall's conversations with Nicaraguan women in their struggle against the dictator Somoza in 1979, brought the lives of a group of extraordinary female revolutionaries to the American and world public. The book remains a landmark. Now, a decade later, Randall returns to interview many of the same women and others. In Sandino's Daughters Revisited, they speak of their lives during and since the Sandinista administration, the ways in which the revolution made them strong--and also held them back. Ironically, the 1990 defeat of the Sandinistas at the ballot box has given Sandinista women greater freedom to express…
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.
This book explores the history of the Dominican Republic as it evolved from the first European colony in the Americas into a modern nation under the rule of Rafael Trujillo. It investigates the social foundations of Trujillo's exceptionally enduring and brutal dictatorship (1930-1961) and, more broadly, the way power is sustained in such non-democratic regimes.
The author reveals how the seemingly unilateral imposition of power by Trujillo in fact depended on the regime's mediation of profound social and economic transformations, especially through agrarian policies that assisted the nation's large independent peasantry. By promoting an alternative modernity that sustained peasants' free…
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.
Peter Winn, a highly regarded and internationally recognized Latin-American scholar and journalist, has written an innovative case study of Chile's revolution from below. Winn's analysis of the dramatic seizure of the Yarur cotton mill in Santiago and its widely felt repercussions for Allende's revolution is based on extensive, unique interviews. He juxtaposes the workers' views and activities during the revolution with a portrait of the government.
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.
Bananas, the most frequently consumed fresh fruit in the United States, have been linked to Miss Chiquita and Carmen Miranda, "banana republics," and Banana Republic clothing stores-everything from exotic kitsch, to Third World dictatorships, to middle-class fashion. But how did the rise in banana consumption in the United States affect the banana-growing regions of Central America? In this lively, interdisciplinary study, John Soluri integrates agroecology, anthropology, political economy, and history to trace the symbiotic growth of the export banana industry in Honduras and the consumer mass market in the United States.
Beginning in the 1870s, when bananas first appeared in…
Blazing Cane shows how industrialists, cane farmers, and workers linked to the sugar industry forged classes that worked like lobby groups to build and transform the Cuban state, from the first revolution for independence in 1868 through the 1959 Revolution. Cane burning became a powerful way for farmers, workers, and revolutionaries to commit sabotage, take control of the harvest season, improve working conditions, protest political repression, attack colonialism and imperialism, nationalize sugar mills, and, ultimately, acquire greater political and economic power.
Twentieth-century Cuba suffered from extreme levels of US interference, but its history reflects broader patterns in the Western Hemisphere, from paternalism to populism to Cold War repression.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
