Latin Readers

This book brings together world-renowned experts and rising scholars to provide a collection of chapters examining the long-term impact of historical events on modern-day economic and political developments in Latin America. It, uses a novel approach, stressing empirical contributions and state-of-the-art empirical methods for causal identification. Contributing authors apply these cutting-edge tools to their topics of expertise, giving readers a compendium of frontier research in the region. Important questions of colonialism, migration, elites, land tenure, corruption, and conflict are examined and discussed in an approachable style. The book features a conclusion from Alberto Diaz-Cayeros, Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University.

This volume explores the character of the domestic worker in twenty-first century Latin American cinema and analyzes how recent filmic representations of the housemaid question the marginalization of domestic servants, in particular women, by making them the center of their narratives, their families, and society. The essays in this book posit the female domestic worker as an emergent subjectivity, a complex character who problematizes and contests the hierarchical power structures within the family dynamics and new socioeconomic orders found in contemporary Latin America.

This book describes the main patterns and trends of drug trafficking in Latin America and analyzes its political, economic and social effects on several countries over the last twenty years. Its aim is to provide readers an introductory yet elaborate text on the illegal drug problem in the region. It first seeks to define and measure the problem, and then discusses some of the implications that the growth of production, trafficking, and consumption of illegal drugs had in the economies, in the social fabrics, and in the domestic and international policies of Latin American countries.