Books in the Latin America in Translation series

At turns lyrical, ironic, and sympathetic, Mario Filho's chronicle of ""the beautiful game"" is a classic of Brazilian sports writing. Filho - a famous Brazilian journalist after whom Rio's Maracana stadium is officially named - tells the Brazilian soccer story as a boundary-busting one of race relations, popular culture, and national identity.

In Mexico and across other parts of Latin America local Indigenous peoples have built community policing groups as a means of protection where the state has limited control over, and even complicity in, crime and violence. Luis Hernandez Navarro, a leading Mexican journalist, offers a riveting investigation of these armed self-defense groups.

Now in English for the first time, Keila Grinberg's compelling study of the nineteenth-century jurist Antonio Pereira Reboucas (1798-1880) traces the life of an Afro-Brazilian intellectual who rose from a humble background to play a key as well as conflicted role as Brazilians struggled to define citizenship and understand racial politics.

Formation of Candomble: Vodun History and Ritual in Brazil"

Presents from the Mexican perspective the story of Mexican migration to the US and the astonishing forced repatriation of hundreds of thousands of people to Mexico during the worldwide economic crisis of the Great Depression. Fernando Saul Alanis Enciso provides an illuminating backstory that demonstrates the fluid and controversial immigration and labour situation between Mexico and the US.

Voices of the Enslaved in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Documentary History

This evocative novel - justly famous for its vividly detailed depiction of the cityscape and the city's customs, social interactions, and political activities - assumed singular importance in Mexican popular culture after its original publication in 1903. The book inspired several film adaptations, a music score, a radio series, a television soap opera, and a pornographic comic book.

Compares the formation of Yoruba (Nago) religious traditions and ethnic identities in the Brazilian states of Sergipe and Bahia, revealing how they diverged from each other due to their different social and political contexts and needs.

Offering a comprehensive history of crime and corruption in Cuba, this book challenges the common view that widespread poverty and geographic proximity to the United States were the prime reasons for soaring rates of drug trafficking, smuggling, gambling, and prostitution in the tumultuous decades preceding the Cuban revolution.

Presents salsa as a pan-Caribbean phenomenon, emerging in the migrations and interactions, the celebrations and conflicts that marked the region. This book explains that it is also a commercial product produced and shaped by professional musicians, record producers, and the music industry.