New Books in Mexican Studies

Why did Langston Hughes's translations of Mexican and Cuban stories go unpublished for nearly a century? A landmark book—the first complete publication of Langston Hughes’s translations of thirty-three stories by eighteen Mexican and Cuban writers In late 1934, Langston Hughes, already established as a leading voice of literary Black America, traveled to Mexico City, where he stayed for more than five months and began translating short fiction by prominent Mexican and Cuban writers. These stories, as he wrote to a friend, explore “the revolutions and uprisings, sugar cane, Negroes, Indians, corrupt generals, [and] American imperialists,” and are “mostly all left stories, because practically all the writers down here are left these days.” But when Hughes proposed publishing the stories as a book, to be titled Troubled Lands: Stories of Mexico and Cuba as Translated by Langston Hughes (Princeton University Press, 2026), his agent discouraged him from further pursuing the project and it remained unpublished, until now, with only a handful of the translations making their way into contemporary magazines. This volume presents Hughes’s translations of these stories together for the first time as he originally envisioned. Edited by Ricardo Wilson, the book also features an introduction and brief biographies of the included writers. Troubled Lands features thirty-three stories by eighteen writers, including Rafael Felipe Muñoz, Nellie Campobello, Lino Novás Calvo, Luis Felipe Rodríguez, Germán List Arzubide, Pablo de la Torriente-Brau, and Juan de la Cabada. The collection depicts Mexico in the wake of its revolution and Cuba in the years between the brutal regimes of Machado and Batista. Hughes was a noted translator of poetry, but his commitment to translating fiction is less well known. Troubled Lands provides a window into this important dimension of his work and illuminates his deep interest in Mexico and Cuba. Ricardo A. Wilson II is a creative writer and scholar. He is associate professor of English at Williams College and founder and executive director of The Outpost Foundation. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why do supposedly accountability-enhancing electoral reforms often fail in young democracies? How can legislators serve their constituents when parties control the necessary resources? Unity through Particularism: How Electoral Reforms Influence Parties and Legislative Behavior (Cambridge University Press, 2026) by Dr. Lucia Motolinia sheds light on these questions and more by explaining how parties can use personal vote-seeking incentives in order to decrease intra-party dissent. Studying a unique electoral reform in Mexico, the book provides a detailed description of how institutional incentives can conflict. It draws on a variety of rich, original data sources on legislative behavior and organization in 20 Mexican states to develop a novel explanation of how electoral reforms can amplify competing institutional incentives. In settings where legislative rules and candidate selection procedures favor parties, legislators may lack the resources necessary to build voter support. If this is the case, party leaders can condition access to these resources on loyalty to the party's political agenda. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From Aztec sun stones to satellite launches, from muralist visions to dark sky parks, Mexico's engagement with outer space is fundamental to its identity. Mexico in Space: From La Raza Cósmica to the Space Race (University of Arizona Press, 2026) offers a groundbreaking look at how the country has navigated the tensions between technological dependence and sovereign dreams. Anthropologist Anne W. Johnson reveals Mexico's unique relationship with outer space, describing Indigenous knowledge, nationalist projects, artistic visions, and community practices. Through rich ethnographic detail and historical insight, Johnson challenges the notion that space is for everyone and shows whose voices truly shape the world's cosmic futures. Johnson introduces us to satellite engineers, community astronomers, space generation youth, and artists imagining Mars, each crafting alternative cosmic futures. As space exploration increasingly becomes the domain of billionaires and superpowers, this book offers a compelling counternarrative, demonstrating how Mexican cosmic engagements suggest more just, inclusive ways of inhabiting Earth and beyond and providing vital lessons for reimagining humanity's place in the cosmos. Anne W. Johnson is a professor in the graduate program in social anthropology in the Department of Social and Political Science at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. Caleb Zakarin is the CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. He lives in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Forging a Mexican People: Collective Subjectivities in Postrevolutionary Print Culture, 1917–1968 (University of Arizona Press, 2026) shows how illustrated print culture helped to construct and deconstruct versions of “a people” in postrevolutionary Mexico. Through meticulous research, Dr. Pablo Zavala uncovers the ways photographers, graphic artists, writers, and activists used print culture to challenge hegemonic conceptions of state-guided narratives and forge alternative collective subjectivities. This book offers a fresh perspective on the sociopolitical landscape of postrevolutionary Mexico, revealing how cultural artifacts simultaneously crafted and reflected the people vis-à-vis different political and social categories. By examining print culture, editorial practices, and related processes such as the creation, consumption, and distribution of said culture, Dr. Zavala’s research contributes to scholarship that has recently reexamined the construction of nationalism by moving away from the focus on state formation and addressing the horizontal and aesthetic dimensions in products by cultural producers from nonstate and grassroots political sectors. Dr. Zavala examines the conceptual parameters of el pueblo by analyzing El Universal Ilustrado, El Machete, the Taller de Gráfica Popular, the protest graphic art used in Mexico City’s 1968 popular student movement, and graphic art used in California’s Chicano farmworkers’ struggle. Based on in-depth archival research, the work includes primary sources that have never been digitized, offering readers unique insights into the visual manifestations of Mexico’s postrevolutionary identity and their enduring significance. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mexico is among the most unique nations in the world, writes Northwestern University historian Paul Gillingham in Mexico: A 500-Year History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2025). The country has several claims to fame in this regard - one of the first to abolish slavery, North America's first Black president, North America's only Indigenous president, and its only woman president. Gillingham explains the rich, complex, often bloody, and just as often inspiring history of this place from its early sixteenth century origins, into the turn of the twenty first century. Along the way, readers learn that much of what many Americans think they know about Mexico - a place of violence, drugs, and political chaos - is actually myth. In this sweeping account of Mexican history, the resilience and fortitude of the Mexican people shine through as a major theme in this important synthetic work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Cartographies of Youth Resistance: Hip-Hop, Punk, and Urban Autonomy in Mexico (U California Press, 2020), based on a decade of ethnographic fieldwork, Maurice Magaña considers how urban and migrant youth in Oaxaca embrace subcultures from hip-hop to punk and adopt creative organizing practices to create meaningful channels of participation in local social and political life. In the process, young people remake urban space and construct new identities in ways that directly challenge elite visions of their city and essentialist notions of what it means to be indigenous in the contemporary era. Cartographies of Youth Resistance is essential reading for students and scholars interested in youth politics and culture in Mexico, social movements, urban studies, and migration. Dr. Magaña is sociocultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Mexican American studies at the university of Arizona. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law (Oxford UP, 2024) by Dr. Allison Powers offers a new history of the emergence of the United States as a global power-one shaped as much by attempts to insulate the US government from international legal scrutiny as it was by efforts to project influence across the globe. Drawing on extensive archival research in the United States, Mexico, Panama, and the United Kingdom, the book traces how thousands of dispossessed residents of US-annexed territories petitioned international Claims Commissions between the 1870s and the 1930s to charge the United States with violating international legal protections for life and property.Through attention to the consequences of their unexpected claims, Dr. Powers demonstrates how colonized subjects, refugees from slavery, and migrant workers transformed a series of tribunals designed to establish the legality of US imperial interventions into sites through which to challenge the legitimacy of US colonial governance. One of the first social histories of international law, the book argues that contests over meanings of sovereignty and state responsibility that would reshape the mid-twentieth-century international order were waged not only at diplomatic conferences, but also in Arizona copper mines, Texas cotton fields, Samoan port cities, Cuban sugar plantations, and the locks and stops of the Panama Canal.Arbitrating Empire uncovers how ordinary people used international law to hold the United States accountable for state-sanctioned violence during the decades when the nation was first becoming a global empire-and demonstrates why State Department attempts to erase their claims transformed international law in ways that continue to shield the US government from liability to this day. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Located in the Papantla municipality of the Mexican state of Veracruz, El Tajín is a UNESCO World Heritage site but a lesser-known tourist destination and national symbol. The Indigenous Totonac residents of the region know well that the site’s relative absence from discussions of global archaeology and heritage belies a century of wide-ranging labor, extractive industries, and commodity exchange.In the Shadow of El Tajín: The Political Economy of Archaeology in Modern Mexico (U Nebraska Press, 2025) tells the story of how a landscape of ancient mounds and ruins became an archaeological site, brings to light the network of actors who made it happen, and reveals the Indigenous histories silenced in the process. By drawing on the insights of Indigenous Totonac peoples who have lived and worked in El Tajín for more than a century, Sam Holley-Kline explores historical processes that made both the archaeological site and regional historical memory. In the Shadow of El Tajín decenters discussions of the state and tourism industry by focusing on the industries and workers who are integral to the functioning of the site but who have historically been overlooked by studies of the ancient past. Holley-Kline recovers local Indigenous histories in dialogue with broader trends in scholarship to demonstrate the rich recent past of El Tajín, a place better known for its ancient history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Taco (Bloomsbury, 2025) is a deep dive into the most iconic Mexican food from the perspective of a Mexico City native. In a narrative that moves from Mexico to the United States and back, Dr. Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado discusses the definition of the taco, the question of the tortilla and the taco shell, and the existence of the taco as a modern social touchstone that has been shaped by history and geography.  Challenging the idea of centrality and authenticity, in this latest addition to the Object Lessons series, Dr. Sánchez Prado shows instead that the taco is a contemporary, transcultural food that has always been subject to transformation. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Caribbean port city of Veracruz is many things. It is where the Spanish first settled and last left the colony that would go on to become Mexico. It is a destination boasting the “happiest Carnival in the world,” nightly live music, and public dancing. It is also where Blackness is an integral and celebrated part of local culture and history, but not of the individual self. In Local Color: Reckoning with Blackness in the Port City of Veracruz (University of California Press, 2025), anthropologist Karma F. Frierson follows Veracruzanos as they reckon with the Afro-Caribbean roots of their distinctive history, traditions, and culture. As residents learn to be more jarocho, or more local to Veracruz, Frierson examines how people both internalize and externalize the centrality of Blackness in their regional identity. Frierson provocatively asks readers to consider a manifestation of Mexican Blackness unconcerned with self-identification as Black in favor of the active pursuit and cultivation of a collective and regionalized Blackness. Karma F. Frierson is Assistant Professor of Black Studies at the University of Rochester. Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Migration between the United States and Mexico is often compared to the river that runs along the border: a "flow" of immigrants, a "flood" of documented and undocumented workers, a "dam" that has broken. Scholars, journalists, and novelists often tell this story from a south-to-north perspective, emphasizing Mexican migration to the United States, and the American response to the influx of people crossing its borders. In Caught in the Current, Irvin Ibargüen offers a Mexico-centered history of migration in the mid-twentieth century. Drawing on Mexican periodicals and archival sources, he explores how the Mexican state sought to manage US-bound migration. Ibargüen examines Mexico's efforts to blunt migration's impact on its economy, social order, and reputation, at times even aiming to restrict the flow of migrants. As a transnational history, the book highlights how Mexico's policies to moderate out-migration were contested by both the United States and migrants themselves, dooming them to fail. Ultimately, Caught in the Current reveals how both countries manipulated the border to impose control over a phenomenon that quickly escaped legal and political boundaries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To think through soil is to engage with some of the most critical issues of our time. In addition to its agricultural role in feeding eight billion people, soil has become the primary agent of carbon storage in global climate models, and it is crucial for biodiversity, flood control, and freshwater resources. Perhaps no other material is asked to do so much for the human environment, and yet our basic conceptual model of what soil is and how it works remains surprisingly vague. In cities, soil occupies a blurry category whose boundaries are both empirically uncertain and politically contested. Soil functions as a nexus for environmental processes through which the planet’s most fundamental material transformations occur, but conjuring what it actually is serves as a useful exercise in reframing environmental thought, design thinking, and city and regional planning toward a healthier, more ethical, and more sustainable future. Through a sustained analysis of the world’s largest wastewater agricultural system, located in the Mexico City–Mezquital hydrological region, Thinking Through Soil: Wastewater Agriculture in the Mezquital Valley (Harvard UP, 2025) by Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich & Dr. Seth Denizen imagines what a better environmental future might look like in central Mexico. More broadly, this case study offers a new image of soil that captures its shifting identity, explains its profound importance to rural and urban life, and argues for its capacity to save our planet. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Between the late 1840s and the late 1860s, the United States and Mexico had quite a bit in common. Both suffered from reactionary succession movements, both faced brutal civil wars, and both had to figure out a method of reconstructing broken nations in their aftermath. In Torn Asunder: Republican Crises and Civil Wars in the United States and Mexico, 1848-1867 (UNC Press, 2025), Colegio de Mexico history professor Erika Pani draws out these comparisons to explain the strengths, weaknesses, and possibilities of nineteenth century republican institutions. What she reveals is that, for all their different contexts and outcomes, the Mexican and American republics both buckled but did not break in very similar ways. The experiences of these governments in an era of crisis serves as a lesson in the flexibility of republican government in our own moment of global reactionary and authoritarian revolt. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chef Pyet DeSpain joins the New Books Network to discuss her new cookbook, Rooted in Fire: A Celebration of Native American and Mexican Cooking (HarperOne, 2025). Drawing from her Potawatomi and Mexican heritage, DeSpain shares recipes that connect past and present, including bison meatballs with Wojape BBQ sauce, raspberry mezcal quail, and poblano-corn tamales. Each dish reflects her effort to preserve tradition while creating something new. In this conversation, Pyet talks about growing up between two cultures and how understanding their shared roots changed her approach to food and identity. She reflects on rediscovering ancestral ingredients, the meaning of her tribe’s “keeper of the fire” role, and the importance of gratitude and ceremony in her cooking. She also speaks about the family members, chefs, friends and home cooks who inspire her to keep Native American and Mexican foodways alive, ensuring that these traditions continue to be seen, shared, and celebrated. Interview by Laura Goldberg, longtime food blogger at here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Becoming Gods: Medical Training in Mexican Hospitals (Rutgers University Press, 2021), Vania Smith-Oka follows a cohort of interns throughout their year of medical training in hospitals to understand how medical students become medical doctors. She ethnographically tracks their engagements with one another, interactions with patients, experiences with doctors, and presentations of cases to show how medical students undergo a nuanced process of accumulating knowledge and practical experience in shaping their medical selves. Smith-Oka illuminates the gendered aspects of this process, whereby the medical interns’ gender informs the kind of treatment they receive from other doctors and the kinds of possibilities they imagine for their careers and areas of medical practice. She documents the lives of the interns during which time they develop their medical selves and come to understand the tacit values of medical practice. The book is full of descriptive vignettes and ethnographic details that make it accessible to undergraduate students. It would be of interest to those in medical anthropology, hospital ethnography, medical education as well as people interested in how expertise is acquired and developed. The book examines medical interns’ transformations through ordinary and extraordinary moments, through active and passive learning where they not only acquire new knowledge but also new ways of being. Vania Smith-Oka is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. She is the Director of the Health, Humanities, and Society Program at the John J. Reilly Center. Reighan Gillam is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since the first moment of conquest, colonizers and the colonized alike in Mexico confronted questions about what it meant to be from this place, what natural resources it offered, and who had the right to control those resources and on what basis. Focusing on the ways people, environment, and policies have been affected by political boundaries, in Rooted in Place: Botany, Indigeneity, and Art in the Construction of Mexican Nature, 1570–1914 (University of Arizona Press, 2025) historian Dr. Rick A. López explores the historical connections between political identities and the natural world. Dr. López analyzes how scientific intellectuals laid claim to nature within Mexico, first on behalf of the Spanish Empire and then in the name of the republic, during three transformative moments: the Hernández expedition of the late sixteenth century; the Royal Botanical Expedition of the late eighteenth century; and the heyday of scientific societies such as the Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural of the late nineteenth century. This work traces how scientific intellectuals studied and debated what it meant to know and claim the flora that sprang from Mexican soil—ranging from individual plants to forests and vegetated landscapes—and the importance they placed on indigeneity. It also points to the short- and long-term consequences of these efforts. Dr. López draws on archival and published sources produced from the sixteenth century through the start of the twentieth century and gives special attention to the use of visual images such as scientific illustrations and landscape art. López employs the term “visualization” in recognition of the degree to which officials, botanists, and draftsmen produced imagery and also how they and others viewed nature. Rooted in Place reveals how scientific endeavors were not just about cataloging flora but were deeply intertwined with the construction of identity and the political landscape at three pivotal moments in Mexican history. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, images of cartels, security agents donning face coverings, graphs depicting egregious murder rates, and military guards at US border crossings influence the world's perception of Mexico. Mexico's so-called drug war, as generally conceived by journalists and academics, was the product of recent cartel turf wars, the end of the PRI's single party rule in 2000, and enhanced US border security measures post-9/11. These explanations are compelling, but they overlook state actions beginning in the 1970s that set the foundation for drug violence over the longer term. In Policing on Drugs: The United States, Mexico, and the Origins of the Modern Drug War, 1969-2000 (Oxford University Press, 2025), Aileen Teague chronicles a largely ignored but critical prehistory of intensified bilateral antidrug efforts by exploring their origins and inherent contradictions in Mexico. Beginning in the 1960s, US leaders externalized their aggressive domestic drug control practices by forcing junior partners such as Mexico into adopting their policies. Leaders on both sides of the border situated counternarcotics within a larger paradigm of militarized policing, which increased the power and influence of the military and aggressive counternarcotics in both countries. However, different security imperatives motivated US and Mexican agents, complicating enforcement in Mexico. Between 1969 and 2000, Mexico's embrace of America's punitive antidrug policies strengthened the coercive capacities of the Mexican state, exacerbated crime, and were so ineffective in an era of open trade blocs that they hastened the expansion of the drug trade. Drawing on such sources as records from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the US State Department, interviews with key officials, accounts from Mexican journalists, and rarely seen Mexican intelligence reports, Teague relates the war on drugs as a transnational story with deep historical roots in US and Mexican conceptions of policing and security. The negative impacts of US-led counternarcotics policies in Mexico can be attributed to the complex relationship between the United States' and Mexico's shared approach to the drug war--with critical implications for present-day relations. Aileen Teague is an Assistant Professor of International Affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. She is a former Marine Corps officer and a fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Women Who Threw Corn: Witchcraft and Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Cambridge UP, 2025) tells the stories of women from Spain, North Africa, Senegambia, and Canaries accused of sorcery in sixteenth-century Mexico for adapting native magic and healing practices. These non-native women - the mulata of Seville who cured the evil eye; the Canarian daughter of a Count who ate peyote and mixed her bath water into a man's mustard supply; the wife of a Spanish conquistador who let her hair loose and chanted to a Mesoamerican god while sweeping at midnight; the wealthy Basque woman with a tattoo of a red devil; and many others - routinely adapted Native ritual into hybrid magic and cosmology. In this episode Dr. Martin Nesvig (University of Miami) and Leah Cargin (University of Oklahoma) discuss processes of acculturation, early colonial witchcraft practices, and doing historical research at Mexico’s national archive. This episode is hosted by Leah Cargin Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Women Who Threw Corn: Witchcraft and Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Cambridge UP, 2025) by Dr. Martin Austin Nesvig tells the stories of women from Spain, North Africa, Senegambia, and Canaries accused of sorcery in sixteenth-century Mexico for adapting native magic and healing practices. These non-native women – the mulata of Seville who cured the evil eye; the Canarian daughter of a Count who ate peyote and mixed her bath water into a man's mustard supply; the wife of a Spanish conquistador who let her hair loose and chanted to a Mesoamerican god while sweeping at midnight; the wealthy Basque woman with a tattoo of a red devil; and many others – routinely adapted Native ritual into hybrid magic and cosmology. Through a radical rethinking of colonial knowledge, Dr. Nesvig uncovers a world previously left in the shadows of historical writing, revealing a fascinating and vibrant multi-ethnic community of witches, midwives, and healers. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico’s Religionero Rebellion (University of New Mexico Press, 2019), Brian A. Stauffer reconstructs the history of Mexico's forgotten "Religionero" rebellion of 1873-1877, an armed Catholic challenge to the government of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada. An essentially grassroots movement--organized by indigenous, Afro-Mexican, and mestizo parishioners in Mexico's central-western Catholic heartland--the Religionero rebellion erupted in response to a series of anticlerical measures raised to constitutional status by the Lerdo government. These "Laws of Reform" decreed the full independence of Church and state, secularized marriage and burial practices, prohibited acts of public worship, and severely curtailed the Church's ability to own and administer property. A comprehensive reconstruction of the revolt and a critical reappraisal of its significance, this book places ordinary Catholics at the center of the story of Mexico's fragmented nineteenth-century secularization and Catholic revival. Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices