What if Latin America Ruled the World?
How the South Will Take the North Through the 21st Century
By Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
September 2010
$30.00
480 pp
6.125 x 9.25 in
Hardcover
By Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
An eye-opening tour of Latin America past and present-and a persuasive argument that the region will lead the rest of the world into the future.
For too many of us, Latin America exists "below the fold," an echo barely heard beyond the roar of U.S. economics, politics, and culture; the source of little more than dance steps, mesmerizing soccer, spicy food, and questionable politics.
But Latin America has been a vital part of the global community since the seventeenth century, when the Spanish silver peso became the world's first global currency instrument. Today it is home to six hundred million people and some of the fastest-growing economies on the planet. Latin America may not outshine or outspend the United States on the world stage anytime soon, but its voices will be heard. Its consumers, resources, and emigrants are already affecting us; they will be even bigger factors in our future.
What if Latin America Ruled the World? deftly braids together the histories of North and South America from the exploits of Hernán Cortés to the political showmanship of Hugo Chávezand Evo Morales. Scholar Oscar Guardiola-Rivera is an ideal guide for a searching portrait of the Latin America that we rarely hear about.
Reviews for What if Latin America Ruled the World?:
As the Great Recession rolled across the globe in 2008, the economies of Latin America proved unexpectedly resilient--a happy occurrence that legal scholar Guardiola-Rivera credits to the majority of Latin American societies veering away from the neoliberal paradigm and the shadow of the empire to the north. Guardiola-Rivera puts this remarkable trend among Latin American countries--a category into which the U.S. is destined for inclusion, with its projected Latino majority by 2040--into the historical context of enduring pre-Columbian values and popular resistance to imperialism among the dispossessed of North and South America (indigenous peoples and African slaves disproportionately among them).The nuanced narrative, while sometimes too theoretically subtle, links broad and localized struggles to current issues of global justice. Such key episodes as the Spanish conquest of Incan society, the multiethnic alliances of slave revolts in England's North American colonies, and the worker-farmer alliances in Bolivia's recent water wars highlight the ongoing clash of human and social values that attend globalization in the Americas. (Oct.)—Publishers Weekly, starred review.
