What If Latin America Ruled the World? How the South Will Take the North Through the 21st Century

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.)