Once every three or four years, I offer a graduate seminar called Latin American Readings. The purpose of the course is to introduce students to works that try to think about Latin America as a region: for example, Tulio Halperin Donghi's Historia contemporánea de América Latina (1969), or Shawn Miller's An Environmental History of Latin America (2007), or Luis Bértola and José Antonio Ocampo's The Economic Development of Latin America since Independence (2012). At the end of the term I ask the students to discuss how useful the concept of Latin America is for historians and whether we should continue to use it in our work. They almost always conclude that we should.
Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo appears to be on board with that. While he spends most of his new book denouncing the concept of Latin America, he concludes, somewhat surprisingly, with a chapter explaining why we should nevertheless continue to...
