Latin American & Caribbean History

MSU’s History Department has a flourishing program in Latin American and Caribbean History which builds on decades of tradition. The program has had a succession of internationally recognized scholars who laid the foundation of this tradition: David C. Bailey, Charles C. Cumberland, Leslie B. Rout, and David W. Walker all produced superior scholarship and trained graduate students over the second half of the twentieth century.

The faculty currently engaged in the program has grown steadily over the past few years and includes prize winning researchers and instructors. Peter M. Beattie focuses on the interaction between state institutions and the poor (both free and enslaved) in Brazil from 1850 to 1950. His cases studies in Brazilian history engage broader debates on state building, masculinity, race, national identity, sexuality, the body, and penology. Benjamin T. Smith’s research centers on the post-Revolutionary relationship between the state, religion, and indigenous movements in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. He is particularly interested in how Catholicism became a central part of indigenous identity and political mobilization to resist the growing power of a secular state in centered in Mexico City, and his new project examines the formation of popular urban social movements in the 1940s and 1950s. Erica M. Windler’s research focuses on childhood amidst the world’s largest nineteenth century urban slave population: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She examines how slavery, gender, age cohort, class, and race influenced the treatment and education of children from humble backgrounds in this fascinating tropical city.

Our Latin America and Caribbean field is supported by professors hired in fields outside the region, but whose research and teaching contribute to Latin American history. Our three professors of Chicano/Latino History were all originally trained in Mexican history. Dionicio (Dennis) Valdes began his scholarly career as a colonial Mexicanist, but he has also published extensively on Chicanos in the American Midwest with a focus on twentieth century labor history. Javier Pescador also began his career as a colonial Mexicanist; he even co-authored a text book on the subject. His research ranges from transatlantic colonial identities to contemporary Mexican American religious practice and sports. Jerry Garcia wrote his dissertation on Asian immigrants in Mexican society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but he also works on contemporary Mexican American leisure activities such as cock fighting. Finally, one of our new historians of Africa, Walter Hawthorne published a book on the supply of slaves for the international market in the Portuguese colony of Guinea Bissau, but he is currently at work on research on the slave trade from Guinea to northern Brazil in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Our students also benefit from the expertise of top ranked scholars in other fields of history: African, Comparative Black, Atlantic, Migration and World History. Moreover, MSU has more than 140 faculty affiliated with its center of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Students are encouraged to work with highly respected Latin Americanist and Caribbeanist scholars in other related disciplines such as Geography, Sociology, Anthropology, Agricultural Economics, and Political Science.

In addition to support from the History Department, students of Latin American and Caribbean history can compete for additional support for their research from other MSU units. The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) currently holds a grant from the Tinker Foundation that funds some ten summer pre-dissertation research trips. The Center for the Advanced Study of International Development (CASID) has Foreign Language Areas Studies (FLAS) fellowships that fund the study of less commonly taught languages. International Studies and Programs (ISP) offers ten $5,000.00 grants that fund pre-dissertation research in the international arena. In addition the College of Social Science and the Council of Graduate Students offer support for conference travel, dissertation research, and dissertation write up. Competitive fellowships are also available to graduate applicants as well as funding targeted to support students from underrepresented groups.

MSU's support of Latin American and Caribbean Studies is manifested in a number of vital areas. The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies is a Title VI funded area studies center that provides a venue to encourage interdisciplinary teaching and research on the region. CLACS sponsors a speaker series that brings top scholars to campus to share their research findings and enliven the campus community with arts and music of Latin America. Our Latin American bibliographer Mary Jo Zeter works to build our library holdings in Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Matrix, MSU’s award winning humanities and technology center works with CLACS on projects to preserve Latin American images, documentation, and data. The department of Spanish and Portuguese support the study of the two most spoken languages of the region, and tutors are contracted through CLACS to teach less commonly taught languages in the region, such as Haitian Kreyol.

Our graduate program, though relatively small in terms of the number of students, has had great success in placing our graduates in competitive academic posts in recent years. The small number of graduate students in the field is a benefit to our students who can look forward to working closely with their professors.