Overview

Reframing disability, power, and identity in Latin America's complex histories. Histories of Disability in Latin America offers a sweeping reexamination of disability's place in the region's past, bringing together original scholarship by historians and anthropologists to illuminate how bodies, minds, and the concept of difference have been understood across centuries of Latin American history. Edited by Heather Vrana and David Carey Jr., this volume foregrounds the lived experiences, agency, and social meanings of disability in a region too often marginalized in global disability studies. With contributions and case studies based on archival and ethnographic research, the book illustrates how colonialism, slavery, war, industrialization, imperialism, and revolution have generated both disability and distinctive conceptions of disability. Rather than applying rigid Western frameworks, contributors examine Indigenous and Afro–Latin American terminologies and epistemologies to explore how societies have made sense of bodily difference, care, and capacity. In doing so, they critically engage medicalized and deficit-based interpretations that have long dominated historical and scholarly narratives. This collection shifts the center of inquiry to Latin America, interrogates presentist assumptions, and reconsiders the historical emergence of disability through the prisms of race, class, gender, and power. Histories of Disability in Latin America engages and expands key debates in both disability studies and Latin American historiography. This book invites readers to rethink what disability has meant—and continues to mean—across time and place. It is essential reading for those interested in the entanglements of embodiment, identity, and the historical forces that have shaped life in the Americas.

Full Product Details

Author:   Heather Vrana (814 NW 17th Ave) ,  David Carey, Jr.
Publisher:   Johns Hopkins University Press
Imprint:   Johns Hopkins University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.10cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.440kg
ISBN:  

9781421454054

ISBN 10:   142145405
Pages:   312
Publication Date:   03 March 2026
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

Foreword. The Many Threads of Disability Woven Through Latin American History Barbara Weinstein Introduction. Disability in Latin America's Past: An Opening David Carey Jr. and Heather Vrana Chapter 1. Looking at Looking: Staring at and Caring for Peru's Youngest Mother in the World (1939) Bianca Premo Chapter 2. Disability and the Heroic Creation of José Carlos Mariátegui Paulo Drinot Chapter 3. Border Conceptions: Anencephalic Births and Geographies of Bodily Difference in the Rio Grande Valley Emily Xiao and Elizabeth O'Brien Chapter 4. Debilitating Care: Mothers and Children in the Aftermath of Zika in Brazil K. Eliza Williamson Chapter 5. Slavery, Litigation, and the Construction of Disability in Late Colonial Lima, Peru Adam Warren Chapter 6. Madness in Ecuador, 1900–1943: Indigenous People and Intellectual Impairment David Carey Jr. Chapter 7. Disability, Colonialism, and Gendered Illness in the Aftermath of the 1773 Guatemala Earthquake Martha Few Chapter 8. Disability Masquerade and Wounded Combatants in Civil War El Salvador Heather Vrana Afterword. With Us, Not About Us Julie Avril Minich Acknowledgments Contributors Index

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Author Information

Heather Vrana is an associate professor of modern Latin America at the University of Florida. She is the author of This City Belongs to You: A History of Student Activism in Guatemala, 1944-1996, and a coeditor of Out of the Shadow: Revisiting the Revolution from Post-Peace Guatemala. David Carey Jr. is the Doehler Chair in History at Loyola University Maryland. He is the author of Health in the Highlands: Indigenous Healing and Scientific Medicine in Guatemala and Ecuador and Oral History in Latin America: Unlocking the Spoken Archive, among other books.

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