Bridges and Borders: A Reading Guide to U.S.–Latin American Relations
The United States and Latin America have always lived in each other’s imaginations. Sometimes as partners, sometimes as rivals, often as projects of desire. From the Monroe Doctrine to the banana trade, from exchange programs to border walls, the hemisphere’s story is one of ambition and misunderstanding — of bridges built and borders reinforced, often at the same time.
This reading guide offers a way into that long, complicated relationship. It’s meant for anyone curious about how culture, policy, and everyday life intertwine across the Americas. These books reveal not just what governments did, but how people felt about empire, progress, and belonging — and how those feelings shaped history.
(Last updated October 2025)
The Imperial Imagination
Before there was foreign policy, there was fantasy. The U.S. imagined Latin America as a testing ground for its ideals—tropical, pliable, and waiting for improvement—while Latin America saw the U.S. as both model and menace. These books explore the ideas that made empire feel inevitable.
Gilbert Joseph, Catherine LeGrand, and Ricardo Salvatore, eds., Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.–Latin American Relations (1998)
The book that redefined the field—revealing how culture and power intertwine in hemispheric history.
Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (2006)
How Latin America became the proving ground for U.S. interventions—political, military, and ideological.
Kristin Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920 (2007)
A study of how U.S. women participated in empire through consumption, turning global goods into domestic virtue.
Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (2002)
The classic argument that American culture and empire grew up together, shaping each other’s myths.
Performing the Hemisphere, Heritage, and Identity
Hemispheric friendship was never just negotiated—it was staged, curated, and performed. Fairs, films, and travel offered scripts for how the Americas should see one another. These works trace the performances that sold cooperation while concealing hierarchy.
Rosalie Schwartz, Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba (1997)
A lively look at how Cuba became the U.S.’s tropical playground—and a mirror for its desires.
Lisa L. Munro, Desire as Empire: Consuming Indigenous Identity in Transnational Imaginations (forthcoming)
Explores how Guatemala used art, film, and design to sell “Indigeneity” to the world, revealing how culture became both diplomacy and exploitation.
Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession: Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (1995)
Shows how conquest was always a performance—rituals of claiming and seeing that still echo today.
Bananas and the Business of Empire
Bananas built empires—literally. Railroads, ports, and plantations remade Central America in the image of U.S. capital. These accounts, from corporate propaganda to narrative nonfiction, show how empire traveled by freight train and steamship.
Peter Chapman, Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World (2007)
A crisp narrative history of the fruit that became a global industry and a political metaphor.
Rich Cohen, The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King (2012)
The biography of Samuel Zemurray, the hustler who personified the energy—and ruthlessness—of U.S. expansion.
Dan Koeppel, Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World (2008)
The global story of the banana’s rise and its ecological collapse, showing how monoculture and empire grow hand in hand.
Charles Kepner and Jay Soothill, The Banana Empire: A Case Study of Economic Imperialism (1935)
A remarkably early critique of United Fruit’s control of land, labor, and politics.
Stacy May and Galo Plaza, The United Fruit Company in Latin America (1958)
A company-sponsored defense that inadvertently reveals how empire justified itself in the language of “development.”
Desire, Development, and the Cold War
After World War II, the United States promised development instead of direct control. Aid programs, universities, and cultural diplomacy offered friendship wrapped in reform. These books uncover how goodwill became a foreign policy strategy.
Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (2004)
A devastating study of counterinsurgency and idealism, and how both were shaped by Cold War politics.
Shana Klein, The Fruits of Empire: Art, Food, and the Politics of Race in the Age of American Expansion (2020)
Explores how aesthetics and agriculture worked together to make empire look natural and beautiful.
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007)
Shows how neoliberalism took root in Latin America under the guise of reform, revealing economic policy as a new form of control.
Legacies and Afterlives
The story of hemispheric relations doesn’t begin or end with the Cold War. The hemispheric ties built over a century still shape migration, violence, and belonging. These works bring the story to the present, showing how the borders between public and private, love and power, remain porous in both the past and present.
Rachel Nolan, Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala (2024)
A haunting investigation of how the disappearances of Guatemala’s civil war morphed into the international adoption system.
Oscar Martínez, The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail (2013)
Firsthand reporting on the human costs of hemispheric inequality, told from the top of a train.
Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (2017)
A spare, luminous reflection on migration and bureaucracy, written from inside the U.S. immigration system.
Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (2016)
Expands our sense of empire by tracing forced labor systems that long predate modern borders
