Placing Latin America: Contemporary Themes in Human Geography (review)

S tudying Latin America can seem like a fatalistic endeavor, with the heavy burden of structural legacies weighing down on progress and change. In Placing Latin America, Edward Jackiewicz and Fernando Bosco have assembled a volume that not only addresses the stifling effects of these legacies but also, and more importantly, highlights the role of human agency in exploiting the spaces made available to local actors as they stimulate change. As the editors rightfully claim, the underlying themes throughout the work are the seemingly contradictory, and yet related, concepts of continuity and change.

The 14 chapters bring together an impressive collection of submissions from established Latin American geographers and fresh faces as well. Conceived as a thematic textbook, it diverges from the traditional pattern of focusing on general themes with interspersed case studies. Instead, the submissions present more specific topics with general themes developed in the process. While this style takes a little adjusting to, it does provide an exciting way to cover the human geography of Latin America in the classroom. For example, Kent Mathewson’s contribution focuses on psychoactive drug production, processing, and trafficking as both a way of exploring this specific issue and covering the historical legacy of Latin American agriculture as a source of luxury crops for the global North. While the same can be done with bananas, I doubt it would be as effective in capturing the attention and imagination of students.

The beginning half of the textbook deals more with continuity than change. In the first chapter, Edward Jackiewicz and Linda Quiquivix provide a clear and concise historical and geographical coverage of Latin America’s political economy. From colonial mercantilism to post-independence liberalism, followed by state-sponsored import-substitution and the contemporary shift to neoliberalism, it exhibits the cyclical nature of political economy. While some may concede to the triumph of neoliberalism, they suggest that it, too, will be replaced in due time. And, according to Thomas Klak in the following chapter, this change had better come sooner rather than later. Arguing that neoliberalism has resulted in coerced trade and increased dependency through the application of unequal economic and political power, Klak believes it has hindered sustainable development by supplanting local and national needs with global interests. The few niches left open for Latin American countries (particularly Caribbean and Central American ones) create intraregional competition in the “race to the bottom” of common parlance. The result is service and remittance economies, with the primary export being labor.

John Davenport and Edward Jackiewicz highlight one such example of a resultant service economy in their chapter called “Spaces of Tourism.” While summarizing several typologies of tourism, they argue that tourism needs to be better managed in order to increase benefits for local stakeholders, rather than the present situation in which much of the profits leak off shore. In relation, Thomas Klak and Ross Flynn elaborate on ecotourism as a possible avenue for sustainable development, using the case study of Dominica’s relative success. Lacking the typical mass tourism characteristics of picture-perfect sandy beaches and direct air service to major markets, and experiencing less sun and more rain due to its physical geography, Dominica has been left to focus on small-scale ecotourism to stimulate sustainable development on the island.

Several chapters deal with urban issues, balancing continuity with change. Larry Ford goes beyond his classic model of urban form with the observation that Latin American cities, once on the avant-garde of architectural design and urban planning, have fallen behind advances in other world regions. Instead of moving forward, urban areas in Latin America are left preserving an imported architectural history and dealing with the problems of unplanned squatter settlements. Adrian Aguilar and Antonio Vieyra’s chapter includes the continuity of rural-to-urban migration and urban primacy, but begins to focus on change as neoliberal policies have led to urban deconcentration due to altered labor markets. These arguments are advanced by Altha Cravey’s chapter...