Histories of Disability in Latin America

Barbara Weinstein, David Carey Jr., Heather Vrana, Bianca Premo, Paulo Drinot, Elizabeth O'Brien, Emily Xiao, K. Eliza Williamson, Adam Warren, David Carey Jr., Martha Few, Heather Vrana, Julie Minich, Heather Vrana, David Carey Jr.

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Year: 2026
• eBook ISBN:
  9781421454061
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword. The Many Threads of Disability Woven Through Latin American History
• Introduction. Disability in Latin America’s Past: An Opening
• 1 Looking at Looking: Staring at and Caring for Peru’s Youngest Mother in the World (1939)
• 2 Disability and the Heroic Creation of José Carlos Mariátegui
• 3 Border Conceptions: Anencephalic Births and Geographies of Bodily Difference in the Rio Grande Valley
• 4 Debilitating Care: Mothers and Children in the Aftermath of Zika in Brazil
• 5 Slavery, Litigation, and the Construction of Disability in Late Colonial Lima, Peru
• 6 Madness in Ecuador, 1900–1943: Indigenous People and Intellectual Impairment
• 7 Disability, Colonialism, and Gendered Illness in the Aftermath of the 1773 Guatemala Earthquake
• 8 Disability Masquerade and Wounded Combatants in Civil War El Salvador
• Afterword. With Us, Not About Us
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Index