For most Westerners, Latin America is the junior partner of the New World, an underdeveloped sibling to the United States and Canada. In his provocative and powerful book, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera shows how Latin America and its people are making their presence felt across the world by upsetting long-standing political and economic assumptions and orthodoxies. The United States will still occupy center stage in the West for the time being, but few observers have taken notice of the rapid growth of Spanish language and culture within the United States—which is quietly and quickly becoming part of Latin America in its own way. Guardiola-Rivera’s stimulating work is equally a hidden history of the modern world (the silver peso was the first global currency) and a piercing look at the future.
