Comprehensive and interdisciplinary, this thoroughly updated and revised second edition is an engaging critical analysis of the major political, economic, social, and ecological conditions in Latin America and the Caribbean. Genuinely regional in scope, this textbook examines the hemispheric and global context of these conditions as well as the relations among Latin American and Caribbean states and their relations with the United States. Expert contributors describe and analyze the economies and trading relations, politics and state policies, social inequalities and social injustices, indigenous communities, gender relations, influence of religion, wide array of social movements, and social ecology of the societies in this important region of the world. Harris and Nef have assembled a valuable resource for undergraduate and graduate courses and all readers concerned with understanding the past, present, and future development of contemporary Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Americas as a whole.