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Book Review: El Mall

By Vanessa Rosales

A substantial and captivating look at Latin America's shopping mall boom.

The structures that inhabit our daily lives — our homes, businesses, churches — are often markers of the invisible forces that shape and crystallize them. But it takes a lucid and thoughtful eye to see the tangible as something also drenched in the revealing, subtle nuances of social and cultural life.

Arlene Dávila, the author of El Mall: The Spatial  and Class Politics of Shopping Malls in Latin America, has just such an eye, and she uses it to guide readers through hypermodern Latin American societies with the shopping mall set as both...

Read this article on the Americas Quarterly website. | Subscribe to AQ.

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