Friedrich Katz Prize Recipients
The Friedrich Katz Prize is awarded annually to the best book published in English focusing on Latin America, including the Caribbean. Awarded for the first time in 2014, the prize honors honors Friedrich Katz, an Austrian-born specialist in Latin American history, whose nearly 50-year career inspired dozens of students and colleagues in the field.
2020
Marixa Lasso, Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal (Harvard Univ. Press)
2019
Michel Gobat, Empire by Invitation: William Walker and Manifest Destiny in Central America (Harvard Univ. Press)
2018
Lisa Sousa, The Woman Who Turned Into a Jaguar, and Other Narratives of Native Women in Archives of Colonial Mexico (Stanford Univ. Press)
2017
Jane Mangan, Transatlantic Obligations: Creating the Bonds of Family in Conquest-Era Peru and Spain (Oxford Univ. Press)
2016
Edward Beatty, Technology and the Search for Progress in Modern Mexico (Univ. of California Press)
2015
Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge Univ. Press)
2014
Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976-1991 (Univ. of North Carolina Press)
2020 Katz Prize
Marixa Lasso, Ministerio de Cultura de Panamá
Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal (Harvard Univ. Press)
Marixa Lasso’s Erased is subversive history at its best. Engaging specialists and nonspecialists alike, Lasso carefully examines how US officials (with Panamanian authorities’ complicity) destroyed dynamic, bustling, mercantile communities in the canal zone and replaced them with segregated, sterile towns modeled on a projection of tropical wilderness. Poignant narration and pointed analysis, based on an array of oral and written sources and the author’s own experiences, bring alive a lost world of global cosmopolitanism, Black republicanism, and Latin American modernity in the isthmus of Panamá.