Mike Davis

In the U.S. borderlands, the myth of the Chupacabra came to embody the government's war against the welfare state and rising anti-immigration sentiment.

The historian Mike Davis described the Chupacabra phenomenon in California as a byproduct of the increasingly hostile environment for migrants and the violence that the state was imposing on them.

Quoting Calvoquiros here, at a base level, monsters and the phantasmagoric allow for the out-of-this-world atrocious experiences in daily life to become a collective spectacle that comes to represent the social relations and realities imposed over the community.

Therefore, as a collective entity, Chupacabras calls attention to the atrocities experienced by small farmers and those at the vulnerable and peripheral edges of society.

And so I think that's one of the books that's most extraordinary in both having focused studies of local people, working people, but in this global capitalist, global imperial context.

And then, you know, another book that I have to mention is Mike Davis's Prisoners of the American Dream, a really sweeping take on U.S. labor history in relation to war, in relation to comparison and connection.

to Europe and Latin America and other sites, a really sort of bold essayistic take.

And even that title, Prisoners of the American Dream, sort of the tensions that are within it, the unsettled questions that are within it.

And.

Mike Davis has articulated this so beautifully in late Victorian holocausts of just the sheer number of South Asians that died as a direct result of man-made famines in El Nino cycles where there was huge decrease in crop productivity but the British Empire needed its crops and so the priority went to the metropole and so millions of South Asians starved and I think that's so relevant in this current moment in 2026 because we're living through a super El Nino.

In fact, I've heard some climate scientists say it's not even really appropriate to call it a super El Nino because what we're in is truly has no historical precedent, is so extreme that it can't be directly compared to.

And you know, a lot of people are almost certainly going to die as a direct result of both that super El Nino and also the imperialist war the United States is waging and Israel is waging against Iran.

right that's where i learned that bookworms are a real oh yeah that's where a bookworm in your head i was like oh yeah there's always a cartoon worm eating through a book and it's no there were you would find worms and papyrus and they would chew through the book and then the book doesn't exist anymore that's crazy so yeah that's a real thing

yeah and then um you know i feel like uh I'm a little biased because being an L.A. guy, but Mike Davis.

Okay.

He made Garfield.

And so I think that's one of the books that's most extraordinary in both having focused studies of local people, working people, but in this global capitalist, global imperial context.

And then, you know, another book that I have to mention is Mike Davis's Prisoners of the American Dream, a really sweeping take on US labor history in relation to war, in relation to comparison and connection.

to Europe and Latin America and other sites, a really sort of bold essayistic take.

And even that title, Prisoners of the American Dream, sort of the tensions that are within it, the unsettled questions that are within it.