This unique reader offers an engaging collection of essays that highlight the diversity of Latin America's cultural expressions from independence to the present. Exploring such themes and events as funerals, dance and music, letters and literature, spectacles and monuments, and world's fairs and food, a group of leading historians examines the ways that a wide range of individuals with a variety of motives attempted to forge identity, turn the world upside down, mock their betters, forget their troubles through dance, express love in letters, and altogether enjoy life. Drawing on a rich array of case studies, this text introduces the complexity of motives behind and the diversity of expression of popular culture in Latin America.