In this follow up to his book, The Rule of Racialization—which considered the way class structure is formed in the U.S.—Steve Martinot now examines how the structures of racialization reside at the core of all social, cultural, and political institutions in the U.S. In The Machinery of Whiteness, Martinot examines how race and racism are produced in the United States, analyzing the politics of racialization, and the preponderance of racial segregation and racial deprivation that have kept the U.S. a white dominated society throughout its history. Martinot dedicates this work to expunging white supremacy from the earth.
The Machinery of Whiteness investigates how “whiteness” came to be as foundational to the process that then produced the modern concept of race. Martinot addresses the instrumentalization of women as a necessary step in its formation, furthering the debates regarding the relationships of race and gender. And he addresses U.S. international interventionism, the anti-immigrant movements, and white racist populism to describe the political forms that white supremacy takes.
Martinot puts these together to analyze the underlying cultural structures of racialization that have driven and conditioned the resurgence of white supremacy and white entitlement in the wake of the Civil Rights movements. This book is a call to transform the cultural structures of the U.S. to make justice and democracy, which depend on inclusion and not segregation, possible.
This remarkable account of gays in Cuba links the treatment of male homosexuality under Castro with prejudices and preconceptions prevalent in Cuban society before the Revolution. Ian Lumsden argues that much of the present discussion does not acknowledge the significant improvements that have occurred in the last decade. As an antidote to what he considers wide-spread misinformation, Lumsden locates the current issues surrounding homosexual identity within the broad context of Cuban culture, history, and social policy and makes revealing comparisons to the experience of homosexuals in other Latin American countries.
Lumsden explores the historic roots of the oppression of homosexuals through such issues as race, religion, and gender. He considers the cultural history and current erosion of traditional "machismo," the correlation between traditional women's roles and the relationships between gay men, and homosexuality as defined by the law and as presented in typical sexual education. He addresses the international controversy over state-imposed sanatoriums for HIV/AIDS patients, and details the social scene, the varying ideals among different generations of gay Cubans, gay life and family ties, and the difference between being publicly and privately gay in Cuba.
Lumsden's involvement over the years in gay culture in Cuba, his interviews with gay Cuban men, and his formidable scholarship produce a strikingly honest, accurate portrayal of the changes in homosexual life.
Based on more than a decade of research, Making a Global Immigrant Neighborhood charts the evolution of Sunset Park--with a densely concentrated working-poor and racially diverse immigrant population--from the late 1960s to its current status as one of New York City's most vibrant neighborhoods.
Tarry Hum shows how processes of globalization, such as shifts in low-wage labor markets and immigration patterns, shaped the neighborhood. She explains why Sunset Park's future now depends on Asian and Latino immigrant collaborations in advancing common interests in community building, civic engagement, entrepreneurialism, and sustainability planning. She shows, too, how residents' responses to urban development policies and projects and the capital represented by local institutions and banks foster community activism.
Hum pays close attention to the complex social, political, and spatial dynamics that forge a community and create new models of leadership as well as coalitions. The evolution of Sunset Park so astutely depicted in this book suggests new avenues for studying urban change and community development.
Making a Promised Land examines the interconnected histories of African American representation, urban life, and citizenship as documented in still and moving images of Harlem over the last century. Paula J. Massood analyzes how photography and film have been used over time to make African American culture visible to itself and to a wider audience and charts the ways in which the “Mecca of the New Negro” became a battleground in the struggle to define American politics, aesthetics, and citizenship. Visual media were first used as tools for uplift and education. With Harlem’s downturn in fortunes through the 1930s, narratives of black urban criminality became common in sociological tracts, photojournalism, and film. These narratives were particularly embodied in the gangster film, which was adapted to include stories of achievement, economic success, and, later in the century, a nostalgic return to the past. Among the films discussed are Fights of Nations (1907), Dark Manhattan (1937), The Cool World (1963), Black Caesar (1974), Malcolm X (1992), and American Gangster (2007). Massood asserts that the history of photography and film in Harlem provides the keys to understanding the neighborhood’s symbolic resonance in African American and American life, especially in light of recent urban redevelopment that has redefined many of its physical and demographic contours.
Contributors. William Aal, Allan Bérubé, Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Dalton Conley, Troy Duster, Ruth Frankenberg, John Hartigan Jr., Eric Klinenberg, Eric Lott, Irene J. Nexica, Michael Omi, Jasbir Kaur Puar, Mab Segrest, Vron Ware, Howard Winant, Matt Wray
Americans have access to some of the best science education in the world, but too often black students are excluded from these opportunities. This essential book by leading voices in the field of education reform offers an inspiring vision of how America’s universities can guide a new generation of African Americans to success in science.
Educators, research scientists, and college administrators have all called for a new commitment to diversity in the sciences, but most universities struggle to truly support black students in these fields. Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are different, though. Marybeth Gasman, widely celebrated as an education-reform visionary, and Thai-Huy Nguyen show that many HBCUs have proven adept at helping their students achieve in the sciences. There is a lot we can learn from these exemplary schools.
Gasman and Nguyen explore ten innovative schools that have increased the number of black students studying science and improved those students’ performance. Educators on these campuses have a keen sense of their students’ backgrounds and circumstances, familiarity that helps their science departments avoid the high rates of attrition that plague departments elsewhere. The most effective science programs at HBCUs emphasize teaching when considering whom to hire and promote, encourage students to collaborate rather than compete, and offer more opportunities for black students to find role models among both professors and peers.
Making Black Scientists reveals the secrets to these institutions’ striking successes and shows how other colleges and universities can follow their lead. The result is a bold new agenda for institutions that want to better serve African American students.
Havana is a city that rarely fails to captivate. But much of the unique beauty and culture of this historic city is rapidly disappearing. As Cuban society finds itself at a crossroads, Havana is more than ever a city on the edge, for although frozen in time as a consequence of Fidel Castro’s revolution, it has certainly not been well preserved. Time, climate, and neglect have eroded a rare architectural legacy, making the need to document this heritage even more pressing than ever before.
Making Home in Havana is an elegant book of photographs and testimonies, recording, questioning, and evoking the meaning of place — in particular, the meaning of home. The combination of fine photography and the words of residents of former palaces, humble apartments, and other dwellings offer us an irresistible portrait of Havana that might otherwise be lost forever.Out of the “lemons” handed to Mexican American workers in Corona, California--low pay, segregated schooling, inadequate housing, and racial discrimination--Mexican men and women made “lemonade” by transforming leisure spaces such as baseball games, parades, festivals, and churches into politicized spaces where workers voiced their grievances, debated strategies for advancement, and built solidarity. Using oral history interviews, extensive citrus company records, and his own experiences in Corona, José Alamillo argues that Mexican Americans helped lay the groundwork for civil rights struggles and electoral campaigns in the post-World War II era.
The Making of Chicana/o Studies traces the philosophy and historical development of the field of Chicana/o studies from precursor movements to the Civil Rights era to today, focusing its lens on the political machinations in higher education that sought to destroy the discipline. As a renowned leader, activist, scholar, and founding member of the movement to establish this curriculum in the California State University system, which serves as a model for the rest of the country, Rodolfo F. Acuña has, for more than forty years, battled the trend in academia to deprive this group of its academic presence.
The book assesses the development of Chicana/o studies (an area of studies that has even more value today than at its inception)--myths about its epistemological foundations have remained uncontested. Acuña sets the record straight, challenging those in the academy who would fold the discipline into Latino studies, shadow it under the dubious umbrella of ethnic studies, or eliminate it altogether.
Building the largest Chicana/o studies program in the nation was no easy feat, especially in an atmosphere of academic contention. In this remarkable account, Acuña reveals how California State University, Northridge, was instrumental in developing an area of study that offers more than 166 sections per semester, taught by 26 tenured and 45 part-time instructors. He provides vignettes of successful programs across the country and offers contemporary educators and students a game plan--the mechanics for creating a successful Chicana/o studies discipline--and a comprehensive index of current Chicana/o studies programs nationwide.
Latinas/os, of which Mexican Americans are nearly seventy percent, comprise a complex sector of society projected to be just shy of thirty percent of the nation's population by 2050. The Making of Chicana/o Studies identifies what went wrong in the history of Chicana/o studies and offers tangible solutions for the future.
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2023
Large numbers of Latino migrants began to arrive in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the 1950s. They joined a small but established Spanish-speaking community of people from Texas, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. Delia Fernández-Jones merges storytelling with historical analysis to recapture the placemaking practices that these Mexicans, Tejanos, and Puerto Ricans used to create a new home for themselves. Faced with entrenched white racism and hostility, Latinos of different backgrounds formed powerful relationships to better secure material needs like houses and jobs and to recreate community cultural practices. Their pan-Latino solidarity crossed ethnic and racial boundaries and shaped activist efforts that emphasized working within the system to advocate for social change. In time, this interethnic Latino alliance exploited cracks in both overt and structural racism and attracted white and Black partners to fight for equality in social welfare programs, policing, and education.
Groundbreaking and revelatory, Making the MexiRican City details how disparate Latino communities came together to respond to social, racial, and economic challenges.
Mal Goode (1908–1995) became network news’s first African American correspondent when ABC News hired him in 1962. Raised in Homestead and Pittsburgh, he worked in the mills, graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, and went on to become a journalist for the Pittsburgh Courier and later for local radio. With his basso profundo voice resonating on the airwaves, Goode challenged the police, politicians, and segregation, while providing Black listeners a voice that captured their experience. Race prevented him from breaking into television until Jackie Robinson dared ABC to give him a chance. Goode was uncompromising in his belief that network news needed Black voices and perspectives if it were to authentically reflect the nation’s complexities. His success at ABC initiated the slow integration of network news. Goode’s life and work are remarkable in their own right, but his struggles and achievements also speak to larger issues of American life and the African American experience.
Pinho explores how Bahian cultural production influences and is influenced by black diasporic cultures and the idealization of Africa—to the extent that Bahia draws African American tourists wanting to learn about their heritage. Analyzing the conceptions of blackness produced by the blocos afro, she describes how Africa is re-inscribed on the body through clothes, hairstyles, and jewelry; once demeaned, blackness is reclaimed as a source of beauty and pride. Turning to the body’s interior, Pinho explains that the myth of Mama Africa implies that black appearances have corresponding black essences. Musical and dance abilities are seen as naturally belonging to black people, and these traits are often believed to be transmitted by blood. Pinho argues that such essentialized ideas of blackness render black culture increasingly vulnerable to exploitation by the state and commercial interests. She contends that the myth of Mama Africa, while informing oppositional black identities, overlaps with a constraining notion of Bahianness promoted by the government and the tourist industry.
"In this insightful analysis of representations of mammy, Wallace-Sanders skillfully illustrates how this core icon of Black womanhood has figured prominently in upholding hierarchies of race, gender, and class in the United States. Far from being a timeless, natural, benign image of domesticity, the idealized mammy figure was repeatedly reworked to accommodate varying configurations of racial rule. No one reading this book will be able to see Gone with the Wind in the same way ever again."
---Patricia Hill Collins, University of Maryland
"Kimberly Wallace-Sanders' interdisciplinary approach is first-rate. This expansive and engaging book should appeal to students and scholars in American studies, African American studies, and women's studies."
---Thadious Davis, The University of Pennsylvania
Her cheerful smile and bright eyes gaze out from the covers of old cookbooks, song sheets, syrup bottles, salt and pepper shakers, and cookie jars, and she has long been a prominent figure in fiction, film, television, and folk art. She is Mammy, a figure whose provocative hold on the American psyche has persisted since before the Civil War.
But who is Mammy, and where did she come from? Her large, dark body and her round smiling face tower over our imaginations to such an extent that more accurate representations of African American women wither in her shadow. Mammy's stereotypical attributes---a sonorous and soothing voice, raucous laugh, infinite patience, self-deprecating wit, and implicit acceptance of her own inferiority and her devotion to white children---all point to a long-lasting and troubled confluence of racism, sexism, and southern nostalgia.
This groundbreaking book traces the mammy figure and what it has symbolized at various historical moments that are linked to phases in America's racial consciousness. The author shows how representations of Mammy have loomed over the American literary and cultural imagination, an influence so pervasive that only a comprehensive and integrated approach of this kind can do it justice.
The book's many illustrations trace representations of the mammy figure from the nineteenth century to the present, as she has been depicted in advertising, book illustrations, kitchen figurines, and dolls. The author also surveys the rich and previously unmined history of the responses of African American artists to the black mammy stereotype, including contemporary reframings by artists Betye Saar, Michael Ray Charles, and Joyce Scott.
Kimberly Wallace-Sanders is Associate Professor of the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts and Women's Studies at Emory University. She is editor of Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture.
2020 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) Book Award Winner
Honorable Mention, Ramirez Family Award for Most Significant Scholarly Book, Texas Institute of Letters, 2019
Managed Migrations examines the concurrent development of a border agricultural industry and changing methods of border enforcement in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas during the past century.
Needed at one moment, scorned at others, Mexican agricultural workers have moved back and forth across the US–Mexico border for the past century. In South Texas, Anglo growers’ dreams of creating a modern agricultural empire depended on continuous access to Mexican workers. While this access was officially regulated by immigration laws and policy promulgated in Washington, DC, in practice the migration of Mexican labor involved daily, on-the-ground negotiations among growers, workers, and the US Border Patrol. In a very real sense, these groups set the parameters of border enforcement policy.
Managed Migrations examines the relationship between immigration laws and policy and the agricultural labor relations of growers and workers in South Texas and El Paso during the 1940s and 1950s. Cristina Salinas argues that immigration law was mainly enacted not in embassies or the halls of Congress but on the ground, as a result of daily decisions by the Border Patrol that growers and workers negotiated and contested. She describes how the INS devised techniques to facilitate high-volume yearly deportations and shows how the agency used these enforcement practices to manage the seasonal agricultural labor migration across the border. Her pioneering research reveals the great extent to which immigration policy was made at the local level, as well as the agency of Mexican farmworkers who managed to maintain their mobility and kinship networks despite the constraints of grower paternalism and enforcement actions by the Border Patrol.
In Managing Motherhood, Managing Risk, Denise Roth Allen persuasively argues that development interventions in the Third World often have unintended and unacknowledged consequences. Based on twenty-two months of fieldwork in the Shinyanga Region of west central Tanzania, this rich and engaging ethnography of women's fertility-related experiences highlights the processes by which a set of seemingly well-intentioned international maternal health policy recommendations go awry when implemented at the local level.
An exploration of how threats to maternal health have been defined and addressed at the global, national, and local levels, Managing Motherhood, Managing Risk presents two contrasting, and oftentimes competing, definitions of risk: those that form the basis of international recommendations and national maternal health policies and those that do not. The effect that these contrasting definitions of risk have on women's fertility-related experiences at the local level are explored throughout the book.
This study employs an innovative approach to the analysis of maternal health risk, one that situates rural Tanzanian women's fertility-related experiences within a broader historical and sociocultural context. Beginning with an examination of how maternal health risk was defined and addressed during the early years of British colonial rule in Tanganyika and moving to a discussion of an internationally conceived maternal health initiative that was launched on the world stage in the late 1980s, the author explores the similarities in the language used and solutions proposed by health development experts over time.
This set of "official" maternal health risks is then compared to an alternative set of risks that emerge when attention is focused on women's experiences of pregnancy and childbirth at the local level. Although some of these latter risks are often spoken about as deriving from spiritual or supernatural causes, the case studies presented throughout the second half of the book reveal that the concept of risk in the context of pregnancy and childbirth is much more complex, involving the interplay of spiritual, physical, and economic aspects of everyday life.
An important investigation of hip hop as a movement of racial consciousness, Manifest Technique shows how the genre has inspired Filipino Americans to envision and enact new ideas of their bodies, their history, and their dignity.
The Before Columbus Foundation 2018 Winner of the AMERICAN BOOK AWARD
Tommy J. Curry’s provocative book The Man-Not is a justification for Black Male Studies. He posits that we should conceptualize the Black male as a victim, oppressed by his sex. The Man-Not, therefore,is a corrective of sorts, offering a concept of Black males that could challenge the existing accounts of Black men and boys desiring the power of white men who oppress them that has been proliferated throughout academic research across disciplines.
Curry argues that Black men struggle with death and suicide, as well as abuse and rape, and their genred existence deserves study and theorization. This book offers intellectual, historical, sociological, and psychological evidence that the analysis of patriarchy offered by mainstream feminism (including Black feminism) does not yet fully understand the role that homoeroticism, sexual violence, and vulnerability play in the deaths and lives of Black males. Curry challenges how we think of and perceive the conditions that actually affect all Black males.
Today most Americans, black and white, identify slavery with cotton, the deep South, and the African-American church. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, after almost two hundred years of African-American life in mainland North America, few slaves grew cotton, lived in the deep South, or embraced Christianity. Many Thousands Gone traces the evolution of black society from the first arrivals in the early seventeenth century through the Revolution. In telling their story, Ira Berlin, a leading historian of southern and African-American life, reintegrates slaves into the history of the American working class and into the tapestry of our nation.
Laboring as field hands on tobacco and rice plantations, as skilled artisans in port cities, or soldiers along the frontier, generation after generation of African Americans struggled to create a world of their own in circumstances not of their own making. In a panoramic view that stretches from the North to the Chesapeake Bay and Carolina lowcountry to the Mississippi Valley, Many Thousands Gone reveals the diverse forms that slavery and freedom assumed before cotton was king. We witness the transformation that occurred as the first generations of creole slaves—who worked alongside their owners, free blacks, and indentured whites—gave way to the plantation generations, whose back-breaking labor was the sole engine of their society and whose physical and linguistic isolation sustained African traditions on American soil.
As the nature of the slaves’ labor changed with place and time, so did the relationship between slave and master, and between slave and society. In this fresh and vivid interpretation, Berlin demonstrates that the meaning of slavery and of race itself was continually renegotiated and redefined, as the nation lurched toward political and economic independence and grappled with the Enlightenment ideals that had inspired its birth.
"How do we apply Chairman Mao's Thought to get fat pigs?" Squad Leader Ho (who knew the most about pigs) replied that, according to Chairman Mao, one must investigate the problem fully from all sides, and then integrate practice and theory. Ho concluded that the reason for our skinny pigs had to be found in one of three areas: the relationship between the pigs and their natural environment (excluding man); the relationship between the cadres and the pigs; and the relationship among the pigs themselves.
And so the city slickers, sent down to the countryside for political reeducation, set out to find the Thousand-Dollar Pig, much to the bemusement of the local peasants.
The sixteen stories collected in this remarkable book give firsthand accounts of daily life in contemporary China. From 250 interviews conducted in Hong Kong between 1972 and 1976, Mr. Frolic has created charming vignettes that show how individuals from all parts of China led their lives in the midst of rapid social change and political unrest. We hear about oil prospectors, rubber growers, and factory workers, Widow Wang and her sit-in to get a larger apartment, the thoroughly corrupt Man Who Loved Dog Meat, the young people who flew kites to protest antidemocratic tendencies.
As fresh and original as the individual accounts are, common and timeless themes emerge: the sluggishness of an agrarian society in responding to modernization; the painful lack of resources in a poor and gigantic country; the constraints imposed on common people by the bureaucracy; the way in which individuals outwardly support the system and inwardly resist it; the limitations of heavy and conflicting doses of ideology in motivating individuals.
But there are also recurrent motifs of economic and social progress: production rises, illiteracy declines, and socialist values have impact. A new China has emerged, though change is occurring far more slowly than its leaders had intended.
Mao's People contains much new information on China both for the general reader and for specialists in the field. Above all, it is a completely engrossing and vivid glimpse into the ways of a nation we are only beginning to discover.
The first international anthology to explore women’s human rights from a literary perspective.
More than half a century after the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, women throughout the world still struggle for social and political justice. Many fight back with the only tools of resistance they possess—words. A Map of Hope presents a collection of 77 extraordinary literary works documenting the ways women writers have spoken out about human rights issues.
Writers young and old, known and unknown, explore the dimensions of terror, the unspeakable atrocities of war, and the possibilities of resistance and refusal against all odds. Their poems, essays, memoirs, and brief histories examine issues that affect the condition of women in war, prison camps, exile, and as victims of domestic and political violence.
A Map of Hope presents diverse women writers who have created a literature of global consciousness and justice. Their works give a face, an image, and a human dimension to the dehumanization of human rights violations. The collection allows readers to hear voices that have decided to make a difference. It goes beyond geography and ethnic groups; writers from around the globe are united by the universal dimensions of horror and deprivation, as well as the unique common struggle for justice and solidarity.
Examining how the development of a deterritorialized network of black cultural nationalists became aligned with a lucrative late-twentieth-century roots heritage market, Clarke explores the dynamics of Òyótúnjí Village’s religious and tourist economy. She discusses how the community generates income through the sale of prophetic divinatory consultations, African market souvenirs—such as cloth, books, candles, and carvings—and fees for community-based tours and dining services. Clarke accompanied Òyótúnjí villagers to Nigeria, and she describes how these heritage travelers often returned home feeling that despite the separation of their ancestors from Africa as a result of transatlantic slavery, they—more than the Nigerian Yorùbá—are the true claimants to the ancestral history of the Great Òyó Empire of the Yorùbá people. Mapping Yorùbá Networks is a unique look at the political economy of homeland identification and the transnational construction and legitimization of ideas such as authenticity, ancestry, blackness, and tradition.
Marcha is a multidisciplinary survey of the individuals, organizations, and institutions that have given shape and power to the contemporary immigrant rights movement in Chicago. A city with longstanding historic ties to immigrant activism, Chicago has been the scene of a precedent-setting immigrant rights mobilization in 2006 and subsequent mobilizations in 2007 and 2008.
Positing Chicago as a microcosm of the immigrant rights movement on national level, these essays plumb an extraordinarily rich set of data regarding recent immigrant rights activities, defining the cause as not just a local quest for citizenship rights, but a panethnic, transnational movement. The result is a timely volume likely to provoke debate and advance the national conversation about immigration in innovative ways.
Praise for the Previous Volumes:
“The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers will take its place among the most important records of the Afro-American experience. . . . ‘The Marcus Garvey Papers’ lays the groundwork for a long overdue reassessment of Marcus Garvey and the legacy of racial pride, nationalism and concern with Africa he bequeathed to today’s black community.”—Eric Foner, the New York Times Book Review
“Until the publication of The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, many of the documents necessary for a full assessment of Garvey’s thought or of his movement’s significance have not been easily accessible. Robert A. Hill and his staff . . . have gathered over 30,000 documents from libraries and other sources in many countries. . . . The Garvey papers will reshape our understanding of the history of black nationalism and perhaps increase our understanding of contemporary black politics.”—Clayborne Carson, the Nation
“Now is our chance, through these important volumes, to finally begin to come to terms with the significance of Garvey’s complex, fascinating career and the meaning of the movement he built.”—Lawrence W. Levine, the New Republic
Son Jarocho was born as the regional sound of Veracruz but over time became a Mexican national genre, even transnational, genre—a touchstone of Chicano identity in the United States. Mario Barradas and Son Jarocho traces a musical journey from the Gulf Coast to interior Mexico and across the border, describing the transformations of Son Jarocho along the way.
This comprehensive cultural study pairs ethnographic and musicological insights with an oral history of the late Mario Barradas, one of Son Jarocho’s preeminent modern musicians. Chicano musician Francisco González offers an insider’s account of Barradas’s influence and Son Jarocho’s musical qualities, while Rafael Figueroa Hernández delves into Barradas’s recordings and films. Yolanda Broyles-González examines the interplay between Son Jarocho’s indigenous roots and contemporary role in Mexican and US society. The result is a nuanced portrait of a vital and evolving musical tradition.
Nearly every job application asks it: have you ever been convicted of a crime? For the hundreds of thousands of young men leaving American prisons each year, their answer to that question may determine whether they can find work and begin rebuilding their lives.
The product of an innovative field experiment, Marked gives us our first real glimpse into the tremendous difficulties facing ex-offenders in the job market. Devah Pager matched up pairs of young men, randomly assigned them criminal records, then sent them on hundreds of real job searches throughout the city of Milwaukee. Her applicants were attractive, articulate, and capable—yet ex-offenders received less than half the callbacks of the equally qualified applicants without criminal backgrounds. Young black men, meanwhile, paid a particularly high price: those with clean records fared no better in their job searches than white men just out of prison. Such shocking barriers to legitimate work, Pager contends, are an important reason that many ex-prisoners soon find themselves back in the realm of poverty, underground employment, and crime that led them to prison in the first place.
“Using scholarly research, field research in Milwaukee, and graphics, [Pager] shows that ex-offenders, white or black, stand a very poor chance of getting a legitimate job. . . . Both informative and convincing.”—Library Journal
“Marked is that rare book: a penetrating text that rings with moral concern couched in vivid prose—and one of the most useful sociological studies in years.”—Michael Eric Dyson
The experience of Filipino nurses and domestic workers—two of the country's prized exports—is at the core of the research, which utilizes interviews with employees at labor brokering agencies, state officials from governmental organizations in the Philippines, and nurses working in the United States. Guevarra's multisited ethnography reveals the disciplinary power that state and employment agencies exercise over care workers—managing migration and garnering wages—to govern social conduct, and brings this isolated yet widespread social problem to life.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is as relevant today as he was when he led civil rights campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s. He was an agent and a prophet of political change in this country, and the election of President Barack Obama is his direct legacy.
Now from one of Britain's most experienced political observers comes a new, accessible biography of the man and his works. The story of King is dramatic, and Godfrey Hodgson presents it with verve, clarity, and acute insight based in part on his own reporting on-scene at the time. He interviewed King half a dozen times or more; heard his speech at the March on Washington; was in Birmingham, Selma and Chicago; and met many of the characters in King's life story. Martin Luther King combines the best of his own reporting, plus the work of other biographers and researchers, to trace the iconic civil rights leader's career from his birth in Atlanta in 1929, through the campaigns that made possible the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to his assassination in Memphis in 1968. Hodgson sheds light on every aspect of an extraordinary life: the Black Baptist culture in which King grew up, his theology and political philosophy, his physical and moral courage, his insistence on the injustice of inequality, his campaigning energy, his repeated sexual infidelities.
Hodgson describes the political minefield in which King operated; follows how he gradually persuaded President Kennedy that he could not stand by and allow the civil rights movement to be frustrated; and describes how, on the verge of success, his career was threatened by President Johnson's anger at King's principled decision to come out against the Vietnam War. He also puts King's career into the context of American history in the crisis of the 1960s. In his life, King was frustrated; but in death, he has been triumphant.
Martin Luther King allows the charisma and power of King's personality to shine through, showing in gripping narrative style exactly how one man helped America to progress toward its truest ideals. Hodgson's extensive research and detail help paint an accurate, complex portrait of one of America's most important leaders.
Godfrey Hodgson has worked in Britain and America as a newspaper and magazine journalist; as a television reporter, documentary maker and anchor; as a university teacher and lecturer; and as the author of a dozen well-received books about U.S. politics and recent history, including America in Our Time, a history of the United States in the 1960s; More Equal than Others, on politics and society in twentieth-century America; and most recently, a biography of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Gentleman from New York. Hodgson met King on a number of occasions between 1956 and 1967. He recently retired as director of the Reuters Foundation Programme at Oxford University and is a visiting journalism professor at City University in London.
PRAISE FOR America in Our Time
"A critique so stimulating and compelling that I can only say read it."
---Richard Lingeman, The New York Times
"It simply gets right, without great fuss, the detail and proportion of things like the civil rights movement, student unrest, the stages of our Vietnam engagement."
---Garry Wills, The New York Review of Books
PRAISE FOR More Equal than Others
"The most thoughtful, thorough and sorrowful book imaginable on what has happened in these years."
---Bernard Crick, The Independent
Mary McLeod Bethune was a significant figure in American political history. She devoted her life to advancing equal social, economic, and political rights for blacks. She distinguished herself by creating lasting institutions that trained black women for visible and expanding public leadership roles. Few have been as effective in the development of women’s leadership for group advancement. Despite her accomplishments, the means, techniques, and actions Bethune employed in fighting for equality have been widely misinterpreted.
In Matters of Choice, Iris Lopez presents a comprehensive analysis of the dichotomous views that have portrayed sterilization either as part of a coercive program of population control or as a means of voluntary, even liberating, fertility control by individual women. Drawing upon her twenty-five years of research on sterilized Puerto Rican women from five different families in Brooklyn, Lopez untangles the interplay between how women make fertility decisions and their social, economic, cultural, and historical constraints. Weaving together the voices of these women, she covers the history of sterilization and eugenics, societal pressures to have fewer children, a lack of adequate health care, patterns of gender inequality, and misinformation provided by doctors and family members.
Lopez makes a stirring case for a model of reproductive freedom, taking readers beyond victim/agent debates to consider a broader definition of reproductive rights within a feminist anthropological context.
The American Football League, established in 1960, was innovative both in its commitment to finding talented, overlooked players—particularly those who played for historically black colleges and universities—and in the decision by team owners to share television revenues.
In Mavericks, Money and Men, football historian Charles Ross chronicles the AFL’s key events, including Buck Buchanan becoming the first overall draft pick in 1963, and the 1965 boycott led by black players who refused to play in the AFL-All Star game after experiencing blatant racism. He also recounts how the success of the AFL forced a merger with the NFL in 1969, which arguably facilitated the evolution of modern professional football.
Ross shows how the league, originally created as a challenge to the dominance of the NFL, pressured for and ultimately accelerated the racial integration of pro football and also allowed the sport to adapt to how African Americans were themselves changing the game.
Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala marks a new era in Guatemalan studies by offering an up-to-the-minute look at the pan-Maya movement and the future of the Maya people as they struggle to regain control over their cultural destiny. The successful emergence of what is in some senses a nationalism grounded in ethnicity and language has challenged scholars to reconsider their concepts of nationalism, community, and identity.
Editors Edward F. Fischer and R. McKenna Brown have brought together essays by virtually all the leading U.S. experts on contemporary Maya communities and the top Maya scholars working in Guatemala today. Supplementing scholarly analysis of Mayan cultural activism is a position statement originating within the movement and more wide-ranging and personal reflections by anthropologists and linguists who have worked with the Maya over the years. Among the broader issues that come in for examination are the complex relations between U.S. Mayanists and the Mayan cultural movement, efforts to promote literacy in Mayan languages, the significance of woven textiles and native dress, the relations between language and national identity, and the cultural meanings that the present-day Maya have encountered in ancient Mayan texts and hieroglyphic writing.
The Maya of Santiago Chimaltenango have experienced increasingly rapid, even violent, integration into Guatemalan society in the last fifty years, yet they still distinguish themselves ethnically from Spanish-speaking Guatemalans and other Maya. Why this sense of ethnic identity persists—and also changes—over time is the focus of Maya Saints and Souls in a Changing World, a beautifully written ethnography of a Mam-speaking Maya town in the western highlands of Guatemala.
John Watanabe uniquely explores how Chimaltecos themselves define their local distinctiveness. This approach uncovers significant continuities in lifeways and world view that might otherwise remain imperceptible to an outsider.
Another important feature of the study is that it updates Charles Wagley's pioneering research in the community during the 1930s. Watanabe identifies both the external, historical factors that have prompted change in the community since Wagley's time and the people's responses to these changes.
In the last decades of the twentieth century, thousands of Mayas were expelled, often violently, from their homes in San Juan Chamula and other highland communities in Chiapas, Mexico, by fellow Mayas allied with the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). State and federal authorities generally turned a blind eye to these human rights abuses, downplaying them as local conflicts over religious conversion and defense of cultural traditions. The expelled have organized themselves to fight not only for religious rights, but also for political and economic justice based on a broad understanding of human rights.
This pioneering ethnography tells the intertwined stories of the new communities formed by the Mayan exiles and their ongoing efforts to define and defend their human rights. Focusing on a community of Mayan Catholics, the book describes the process by which the progressive Diocese of San Cristóbal and Bishop Samuel Ruiz García became powerful allies for indigenous people in the promotion and defense of human rights. Drawing on the words and insights of displaced Mayas she interviewed throughout the 1990s, Christine Kovic reveals how the exiles have created new communities and lifeways based on a shared sense of faith (even between Catholics and Protestants) and their own concept of human rights and dignity. She also uncovers the underlying political and economic factors that drove the expulsions and shows how the Mayas who were expelled for not being "traditional" enough are in fact basing their new communities on traditional values of duty and reciprocity.
2005 — Best Book Award – New England Council of Latin American Studies
Selling handicrafts to tourists has brought the Maya peoples of Guatemala into the world market. Vendors from rural communities now offer their wares to more than 500,000 international tourists annually in the marketplaces of larger cities such as Antigua, Guatemala City, Panajachel, and Chichicastenango. Like businesspeople anywhere, Maya artisans analyze the desires and needs of their customers and shape their products to meet the demands of the market. But how has adapting to the global marketplace reciprocally shaped the identity and cultural practices of the Maya peoples?
Drawing on over a decade of fieldwork, Walter Little presents the first ethnographic study of Maya handicraft vendors in the international marketplace. Focusing on Kaqchikel Mayas who commute to Antigua to sell their goods, he explores three significant issues:
Little's wide-ranging research challenges our current understanding of tourism's negative impact on indigenous communities. He demonstrates that the Maya are maintaining a specific, community-based sense of Maya identity, even as they commodify their culture for tourist consumption in the world market.
Until recently, print media was the dominant force in American culture. The power of the paper was especially true in minority communities. African Americans and European immigrants vigorously embraced the print newsweekly as a forum to move public opinion, cohere group identity, and establish American belonging.
Mediating America explores the life and work of T. Thomas Fortune and J. Samuel Stemons as well as Rev. Peter C. Yorke and Patrick Ford—respectively two African American and two Irish American editor/activists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historian Brian Shott shows how each of these “race men” (the parlance of the time) understood and advocated for his group’s interests through their newspapers. Yet the author also explains how the newspaper medium itself—through illustrations, cartoons, and photographs; advertisements and page layout; and more—could constrain editors’ efforts to guide debates over race, religion, and citizenship during a tumultuous time of social unrest and imperial expansion.
Black and Irish journalists used newspapers to recover and reinvigorate racial identities. As Shott proves, minority print culture was a powerful force in defining American nationhood.
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