A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY1445 start with M start with M
This book examines techniques and technologies of food preparation, the spaces where food was cooked, the relationship between cooking and changes in suprahousehold economies, the religious and symbolic aspects of cooking, the relationship between cooking and social identity, and how examining foodways provides insight into social relations of production, distribution, and consumption. Contributors use a wide variety of evidence-including archaeological data; archival research; analysis of ceramics, fauna, botany, glass artifacts, stone tools, murals, and painted ceramics; ethnographic analogy; and the distribution of artifacts across space-to identify signs of cooking and food processing left by ancient cooks.
The Menial Art of Cooking is the first archaeological volume focused on cooking and food preparation in prehistoric and historic settings around the world and will interest archaeologists, social anthropologists, sociologists, and other scholars studying cooking and food preparation or subsistence.
"With classic butch finesse---that handsome combination of vulnerability and toughness---Peggy Shaw pieces together the challenges of growing up butch in the 1950s. Shaw is an engaging performer and inspired writer."
---Gay Community News
Obie-award-winning performer and writer Peggy Shaw has been playing her gender-bending performances on Off Broadway, regional, and international stages for three decades. Co-founder of the renowned troupe Split Britches, Shaw has gone on to create memorable solo performances that mix achingly honest introspection with campy humor, reflecting on everything from her Irish-American working-class roots to her aging butch body.
This collection of Shaw's solo performance scripts evokes a 54-year-old grandmother who looks like a 35-year-old man (in her classic Menopausal Gentleman); a mother's ambivalent ministrations to a daughter she treated like a son (in the raw You're Just Like My Father); Shaw's love for her biracial grandson, for whom she models masculinity (in the musically punctuated To My Chagrin); and a mapping of her body's long, bittersweet history (in the lyrical Must: The Inside Story, a collaboration with the UK's Clod Ensemble). The book also includes a selection of Shaw's other classic monologues and an extensive introduction by Jill Dolan, Professor of English and Theater and Dance at Princeton University and the blogger behind The Feminist Spectator website.
A volume in the series Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Theater/Drama/Performance
Cover photos by Eva Weiss (top) and Robin Holland/robinholland.com (bottom).
Menopause is a biological reality for all women in their forties and fifties. Yet the way we think about the cessation of menstruation is influenced by a variety of factors. Cultural and technological influences combine with biology to transform this universal phenomenon into an experience that varies considerably between cultures and individuals. In this concise book, Lynnette Leidy Sievert draws on her own case studies from Puebla, Mexico, and western Massachusetts, as well as on comparative data from other studies in places such as Slovenia, Paraguay, and Hawaii, to explore the different ways that women experience menopause around the world. Sievert suggests that attempts by medical professionals to define the “normal” occurrence of menopause, including its typical onset and symptoms, may not be realistic when considering how lifestyle, nutrition, and workload can contribute to diverging realities. She explores how women feel about hysterectomies, chemotherapy, and other medical procedures and treatments that stop menstruation prematurely. She also considers recent advances in technology, including post-menopausal birth, which have turned what was previously an unavoidable end of fertility into something that can be postponed.
A unique comparative look at women’s experiences, this text brings new perspectives to the mainstream literature on the subject and invites readers to consider compelling questions about menopause, its meanings, and its future.
The menorah, the seven-branched candelabrum, has traversed millennia as a living symbol of Judaism and the Jewish people. Naturally, it did not pass through the ages unaltered. The Menorah explores the cultural and intellectual history of the Western world’s oldest continuously used religious symbol. This meticulously researched yet deeply personal history explains how the menorah illuminates the great changes and continuities in Jewish culture, from biblical times to modern Israel.
Though the golden seven-branched menorahs of Moses and of the Jerusalem Temple are artifacts lost to history, the best-known menorah image survives on the Arch of Titus in Rome. Commemorating the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the arch reliefs depict the spoils of the Temple, the menorah chief among them, as they appeared in Titus’s great triumphal parade in 71 CE. Steven Fine recounts how, in 2012, his team discovered the original yellow ochre paint that colored the menorah—an event that inspired his search for the history of this rich symbol from ancient Israel through classical history, the Middle Ages, and on to our own tumultuous times.
Surveying artifacts and literary sources spanning three thousand years—from the Torah and the ruins of Rome to yesterday’s news—Fine presents the menorah as a source of fascination and illumination for Jews, Samaritans, Christians, and even Freemasons. A symbol for the divine, for continuity, emancipation, national liberation, and redemption, the menorah features prominently on Israel’s state seal and continues to inspire and challenge in surprising ways.
College sports have provided a compelling means to discuss issues regarding racial equality and fairness in American life. As previously-white institutions of higher learning gradually (and grudgingly) opened their playing fields to African-American athletes in men's basketball and football, black and white spectators interpreted mixed-race team sports in often contradictory ways. In Men's College Athletics and the Politics of Racial Equality, Gregory Kaliss offers stunning insights into Americans' contested visions of equality, fairness, black manhood, citizenship, and an equal opportunity society.
Kaliss looks at Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Wilt Chamberlain, Charlie Scott, John Mitchell, Wilbur Marshall, and Bear Bryant to show how Americans responded to racial integration over time. Men's College Athletics and the Politics of Racial Equality reveals that as fans, media members, university students, faculty, and administration—black and white—discussed the achievements and struggles of these athletes, they inevitably talked about much more than what occurred on the field.
The contributors consider how methodology informs mentorship, how mentorship activates methodology, and how to locate the future of the field in these moments of intersection. Mentorship, through the research and relationships it nourishes, creates the future of writing studies—or, conversely, reproduces the past. At the juncture where this happens, the contributors inquire, Where have current arrangements of mentorship/methodology taken writing studies? Where do these points of intersection exist in performance and practice, in theory, in research? What images of the field do they produce? How can scholars better articulate and write about these moments or spaces in which mentorship and methodology collide in productive disciplinary work?
By making the “slash” more visible, Mentorship/Methodology provides significant opportunities to support and cultivate diverse ways of knowing and being in rhetoric and composition, both locally and globally. The volume will appeal to students and scholars of rhetoric, composition, and technical and professional communication, as well as readers interested in conversations about mentorship and methodology.
Robert E. Weems Jr. restores Overton to his rightful place in American business history. Dispelling stubborn myths, he traces Overton's rise from mentorship by Booker T. Washington, through early failures, to a fateful move to Chicago in 1911. There, Overton started a popular magazine aimed at African American women that helped him dramatically grow his cosmetics firm. Overton went on to become the first African American to head a major business conglomerate, only to lose significant parts of his businesses—and his public persona as ”the merchant prince of his race”—in the Depression, before rebounding once again in the early 1940s.
Revealing and panoramic, The Merchant Prince of Black Chicago weaves the fascinating life story of an African American trailblazer through the eventful history of his times.
Merengue—the quintessential Dominican dance music—has a long and complex history, both on the island and in the large immigrant community in New York City. In this ambitious work, Paul Austerlitz unravels the African and Iberian roots of merengue and traces its growth under dictator Rafael Trujillo and its renewed popularity as an international music.
Using extensive interviews as well as written commentaries, Austerlitz examines the historical and contemporary contexts in which merengue is performed and danced, its symbolic significance, its social functions, and its musical and choreographic structures. He tells the tale of merengue's political functions, and of its class and racial significance. He not only explores the various ethnic origins of this Ibero-African art form, but points out how some Dominicans have tried to deny its African roots.
In today's global society, mass culture often marks ethnic identity. Found throughout Dominican society, both at home and abroad, merengue is the prime marker of Dominican identity. By telling the story of this dance music, the author captures the meaning of mass and folk expression in contemporary ethnicity as well as the relationship between regional, national, and migrant culture and between rural/regional and urban/mass culture. Austerlitz also traces the impact of migration and global culture on the native music, itself already a vibrant intermixture of home-grown merengue forms.
From rural folk idiom to transnational mass music, merengue has had a long and colorful career. Its well-deserved popularity will make this book a must read for anyone interested in contemporary music; its complex history will make the book equally indispensable to anyone interested in cultural studies.
Without help from their wives, men are just like unlit lamps . . .
Just think of them as an unreliable clock that tells you it’s ten o’clock when it’s in fact barely two . . .
A man without a woman is like a fly without a head . . .
These are but a small selection of the quips bandied about at this lively gathering of women. The broad topic at hand is the relative pros and cons of men, and the cases in point range from pick-up artists to locker-room talk, and from double standards to fragile masculinity.
Yet this dialogue unfolds not among ironically misandrist millenials venting at their local dive bar, but rather among sixteenth-century women—variously married, widowed, single, and betrothed—attending a respectable Venice garden party. Written in the early 1590s by Moderata Fonte, pseudonym of the Renaissance poet and writer Modesta Pozzo, this literary dialogue interrogates men and men’s treatment of women, and explores by contrast the virtues of singledom and female friendship. As the women diverge from their theme—discussing everything from astrology to the curative powers of plants and minerals—a remarkable group portrait of wisdom, wit, and erudition emerges.
A new introduction by translator Virginia Cox and foreword by Dacia Maraini situate The Merits of Women in its historical context, written as it was on the cusp of Shakespeare’s heyday, and straddling the centuries between the feminist works of Christine de Pizan and Mary Wollstonecraft. Elegantly presented for a general audience, this is a must-read for baby feminists and “nasty women” alike, not to mention the perfect subtle gift for any mansplaining friend who needs a refresher on the merits of women . . . and their superiority to men.
People have been fascinated by merpeople and merfolk since ancient times. From the sirens of Homer’s Odyssey to Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid and the film Splash, myths, stories, and legends of half-human, half-fish creatures abound. In modern times “mermaiding” has gained popularity among cosplayers throughout the world. In Merpeople: A Human History, Vaughn Scribner traces the long history of mermaids and mermen, taking in a wide variety of sources and using 117 striking images. From film to philosophy, church halls to coffee houses, ancient myth to modern science, Scribner shows that mermaids and tritons are—and always have been—everywhere.
The second half of the book combines explorations of various corners and horizons of the poetry scene, including neglected American poets and Hadas's thoughts on her own poetics and career. "Two Letters from New York" and "Tangled Web Sites" take bemused looks at literary or cultural landscapes. Hadas also looks inward: to dreams and dreamwork, to her dead mother's address book, to the emblematic drilling of a well in a country house. The range of selections includes essays, interviews, memoir, criticism, and a few of Hadas's own poems.
Rachel Hadas is the author of eleven books of poetry, essays, and translations. Her most recent book is Halfway Down the Hall: New and Selected Poems. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry and an American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is Professor of English at the Newark campus of Rutgers University.
It wouldn't be Christmas without the "things." How they came to mean so much, and to play such a prominent role in America's central holiday, is the tale told in this delightful and edifying book. In a style characteristically engaging and erudite, Karal Ann Marling, one of our most trenchant observers of American culture, describes the outsize spectacle that Christmas has become, showing us the provenance and significance of each of its essential parts: the decorated trees and holiday lights, the cards and gifts and wrapping papers, the toy villages and store displays and Macy's holiday parade, Bing Crosby and Santa Claus.
Viewing Christmas through the media of mass culture--engravings and lithographs, magazine fiction, pictorial ads, news photos, cards, and movies--Marling tells us how the beloved Christmas tree grew out of a much-reprinted image of Queen Victoria and her family gathered around a decorated fir; how Santa Claus lost his provincial Dutch character and turned into the jolly old soul we know; how Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol borrowed from Washington Irving's imaginings of what Christmas must have been like in Merrie Olde England; and how the holiday, balancing between the private and public realms, conferred a central and defining role on women.
A celebration of the visual culture of the season, Merry Christmas! offers captivating evidence that Christmas in America is primarily a secular celebration of abundance, goodwill, and familial identity, expressed in a multitude of material ways.
Contributors. Sabina Cruz de la Cruz, Rebecca Dufendach, Servando Hinojosa, Timothy W. Knowlton, Gabrielle Vail, Edber Dzidz Yam
Healing practices in Mesoamerica span a wide range, from traditional folk medicine with roots reaching back into the prehispanic era to westernized biomedicine. These sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing practices have attracted attention from researchers and the public alike, as interest in alternative medicine and holistic healing continues to grow.
Responding to this interest, the essays in this book offer a comprehensive, state-of-the-art survey of Mesoamerican healers and medical practices in Mexico and Guatemala. The first two essays describe the work of prehispanic and colonial healers and show how their roles changed over time. The remaining essays look at contemporary healers, including bonesetters, curers, midwives, nurses, physicians, social workers, and spiritualists. Using a variety of theoretical approaches, the authors examine such topics as the intersection of gender and curing, the recruitment of healers and their training, healers' compensation and workload, types of illnesses treated and recommended treatments, conceptual models used in diagnosis and treatment, and the relationships among healers and between indigenous healers and medical and political authorities.
Any overview of prehispanic society in the Americas would identify its obsidian core-blade production as a unique and highly inventive technology. Normally termed prismatic blades, these long, parallel-sided flakes are among the sharpest cutting tools ever produced by humans. Their standardized form permitted interchangeable use, and such blades became the cutting tool of choice throughout Mesoamerica between 600–800 B.C. Because considerable production skill is required, increased demand may have stimulated the appearance of craft specialists who played an integral role in Mesoamerican society. Some investigators have argued that control over obsidian also had a significant effect on the development and organization of chiefdom and state-level societies.
While researchers have long recognized the potential of obsidian studies, recent work has focused primarily on compositional analysis to reconstruct trade and distribution networks. Study of blade production has received much less attention, and many aspects of this highly evolved craft are still lost.
This volume seeks to identify current research questions in Mesoamerican lithic technology and to demonstrate that replication studies coupled with experimental research design are valuable analytical approaches to such questions.
The primary question that has motivated the contributors is how Mesoamerican plazas became arenas for the creation and negotiation of social relations and values in a community. The thirteen contributions stress the significance of interplay between power relations and embodied practices set in specific historical and material settings, as outlined by practice theory and performance theory. This approach allows the contributors to explore broader anthropological issues, such as the negotiation of power relations, community making, and the constitution of political authorities.
Overall, the contributions establish that physical interactions among people in communal events were not the outcomes of political machinations held behind the scenes, but were the actual political processes through which people created, negotiated, and subverted social realities. If so, spacious plazas that were arguably designed for interactions among a large number of individuals must have also provided critical arenas for the constitution and transformation of society.
Exploring the intersection of spirituality and materiality, Mesoamerican Ritual Economy will be of interest to all scholars studying how worldview and belief motivate economic behavior. The authors consider a diverse set of Mesoamerican cultural patterns in order to investigate the ways in which ritual and economic practices influenced each other in the operation of communities, small-scale societies, and state-level polities. Contributors include: Sarah B. Barber, Frances F. Berdan, Karla L. Davis-Salazar, Barbara W. Fash, William L. Fash, Antonia E. Foias, Arthur A. Joyce, Brigitte Kovacevich, Ben A. Nelson, Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría, Katherine A. Spielmann, John M. Watanabe, E. Christian Wells.
New case studies documenting ten thousand years of cuisines across the cultures of Oaxaca, Mexico, from the earliest gathered plants, such as guajes, to the contemporary production of tejate and its health implications.
Among the richest culinary traditions in Mexico are those of the “eight regions” of the state of Oaxaca. Mesquite Pods to Mezcal brings together some of the most prominent scholars in Oaxacan archaeology and related fields to explore the evolution of the area’s world-renowned cuisines. This volume, the first to address food practices across Oaxaca through a long-term historical lens, covers the full spectrum of human occupation in Oaxaca, from the early Holocene to contemporary times. Contributors consider the deep history of agroecological management and large-scale landscape transformation, framing food production as a human-environment relation. They explore how, after the arrival of the Spanish, Oaxacan cuisines adapted, diets changed, and food became a stronger marker of identity. Examining the present, further studies document how traditional foodways persist and what they mean for contemporary Oaxacans, whether they are traveling ancient roads, working outside the region, or rebuilding after an earthquake. Together, the original case studies in this volume demonstrate how new methods and diverse theoretical approaches can come together to trace the development of a rich food tradition, one that is thriving today.
Mestiza Rhetorics is the first anthology dedicated to mexicana rhetors and provides unmatched access to mexicana rhetorics. This collection puts forward the work of mexicana newspaperwomen in Spanish and English, provides evidence of their participation in political and educational debates at the turn of the twentieth century, and demonstrates how the Spanish-language press operated as a rhetorical space for mexicanas.
Mestizaje and Globalization presents perspectives on the underlying transformation of identity and power associated with the term during times of great change in the Americas. The volume offers a comprehensive and empirically diverse collection of insights concerning mestizaje’s complex relationship with indigeneity, the politics of ethnic identity, transnational social movements, the aesthetic of cultural production, development policies, and capitalist globalization, with particular attention to cases in Latin America and the United States.
Beyond the narrow and often inadequate meaning of mestizaje as biological and racial mixing, the concept deserves an innovative theoretical consideration due to its multidimensional, multifaceted character and its resilience as an ideological construct. The contributors argue that historical analyses of mestizaje do not sufficiently understand contemporary ways that racism, ethnic discrimination, and social injustice intermingle with current discourse and practice of cultural recognition and multiculturalism in the Americas.
Mestizaje and Globalization contributes to an emerging multidisciplinary effort to explore how identities are imposed, negotiated, and reconstructed. The chapter authors clearly set forth the issues and obstacles that Indigenous peoples and subjugated minorities face, as well as the strategies they have employed to gain empowerment in the face of globalization.
Informed by a broad-ranging theoretical investigation of identity politics and race and incorporating feminist and queer critiques, Pérez-Torres skillfully analyzes Chicano cultural production. Contextualizing the history of mestizaje, he shows how the concept of mixed race has been used to engage issues of hybridity and voice and examines the dynamics that make mestizo and mestiza identities resistant to, as well as affirmative of, dominant forms of power. He also addresses the role that mestizaje has played in expressive culture, including the hip-hop music of Cypress Hill and the vibrancy of Chicano poster art. Turning to issues of mestizaje in literary creation, Pérez-Torres offers critical readings of the works of Emma Pérez, Gil Cuadros, and Sandra Cisneros, among others. This book concludes with a consideration of the role that the mestizo body plays as a site of elusive or displaced knowledge.
Moving beyond the oppositions—nationalism versus assimilation, men versus women, Texans versus Californians—that have characterized much of Chicano studies, Mestizaje synthesizes and assesses twenty-five years of pathbreaking thinking to make a case for the core components, sensibilities, and concerns of the discipline.
Rafael Pérez-Torres is professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is author of Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins, coauthor of To Alcatraz, Death Row, and Back: Memories of an East LA Outlaw, and coeditor of The Chicano Studies Reader: An Anthology of Aztlán, 1970–2000.
Drawing on ethnographic research in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, the contributors to Mestizo Genomics explore how the concepts of race, ethnicity, nation, and gender enter into and are affected by genomic research. In Latin America, national identities are often based on ideas about mestizaje (race mixture), rather than racial division. Since mestizaje is said to involve relations between European men and indigenous or African women, gender is a key factor in Latin American genomics and in the analyses in this book. Also important are links between contemporary genomics and recent moves toward official multiculturalism in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. One of the first studies of its kind, Mestizo Genomics sheds new light on the interrelations between "race," identity, and genomics in Latin America.
Contributors. Adriana Díaz del Castillo H., Roosbelinda Cárdenas, Vivette García Deister, Verlan Valle Gaspar Neto, Michael Kent, Carlos López Beltrán, María Fernanda Olarte Sierra, Eduardo Restrepo, Mariana Rios Sandoval, Ernesto Schwartz-Marín, Ricardo Ventura Santos, Peter Wade
We use the term “modernism” almost exclusively to characterize the work of European and American writers and artists who struggled to portray a new kind of fractured urban life typified by mechanization and speed. Between the 1880s and 1930s, Latin American artists were similarly engaged--but with a difference. While other modernists drew from “primitive” cultures for an alternative sense of creativity, Latin American modernists were taking a cue from local sources, primarily indigenous and black populations in their own countries. Although these artists remained outsiders to modernism elsewhere as a result of their race, nation, and identity, their racial heritage served as a positive tool in negotiating their relationship to the dichotomy between tradition and modernity.
In Mestizo Modernism Tace Hedrick focuses on four key artists who represent Latin American modernism—Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo, Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, and Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Hedrick interrogates what being “modern” and “American” meant for them and illuminates the cultural contexts within which they worked, as well as the formal methods they shared, including the connection they drew between ancient cultures and modern technologies. In so doing, she defines “modernism” more as a time frame at the turn of the twentieth century, marked broadly across the arts and national boundaries, than as a strict aesthetic or formal category. In fact, this look at Latin American artists will force the reconceptualization of what modernism has meant in academic study and what it might mean for future research.
It is one thing to comprehend how culture makes its way through the world in those cases where something old is reproduced in the same physical shape-where, for example, a song is sung or a story retold. It is another thing altogether, as Greg Urban demonstrates, to think about cultural motion when something new is created-a new song or a new story. And this, the creating of new culture, is the overarching value of the contemporary world, as well as the guiding principle of the capitalist entrepreneur.
From the Declaration of Independence to the movie Babe, from the Amazon River to the film studio, from microscopic studies of the words making up myths and books to the large-scale forces of conquest, conversion, and globalization that drive history, Urban follows the clues to a startling revelation: "metaculture" makes the modern, entrepreneurial form of culture possible. In Urban’s work we see how metaculture, in its relationship to newness, explains the peculiar shape of modern society and its institutions, from the prevalence of taste and choice to the processes of the public sphere, to the centrality of persuasion and hegemony within the nation.
Ultimately, Metafilm reframes materialism as a multimodal composing-in-action, or reflexive materialism, focusing on movies that dramatize their entanglement in economic and historical trauma while provoking forms of resistance during and after viewing. Carter contends that even as we recognize the division of social power in the films, we must also recognize how the concept is subversive and eludes control. In looking at the interplay between the films’ content and their production, circulation, and reception, Carter explores how the films persuade us to identify with onscreen worlds before probing our expectations—validating some, rejecting others, and sometimes proposing new ways of watching altogether.
The greatest trick the videogame industry ever pulled was convincing the world that videogames were games rather than a medium for making metagames. Elegantly defined as “games about games,” metagames implicate a diverse range of practices that stray outside the boundaries and bend the rules: from technical glitches and forbidden strategies to Renaissance painting, algorithmic trading, professional sports, and the War on Terror. In Metagaming, Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux demonstrate how games always extend beyond the screen, and how modders, mappers, streamers, spectators, analysts, and artists are changing the way we play.
Metagaming uncovers these alternative histories of play by exploring the strange experiences and unexpected effects that emerge in, on, around, and through videogames. Players puzzle through the problems of perspectival rendering in Portal, perform clandestine acts of electronic espionage in EVE Online, compete and commentate in Korean StarCraft, and speedrun The Legend of Zelda in record times (with or without the use of vision). Companies like Valve attempt to capture the metagame through international e-sports and online marketplaces while the corporate history of Super Mario Bros. is undermined by the endless levels of Infinite Mario, the frustrating pranks of Asshole Mario, and even Super Mario Clouds, a ROM hack exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
One of the only books to include original software alongside each chapter, Metagaming transforms videogames from packaged products into instruments, equipment, tools, and toys for intervening in the sensory and political economies of everyday life. And although videogames conflate the creativity, criticality, and craft of play with the act of consumption, we don’t simply play videogames—we make metagames.
Contributors. Idelber Avelar, Albert Bell, Dan Bendrups, Harris M. Berger, Paul D. Greene, Ross Hagen, Sharon Hochhauser, Shuhei Hosokawa, Keith Kahn-Harris, Kei Kawano, Rajko Muršič,Steve Waksman, Jeremy Wallach, Robert Walser, Deena Weinstein, Cynthia P. Wong
Since the days of the Spanish Conquest, the indigenous populations of Andean Bolivia have struggled to preserve their textile-based writings. This struggle continues today, both in schools and within the larger culture. The Metamorphosis of Heads explores the history and cultural significance of Andean textile writings--weavings and kipus (knotted cords), and their extreme contrasts in form and production from European alphabet-based texts. Denise Arnold examines the subjugation of native texts in favor of European ones through the imposition of homogenized curricula by the Educational Reform Law. As Arnold reveals, this struggle over language and education directly correlates to long-standing conflicts for land ownership and power in the region, since the majority of the more affluent urban population is Spanish speaking, while indigenous languages are spoken primarily among the rural poor. <I>The Metamorphosis of Heads</I> acknowledges the vital importance of contemporary efforts to maintain Andean history and cultural heritage in schools, and shows how indigenous Andean populations have incorporated elements of Western textual practices into their own textual activities.
Based on extensive fieldwork over two decades, and historical, anthropological, and ethnographic research, Denise Arnold assembles an original and richly diverse interdisciplinary study. The textual theory she proposes has wider ramifications for studies of Latin America in general, while recognizing the specifically regional practices of indigenous struggles in the face of nation building and economic globalization.
Although the theme of blindness occurs frequently in literature, literary criticism has rarely engaged the experiential knowledge of people with visual impairments. The Metanarrative of Blindness counters this trend by bringing to readings of twentieth-century works in English a perspective appreciative of impairment and disability. Author David Bolt examines representations of blindness in more than forty literary works, including writing by Kipling, Joyce, Synge, Orwell, H. G. Wells, Susan Sontag, and Stephen King, shedding light on the deficiencies of these representations and sometimes revealing an uncomfortable resonance with the Anglo-American science of eugenics.
What connects these seemingly disparate works is what Bolt calls “the metanarrative of blindness,” a narrative steeped in mythology and with deep roots in Western culture. Bolt examines literary representations of blindness using the analytical tools of disability studies in both the humanities and social sciences. His readings are also broadly appreciative of personal, social, and cultural aspects of disability, with the aim of bringing literary scholars to the growing discipline of disability studies, and vice versa. This interdisciplinary monograph is relevant to people working in literary studies, disability studies, psychology, sociology, applied linguistics, life writing, and cultural studies, as well as those with a general interest in education and representations of blindness.
Metaphor and the Slave Trade provides compelling evidence of the hidden but unmistakable traces of the transatlantic slave trade that persist in West African discourse. Through an examination of metaphors that describe the trauma, loss, and suffering associated with the commerce in human lives, this book shows how the horrors of slavery are communicated from generation to generation.
Laura T. Murphy’s insightful new readings of canonical West African fiction, autobiography, drama, and poetry explore the relationship between memory and metaphor and emphasize how repressed or otherwise marginalized memories can be transmitted through images, tropes, rumors, and fears. By analyzing the unique codes through which West Africans have represented the slave trade, this work foregrounds African literary contributions to Black Atlantic discourse and draws attention to the archive that metaphor unlocks for scholars of all disciplines and fields of study.
Winner, Senior Book Prize, American Ethnological Society
Starting with the post-structuralist idea that truth systems are lodged in discourse, and that discourse varies from society to society, Greg Urban seeks to discover the nature and extent of that variation. His journey to an Amerindian society in which dreams are more prominent than everyday aspects of the sensible world leads him to radically reformulate one of the main problematics of Western thought: the relationship between our sensations of the world and the understandings we form of them.
Metaphysical Community proposes that this dichotomy comes from the interplay between two sides of discourse-its intelligible side as a carrier of meanings, and its sensible side as thing-in-the-world that must be replicated. This insight leads to the heart of the book-the exploration of the uneasy tension that binds experience and understanding, phenomena and noumena.
Urban challenges basic assumptions that underlie social and cultural anthropology and much of the social sciences and humanities. His provocative insights will be of interest to all those concerned with anthropology, cultural studies, literary criticism, the sociology and politics of culture, and philosophy.
Metaphysical Media focuses on the blurred definitions of topics associated with the occult as they are presented in popular culture to show moving-image media as devices that help structure an understanding of the supernatural world. Edwards examines what media treatment of supernatural subjects and the very characteristics of the media themselves reveal about the persistence of the occult. She maintains that popular art has always had a close association with the paranormal or supernatural— sometimes in illustration of an ideology, sometimes in ridicule of it, and sometimes as invocation itself.
Beginning with an overview of the role of the media in contemporary society and in its use of the occult, Metaphysical Media looks at the properties of media technology that extend human senses beyond biological boundaries. Edwards then discusses specific media treatment of topics related to the occult, including witchcraft, atavism, reincarnation, out-of-body experiences, and lycanthropy. She outlines the interplay of media and folklore regarding taboos about the handling of the dead and investigates media stories about creatures that cross the boundaries between human, beast, and god.
In The Metaphysics of Media, award-winning media critic Peter K. Fallon tackles the complicated question of how a succession of dominant forms of media have supported—and even to some extent created—different conceptions of reality. To do so, he starts with the basics: a critical discussion of the very idea of objective reality and the various postmodern responses that have tended to dominate recent philosophical approaches to the subject. From there, he embarks on a survey of the evolution of communication through four major eras: orality; literacy; print; and electricity.
Within each era, Fallon argues, the dominant form of media supported particular ways of understanding the world, from the ascendance of reason that followed the development of alphabets to the obliteration of space and time that we associate with electronic communications. Fallon concludes with a hard look at the mass ignorance that prevails today despite (or perhaps because of) the sea of information with which contemporary life is surrounded.
A stirring, philosophically rich investigation, The Metaphysics of Media offers not only a clear picture of where our society has been but also a road map to a more engaged, informed, and fully human future.
Exploring anxieties raised by Atlantic slavery in radical enlightenment literature concerned about political unfreedom in Europe, Metaracial argues that Hegel's philosophy assuages these anxieties for the left. Interpreting Hegel beside Rousseau, Kant, Mary Shelley, and Marx, Terada traces Hegel's transposition of racial hierarchy into a hierarchy of stances toward reality. By doing so, she argues, Hegel is simultaneously antiracist and antiblack. In dialogue with Black Studies, psychoanalysis, and critical theory, Metaracial offers a genealogy of the limits of antiracism.
While various points of view are expressed in these nineteen essays, they have in common several themes, including the comparison of social and natural science, the role of knowledge in meeting the demands of society and its pressing problems, and the nature and role of subjectivity in science. Some authors hold that subjectivity cannot be studied scientifically; others argue that it can and must be if progress in knowledge is to be made. The essays demonstrate the philosophical pluralism they discuss and give a wide range of alternative positions on the future of the social and behavioral sciences in a postpositivist intellectual world.
The Methamphetamine Industry in America describes the reality that this industry is a social phenomenon connecting local, national, and international communities and markets. The book details the results of a groundbreaking three-stage study, part of a joint initiative of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute of Justice, in which police agencies across the United States were surveyed and their responses used to identify likely areas of study. The authors then visited these areas to observe and interview local participants, from users and dealers to law enforcement officers and clinical treatment workers.
This book demonstrates the importance of understanding the business of methamphetamine—and by extension other drugs in society—through a lens that focuses on social behavior, social relationships, and the cultural elements that shape the organization and operation of this illicit but effective industry.
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Howard Schuman is one of the premier scholars of social surveys. His expertise concerns the way questions about attitudes and beliefs are worded and the effects questions have on the answers people give. However, Method and Meaning in Polls and Surveys is less about the substance of wording effects and more about approaches to interpreting the respondent’s world, and how surveys can make that world understandable—though often in ways not anticipated by the researcher.
Schuman examines the question-answer process that is basic to polls and surveys, as it is in so much of life. His concern is with the nature of questioning itself, with issues of validity and bias, and with the scope and limitations of meaning sought through polls and surveys.
Writing with both wisdom and humor, Schuman considers the issues both at a theoretical level, bringing in ideas from other social sciences, and empirically with substantive research of his own and others. The book will be of interest to social scientists, to survey researchers in academia and business, and to all those concerned with the pervasive influence of polls in society.
A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication
This invaluable classic provides the framework for the development of American archaeology during the last half of the 20th century.
In 1958 Gordon R. Willey and Philip Phillips first published Method and Theory in American Archaeology—a volume that went through five printings, the last in 1967 at the height of what became known as the new, or processual, archaeology. The advent of processual archaeology, according to Willey and Phillips, represented a "theoretical debate . . . a question of whether archaeology should be the study of cultural history or the study of cultural process."
Willey and Phillips suggested that little interpretation had taken place in American archaeology, and their book offered an analytical perspective; the methods they described and the structural framework they used for synthesizing American prehistory were all geared toward interpretation. Method and Theory served as the catalyst and primary reader on the topic for over a decade.
This facsimile reprint edition of the original University of Chicago Press volume includes a new foreword by Gordon R. Willey, which outlines the state of American archaeology at the time of the original publication, and a new introduction by the editors to place the book in historical context. The bibliography is exhaustive. Academic libraries, students, professionals, and knowledgeable amateurs will welcome this new edition of a standard-maker among texts on American archaeology.
A diverse and highly regarded group of scholars reference a broad array of literature from around the world as they cover their areas of expertise in the practice and theory of paleoethnobotany—starch grain analysis, stable isotope analysis, ancient DNA, digital data management, and ecological and postprocessual theory.
The only comprehensive edited volume focusing on method and theory to appear in the last twenty-five years, Method and Theory in Paleoethnobotany addresses the new areas of inquiry that have become central to contemporary archaeological debates, as well as the current state of theoretical, methodological, and empirical work in paleoethnobotany.
Historically, the largest division between social science methods has been that between quantitative and qualitative measures. For people trained in psychology or sociology, the bias has been toward the former, using surveys and experiments that yield readily comparable numerical results. For people trained in anthropology, it has been toward the latter, using ethnographic observations and interviews that offer richer nuances of meaning but are difficult to compare across societies. Discussing their own endeavors to combine the quantitative with the qualitative, the authors invite readers into a conversation about the best designs and practices of mixed methodologies to stimulate creative ideas and find new pathways of insight. The result is an engaging exploration of a promising new approach to the social sciences.
The death of the daily newspaper in the internet age has been predicted for decades. While print newspapers are struggling from drops in advertising and circulation, their survival has been based on original reporting. Instead of a death knell, metro dailies are experiencing an identity crisis—a clash between traditional print journalism’s formality and detail and digital journalism’s informality and brevity.
In Metro Dailies in the Age of Multimedia Journalism, Mary Lou Nemanic provides in-depth case studies of five mid-size city newspapers to show how these publications are adapting to the transition from print-only to multiplatform content delivery—and how newsroom practices are evolving to address this change. She considers the successes when owners allow journalists to manage their newspapers—to ensure production of quality journalism under the protection of newspaper guilds—as well as how layoffs and resource cutbacks have jeopardized quality standards.
Arguing for an integrated approach in which print and online reporting are considered complementary and visual journalism is emphasized across platforms, Nemanic suggests that there is a future for the endangered daily metro newspaper.
Cities, counties, school districts and other local governments have suffered a long-lasting period of fiscal challenges since the beginning of the Great Recession. Metropolitan governments continue to adjust to the "new normal" of sharply lower property values, consumer sales, and personal income. Contributors to this volume include elected officials, academics, key people in city administrations, and other nationally recognized experts who discuss solutions to the urban problems created by the Great Recession.
Metropolitan Resilience in a Time of Economic Turmoil looks at the capacity of local governments to mobilize resources efficiently and effectively, as well as the overall effects of the long-term economic downturn on quality of life. Introducing the reader to the fiscal effects of the Great Recession on cities, the book examines the initial fraying and subsequent mending of the social safety net, the opportunities for pursuing economic development strategies, the challenges of inter-jurisdictional cooperation, and the legacy costs of pension liabilities and infrastructure decay.
Contributors are Phil Ashton, Raphael Bostic, Richard Feiock, Rachel A. Gordon, Rebecca Hendrick, Geoffrey J.D. Hewings, David Merriman, Richard Nathan, Michael A. Pagano, Breeze Richardson, Annette Steinacker, Nik Theodore, Rachel Weber, and Margaret Weir.
A historical overview of Mexican Americans' social and economic experiences in Texas
For hundreds of years, Mexican Americans in Texas have fought against political oppression and exclusion—in courtrooms, in schools, at the ballot box, and beyond. Through a detailed exploration of this long battle for equality, this book illuminates critical moments of both struggle and triumph in the Mexican American experience.
Martha Menchaca begins with the Spanish settlement of Texas, exploring how Mexican Americans’ racial heritage limited their incorporation into society after the territory’s annexation. She then illustrates their political struggles in the nineteenth century as they tried to assert their legal rights of citizenship and retain possession of their land, and goes on to explore their fight, in the twentieth century, against educational segregation, jury exclusion, and housing covenants. It was only in 1967, she shows, that the collective pressure placed on the state government by Mexican American and African American activists led to the beginning of desegregation. Menchaca concludes with a look at the crucial roles that Mexican Americans have played in national politics, education, philanthropy, and culture, while acknowledging the important work remaining to be done in the struggle for equality.
The Mexican American population is the fastest growing major racial/ethnic group in the United States. During the decade 1970–1980, the Mexican origin population increased from 4.5 million to 8.7 million persons. High fertility, not immigration, was responsible for nearly two-thirds of this growth.
Recent and historical evidence shows that women of Mexican origin or descent bear significantly more children than other white women in the United States. Mexican American Fertility Patterns clarifies the nature and magnitude of these fertility differences by analyzing patterns of childbearing both across ethnic groups and within the Mexican American population.
Using data from the 1970 and 1980 U.S. Censuses and from the 1976 Survey of Income and Education, the authors evaluate various hypotheses of cultural, social, demographic, and/or economic factors as determinants of fertility differences. Empirical analyses center on the interrelationships between fertility and generational status, language usage and proficiency, and female education. This timely report concludes that Mexican American fertility is closest to that of other whites under conditions of greater access to the opportunity structures of the society.
Macías conducted numerous interviews for Mexican American Mojo, and the voices of little-known artists and fans fill its pages. In addition, more famous musicians such as Ritchie Valens and Lalo Guerrero are considered anew in relation to their contemporaries and the city. Macías examines language, fashion, and subcultures to trace the history of hip and cool in Los Angeles as well as the Chicano influence on urban culture. He argues that a grass-roots “multicultural urban civility” that challenged the attempted containment of Mexican Americans and African Americans emerged in the neighborhoods, schools, nightclubs, dance halls, and auditoriums of mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles. So take a little trip with Macías, via streetcar or freeway, to a time when Los Angeles had advanced public high school music programs, segregated musicians’ union locals, a highbrow municipal Bureau of Music, independent R & B labels, and robust rock and roll and Latin music scenes.
The Mexican American orquesta is neither a Mexican nor an American music. Relying on both the Mexican orquesta and the American dance band for repertorial and stylistic cues, it forges a synthesis of the two. The ensemble emerges historically as a powerful artistic vehicle for the expression of what Manuel Peña calls the "dialectic of conflict." Grounded in ethnic and class conflict, this dialectic compels the orquesta and its upwardly mobile advocates to waver between acculturation and ethnic resistance. The musical result: a complex mesh of cultural elements—Mexican and American, working- and middle-class, traditional and contemporary.
In this book, Manuel Peña traces the evolution of the orquesta in the Southwest from its beginnings in the nineteenth century through its pinnacle in the 1970s and its decline since the 1980s. Drawing on fifteen years of field research, he embeds the development of the orquesta within a historical-materialist matrix to achieve the optimal balance between description and interpretation. Rich in ethnographic detail and boldly analytical, his book is the first in-depth study of this important but neglected field of artistic culture.
Turning to literature, contributors consider Gloria Anzaldúa’s view of the borderlands as a mystic vision and the ways that Chicana writers invoke religious symbols and rhetoric to articulate a moral vision highlighting social injustice. They investigate the role of healing, looking at it in relation to both the Latino Pentecostal movement and the practice of the curanderismo tradition in East Los Angeles. Delving into to popular culture, they reflect on Luis Valdez’s video drama La Pastorela: “The Shepherds’ Play,” the spirituality of Chicana art, and the religious overtones of the reverence for the slain Tejana music star Selena. This volume signals the vibrancy and diversity of the practices, arts, traditions, and spiritualities that reflect and inform Mexican American religion.
Contributors: Rudy V. Busto, Davíd Carrasco, Socorro Castañeda-Liles, Gastón Espinosa, Richard R. Flores, Mario T. García, María Herrera-Sobek, Luís D. León, Ellen McCracken, Stephen R. Lloyd-Moffett, Laura E. Pérez, Roberto Lint Saragena, Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, Kay Turner
By focusing on women in two contiguous but very different communities -- the working-class, inner-city neighborhood of Boyle Heights in Eastside Los Angeles and the racially mixed middle-class suburb of Monterey Park -- Pardo is able to bring class as ell as gender and ethnic concerns to bear on her analysis in ways that shed light on the complexity of mobilizing for urban change.
Unlike many studies, the stories told here focus on women's strengths rather than on their problems. We follow the process by which these women empowered themselves by using their own definitions of social justice and their own convictions about the importance of traditional roles. Rather than becoming political participants in spite of their family responsibilities, women in both neighborhoods seem to have been more powerful because they had responsibilities, social networks, and daily routines separate from the men in their communities.
Pardo asserts that the decline of real wages and the growing income gap means that unforunately most women will no longer be able to focus their energies on unpaid community work. She reflects on the consequences of this change for women's political involvement, as well as on the politics of writing about women and politics.
Among the protest movements of the 1960s, the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) emerged as one of the principal Chicano organizations seeking social change. By the time MAYO evolved into the Raza Unida Party (RUP) in 1972, its influence had spread far beyond its Crystal City, Texas, origins. Its members precipitated some thirty-nine school walkouts, demonstrated against the Vietnam War, and confronted church and governmental bodies on numerous occasions.
Armando Navarro here offers the first comprehensive assessment of MAYO's history, politics, leadership, ideology, strategies and tactics, and activist program. Interviews with many MAYO and RUP organizers and members, as well as first-hand knowledge drawn from his own participation in meetings, presentations, and rallies, enrich the text.
This wealth of material yields the first reliable history of this extremely vocal and visible catalyst of the Chicano Movement. The book will add significantly to our understanding of Sixties protest movements and the social and political conditions that gave them birth.
Mexican Americans and Education begins with a brief overview of historical educational conditions that have impacted the experiences and opportunities of Mexican American students, and moves into an examination of major contemporary institutional barriers to academic success, including segregation, high-stakes testing, and curriculum tracking. Ballón also explores the status of Mexican American students in higher education and introduces theories and pedagogies that aim to understand and improve school conditions. Through her extensive examination of the major issues impacting Mexican American students, Ballón provides a broad introduction to an increasingly relevant topic.
Ballón uses understandable and accessible language to examine institutional and ideological factors that have negatively impacted Mexican Americans’ public school experiences, while also focusing on their strengths and possibilities for future action. This unique overview serves as a foundation for both education and Chicana/o studies courses, as well as in teacher and professional development.
Given recent developments in health care and policy and a steadily increasing population of people of Mexican origin in the United States, a comprehensive look at Mexican American health has never been more necessary. Adela de la Torre and Antonio Estrada first accomplished such an overview with Mexican Americans and Health in 2001, and they have since continued to revise and expand their initial work. With a multitude of additions and renovations, Mexican Americans and Health, 2nd Edition provides a timely and accessible description of current topics in Latino health.
De la Torre and Estrada once again present a broad and nuanced understanding of recent issues involving Mexican American health and well-being, this time with the addition of discussions on:
* the new U.S. Human Development Index to contextualize the health, education, and income status of Mexican Americans relative to other population groups,
* emerging diseases, such as diabetes and obesity,
* recent health-care reforms under the Obama administration,
* substance abuse, sexual risk, and psychological distress among HIV-positive individuals in the gay/bisexual community,
* and predictions of future trends for the next decade.
This new volume has been updated throughout to reflect the many developments in health care since its first edition. Mexican Americans and Health, 2nd Edition continues to present data on a large number of health issues that are important and relevant to the Mexican American population, while describing the social contexts in which they are occurring. Its comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach brings originality and focus to a dynamic literature.
- how values such as machismo, familismo, and marianismo influence care-seeking decisions and treatment of illness;
- how factors such as cultural values, socioeconomic status, peer pressure, and family concerns can contribute to substance abuse;
- how cultural attitudes toward sex can heighten the risk of AIDS—and how approaches to AIDS prevention and education need to reflect core cultural values such as familismo, respeto, and confianza. The book also addresses concerns of Mexican Americans regarding the health care system. These include not only access to care and to health insurance but also the shortage of bilingual and bicultural health care professionals. This coverage stresses not only the importance of linguistic competency but also the need to understand folklore illnesses, herbal remedies, and spiritual practices that can delay the treatment of illness and either complement or compromise treatment. Of all the issues that face the contemporary Mexican American community, none is as important to its very survival as health and health care. This timely book gives readers a broad understanding of these complex issues and points the way toward a healthier future for all people of Mexican origin. Mexican Americans and Health and Chicano Popular Culture are the first volumes in the series The Mexican American Experience, a cluster of modular texts designed to provide greater flexibility in undergraduate education. Each book deals with a single topic concerning the Mexican American population. Instructors can create a semester-length course from any combination of volumes, or may choose to use one or two volumes to complement other texts.
This book offers an overview of some of the central issues in the Mexican American language experience, describing it in terms of both bilingualism and minority status. It is the first book to focus on the historical, social, political, and structural aspects of multiple languages in the Mexican American experience and to address the principles and methods of applied sociolinguistic research in the Mexican American community. Spanish and non-Spanish speakers in the Mexican American community share a common set of social and ethnic bonds. They also share a common experience of bilingualism.
As Martínez observes, the ideas that have been constructed around bilingualism are as important to understanding the Mexican American language experience as bilingualism itself. Mexican Americans and Language gives students the background they need to respond to the multiple social problems that can result from the language differences that exist in the Mexican American community. By showing students how to go from word to deed (del dicho al hecho), it reinforces the importance of language for their community, and for their own lives and futures.
Each chapter highlights historical contexts, relevant laws, and policy concerns for a specific issue and features abridged versions of significant state and federal cases involving Mexican Americans. Beginning with People v. Zammora (1940), the trial that was a precursor to the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles during World War II, the authors lead students through some of the most important and precedent-setting cases in American law:
- Educational equality: from segregation concerns in Méndez v. Westminster (1946) to unequal funding in San Antonio Independent School District vs. Rodríguez (1973)
- Gender issues: reproductive rights in Madrigal v. Quilligan (1981), workplace discrimination in EEOC v. Hacienda Hotel (1989), sexual violence in Aguirre-Cervantes v. INS (2001)
- Language rights: Ýñiguez v. Arizonans for Official English (1995), García v. Gloor (1980), Serna v. Portales Municipal Schools (1974)
- Immigration-: search and seizure questions in U.S. v. Brignoni-Ponce (1975) and U.S. v. Martínez-Fuerte (1976); public benefits issues in Plyler v. Doe (1982) and League of United Latin American Citizens v. Wilson (1997)
- Voting rights: redistricting in White v. Regester (1973) and Bush v. Vera (1996)
- Affirmative action: Hopwood v. State of Texas (1996) and Coalition for Economic Equity v. Wilson (1997)
- Criminal justice issues: equal protection in Hernández v. Texas (1954); jury service in Hernández v. New York (1991); self incrimination in Miranda v. Arizona (1966); access to legal counsel in Escobedo v. Illinois (1964)
With coverage as timely as the 2003 Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, Mexican Americans and the Law offers invaluable insight into legal issues that have impacted Mexican Americans, other Latinos, other racial minorities, and all Americans. Discussion questions, suggested readings, and Internet sources help students better comprehend the intricacies of law.
Honorable Mention, Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award, presented by the Racial and Ethnic Minorities Section of the American Sociological Association, 2015
With Mexican Americans constituting a large and growing segment of U.S. society, their assimilation trajectory has become a constant source of debate. Some believe Mexican Americans are following the path of European immigrants toward full assimilation into whiteness, while others argue that they remain racialized as nonwhite. Drawing on extensive interviews with Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants in Texas, Dowling’s research challenges common assumptions about what informs racial labeling for this population. Her interviews demonstrate that for Mexican Americans, racial ideology is key to how they assert their identities as either in or outside the bounds of whiteness. Emphasizing the link between racial ideology and racial identification, Dowling offers an insightful narrative that highlights the complex and highly contingent nature of racial identity.
Up to 750,000 Mexican American men served in World War II, earning more Medals of Honor and other decorations in proportion to their numbers than any other ethnic group. Mexican American women entered the workforce on the home front, supporting the war effort and earning good wages for themselves and their families. But the contributions of these men and women have been largely overlooked as American society celebrates the sacrifices and achievements of the "Greatest Generation." To bring their stories out of the shadows, this book gathers eleven essays that explore the Mexican American experience in World War II from a variety of personal and scholarly perspectives.
The book opens with accounts of the war's impact on individuals and families. It goes on to look at how the war affected school experiences; how Mexican American patriotism helped to soften racist attitudes; how Mexican Americans in the Midwest, unlike their counterparts in other regions of the country, did not experience greater opportunities as a result of the war; how the media exposed racist practices in Texas; and how Mexican nationals played a role in the war effort through the Bracero program and through the Mexican government's championing of Mexican Americans' rights. As a whole, the collection reveals that World War II was the turning point that gave most Mexican Americans their first experience of being truly included in American society, and it confirms that Mexican Americans of the "Greatest Generation" took full advantage of their new opportunities as the walls of segregation fell.
The Mexican aristocracy today is simultaneously an anachronism and a testimony to the persistence of social institutions. Shut out from political power by the democratization movements of the twentieth century, stripped of the basis of its great wealth by land reforms in the 1930s, the aristocracy nonetheless maintains a strong sense of group identity through the deeply held belief that their ancestors were the architects and rulers of Mexico for nearly four hundred years.
This expressive ethnography describes the transformation of the Mexican aristocracy from the onset of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, when the aristocracy was unquestionably Mexico's highest-ranking social class, until the end of the twentieth century, when it had almost ceased to function as a superordinate social group. Drawing on extensive interviews with group members, Nutini maps out the expressive aspects of aristocratic culture in such areas as perceptions of class and race, city and country living, education and professional occupations, political participation, religion, kinship, marriage and divorce, and social ranking. His findings explain why social elites persist even when they have lost their status as ruling and political classes and also illuminate the relationship between the aristocracy and Mexico's new political and economic plutocracy.
The Mexican Border Cities draws on extensive field research to examine eighteen settlements along the 2,000-mile border, ranging from towns of less than 10,000 people to dynamic metropolises of nearly a million. The authors chronicle the cities' growth and compare their urban structure, analyzing them in terms of tourist districts, commercial landscapes, residential areas, and industrial and transportation quarters.
Arreola and Curtis contend that, despite their proximity to the United States, the border cities are fundamentally Mexican places, as distinguished by their cultural landscapes, including town plan, land-use pattern, and building fabric. Their study, richly illustrated with over 75 maps and photographs, offers a provocative and insightful interpretation of the geographic anatomy and personality of these fascinating—and rapidly changing—communities.
Mexican Chicago builds on previous studies of Mexicans in the United States while challenging static definitions of “American” and underlying assumptions of assimilation. Gabriela F. Arredondo contends that because of the revolutionary context from which they came, Mexicans in Chicago between 1916 and 1939 were not just another ethnic group working to be assimilated into a city that has a long history of incorporating newcomers. Suggesting a new understanding of identity formation, she argues that Mexicans wielded tools of identification forged in revolutionary Mexico to collectively battle the prejudices of ethnic groups that included Poles, Italians, and the Irish, as well as African Americans. By turning inward, however, Mexicans also highlighted tremendous differences among themselves, such as gender and class. In discussing this distinctive process of becoming “Mexican” in Chicago during the early twentieth century, Arredondo not only explores how that identity was constructed but also provides telling insight into the repercussions of that identity formation process.
Winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature, J. M. G. Le Clézio here conjures the consciousness of Mexico, powerfully evoking the dreams that made and unmade an ancient culture. Le Clézio’s haunting book takes us into the dream that was the religion of the Aztecs, a religion whose own apocalyptic visions anticipated the coming of the Spanish conquerors. Here the dream of the conquistadores rises before us, too, the glimmering idea of gold drawing Europe into the Mexican dream. Against the religion and thought of the Aztecs and the Tarascans and the Europeans in Mexico, Le Clézio also shows us those of the “barbarians” of the north, the nomadic Indians beyond the pale of the Aztec frontier.
Finally, Le Clézio’s book is a dream of the present, a meditation on what in Amerindian civilizations—in their language, in their way of telling tales, of wanting to survive their own destruction—moved the poet, playwright, and actor Antonin Artaud and motivates Le Clézio in this book. His own deep identification with pre-Columbian cultures, whose faith told them the wheel of time would bring their gods and their beliefs back to them, finds fitting expression in this extraordinary book, which brings the dream around.
“We are lucky to have in Le Clézio a writer of great quality who brings his particular sensibility and talent here to remind us of the very nature of the rituals and myths of the civilizations of ancient Mexico; he provides us with descriptions as precise as they are mysterious.”—Le Figaro
During the same era, capitalist modernization in the United States was creating a strong demand for low-paid, unskilled labor, especially for agricultural and railroad work. Mexico's newly created class of migrant workers rushed across the border to fill this demand, setting in motion a social, economic, and political phenomenon that Lawrence Cardoso analyzed here in detail. What set this study apart, however, is the author's focus on the ' Human element," as revealed through the Mexican workers' hopes, fears, and reactions to events of their time.
Urban Los Angeles is the setting in which Elaine Miller has collected her narratives from Mexican-Americans. The Mexican folk tradition, varied and richly expressive of the inner life not only of a people but also of the individual as each lives it and personalizes it, is abundantly present in the United States. Since it is in the urban centers that most Mexican-Americans have lived, this collection represents an important contribution to the study of that tradition and to the study of the changes urban life effects on traditional folklore.
The collection includes sixty-two legendary narratives and twenty traditional tales. The legendary narratives deal with the virgins and saints as well as with such familiar characters as the vanishing hitchhiker, the headless horseman, and the llorona. Familiar characters appear in the traditional tales—Juan del Oso, Blancaflor, Pedro de Ordimalas, and others. Elaine Miller concludes that the traditional tales are dying out in the city because tale telling itself is not suited to the fast pace of modern urban life, and the situations and characters in the tales are not perceived by the people to be meaningfully related to the everyday challenges and concerns of that life. The legendary tales survive longer in an urban setting because, although containing fantastic elements, they are related to the beliefs and hopes of the narrator—even in the city one may be led to buried treasure on some dark night by a mysterious woman.
The penchant of the informants for the fantastic in many of their tales often reflects their hopes and fears, such as their dreams of suddenly acquiring wealth or their fears of being haunted by the dead. Miller closely observes the teller's relation to the stories—to the duendes, the ánimas, Death, God, the devil—and she notes the tension on the part of the informant in his relation to their religion.
The material is documented according to several standard tale and motif indices and is placed within the context of the larger body of Hispanic folk tradition by the citation of parallel versions throughout the Hispanic world. The tales, transcribed from taped interviews, are presented in colloquial Spanish accompanied by summaries in English.
Presents the broad picture and analysis of excavations at three cultural centers in central Mexico
This classic work published in 1942, ten years after archaeological excavations were begun in the Valley of Mexico by Linné's team, presents additional data that had not been fully detailed in the previously published Archaeological Researches at Teotihuacan. It provides comparative information on the high-status ruins situated on the fringes of the Valley of Mexico and excavation results from a compound within the city of Teotihuacan. This information is of critical use to archaeologists still excavating at Teotihuacan in projecting compound extent, types of artifacts expected to be discovered, and patterns of artifacts to be found in particular types of rooms. The characteristics of burials is also explored.
This book, along with its predecessor, is an important primary resource for Americanists. Staffan Brunius's foreword offers a broad background of Linné's life and work. The introduction by George Cowgill focuses more specifically on the conduct and impact of the archaeological exavations.
G. C. Vaillant has stated, "The greatest achievement of Dr. Linné from the viewpoint of the general student is the presentation of a technical field excavation in such terms that anyone can follow his text and see the relationship between the details of position of specimens and the larger problems of history and anthropology."
Sigvald Linné was Professor of Ethnography at the University of Stockholm and Director of the Swedish National Museum of Ethnography until 1969. He published several other books, including The Technique of South American Ceramics. Staffan Brunius
is Curator of the Americas at the National Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm. George L. Cowgill is Professor of Anthropology at Arizona State University and coeditor of The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations.
Additional reviews:
This book . . . makes Linne's work widely available again to those interested and may prompt a new generation of specialists to examine the original material either in Stockholm's National Museum of Ethnography, Mexico's Museo Nacional de Antropologia or the Teotihuacan site itself. Testament to the lasting value of Linne's work is given in a succinct and helpful new introduction by anthropologist George L. Cowgill. A more recent curator of the Americas at Stockholm's ethnographical museum, Steffan Brunius, also chips in with a brief contextualization of Linne's work against the background of the early Swedish-American tradition.—The Historian
Hometown associations (HTAs) consist of immigrants from the same town in Mexico and often begin quite informally, as soccer clubs or prayer groups. As Bada’s work shows, however, HTAs have become a powerful force for change, advocating for Mexican immigrants in the United States while also working to improve living conditions in their communities of origin. Focusing on a group of HTAs founded by immigrants from the state of Michoacán, the book shows how their activism has bridged public and private spheres, mobilizing social reforms in both inner-city Chicago and rural Mexico.
Bringing together ethnography, political theory, and archival research, Bada excavates the surprisingly long history of Chicago’s HTAs, dating back to the 1920s, then traces the emergence of new models of community activism in the twenty-first century. Filled with vivid observations and original interviews, Mexican Hometown Associations in Chicagoacán gives voice to an underrepresented community and sheds light on an underexplored form of global activism.
Winner, Khayrallah Migration Studies Prize, Moise Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies, 2018
Migration from the Middle East brought hundreds of thousands of people to the Americas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the time the Ottoman political system collapsed in 1918, over a third of the population of the Mashriq, i.e. the Levant, had made the transatlantic journey. This intense mobility was interrupted by World War I but resumed in the 1920s and continued through the late 1940s under the French Mandate. Many migrants returned to their homelands, but the rest concentrated in Brazil, Argentina, the United States, Haiti, and Mexico, building transnational lives.
The Mexican Mahjar provides the first global history of Middle Eastern migrations to Mexico. Making unprecedented use of French colonial archives and historical ethnography, Camila Pastor examines how French colonial control over Syria and Lebanon affected the migrants. Tracing issues of class, race, and gender through the decades of increased immigration to Mexico and looking at the narratives created by the Mahjaris (migrants) themselves in both their old and new homes, Pastor sheds new light on the creation of transnational networks at the intersection of Arab, French, and Mexican colonial modernisms. Revealing how migrants experienced mobility as conquest, diaspora, exile, or pilgrimage, The Mexican Mahjar tracks global history on an intimate scale.
A fascinating examination of masculinity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexico
The first of its kind and a powerful challenge to customary views of gender and sexuality in the life and literature of Mexico, this book traces literary representations of masculinity in Mexico from independence in 1810 to the 1960s, and shows how these intersect with the constructions of nation and nationality.
The rhetoric of “Mexicanness” makes constant use of images of masculinity, though it does so in shifting and often contradictory ways. Robert McKee Irwin’s work follows these shifts from the male homosocial bonding that was central to notions of national integration in the nineteenth century, to questioning of gender norms stirred by science and scandals at the turn of the century, to the virulent reaction against gender chaos after the Mexican revolution, to the association of Mexicanness with machismo and homophobia in the literature of the 1940s and 1950s—even as male homosexuality was established as an integral part of national culture.As the first historical study of how masculinity and, particularly, homosexuality were understood in Mexico in the national era, this book not only provides “queer readings” of most major canonical texts of the period in question, but also uncovers a variety of unknown texts from queer Mexican history, including the 1906 novel Los 41, which reenacts the scandal of a turn-of-the-century transvestite ball that launched modern discussion of homosexuality in Mexico. It is a radical undermining of the simple hetero/homosexual and masculine/feminine oppositions that have for so long informed views of the country’s national character.
Borderlands migration has been the subject of considerable study, but the authorship has usually reflected a north-of-the-border perspective only. Gathering a transnational group of prominent researchers, including leading Mexican scholars whose work is not readily available in the United States and academics from US universities, Mexican Migration to the United States brings together an array of often-overlooked viewpoints, reflecting the interconnectedness of immigration policy.
This collection’s research, principally empirical, reveals significant aspects of labor markets, family life, and educational processes. Presenting recent data and accessible explanations of complex histories, the essays capture the evolving legal frameworks and economic implications of Mexico-US migrations at the national and municipal levels, as well as the experiences of receiving communities in the United States. The volume includes illuminating reports on populations ranging from undocumented young adults to elite Mexican women immigrants, health-care rights, Mexico’s incorporation of return migration, the impact of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals on higher education, and the experiences of young children returning to Mexican schools after living in the United States. Reflecting a multidisciplinary approach, the list of contributors includes anthropologists, demographers, economists, educators, policy analysts, and sociologists.
Underscoring the fact that Mexican migration to the United States is unique and complex, this timely work exemplifies the cross-border collaboration crucial to the development of immigration policies that serve people in both countries.
People of Mexican descent and Anglo Americans have lived together in the U.S. Southwest for over a hundred years, yet relations between them remain strained, as shown by recent controversies over social services for undocumented aliens in California. In this study, covering the Spanish colonial period to the present day, Martha Menchaca delves deeply into interethnic relations in Santa Paula, California, to document how the residential, social, and school segregation of Mexican-origin people became institutionalized in a representative California town.
Menchaca lived in Santa Paula during the 1980s, and interviews with residents add a vivid human dimension to her book. She argues that social segregation in Santa Paula has evolved into a system of social apartness—that is, a cultural system controlled by Anglo Americans that designates the proper times and places where Mexican-origin people can socially interact with Anglos.
This first historical ethnographic case study of a Mexican-origin community will be important reading across a spectrum of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, race and ethnicity, Latino studies, and American culture.
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