Explores and problematizes 'difference' as a feminist concept and its application to the Carribean. Considers the linguistic diversity of the region - English, Spanish, Dutch and French - and the variety of ethnic, racial, class and regional variation in gender and gender ideologies.
Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza (New Directions in Latino American Cultures)
by A. Cruz-Malave
In the tradition of the Latin American testimonio, this is the story of Juan Rivera, a.k.a. Juanito Xtravaganza, a Latino runaway youth who ends up homeless in the streets of New York in the late 70s and becomes partner of the internationally famous 1980s Pop artist Keith Haring during some of the most frenetically productive years of his brief life, as told to the author and retold by him. A hybrid text - part testimonio, part linguistic and cultural analysis, and part art criticism - this is a...
In Circuits of the Sacred Carlos Ulises Decena examines transnational black Latinx Caribbean immigrant queer life and spirit. Decena models what he calls a faggotology—the erotic in the divine as found in the disreputable and the excessive—as foundational to queer black critical and expressive praxis of the future. Drawing on theoretical analysis, memoir, creative writing, and ethnography of Santería/Lucumí in Santo Domingo, Havana, and New Jersey, Decena moves between languages, locations, pron...
Peruvian Street Lives (Interpretations of Culture in the New Millennium) (Interp Culture New Millennium)
by Linda J. Seligmann
Cultural study of the lives and struggles the women in the open-air markets of the Andean highlands of Cuzco face.
Lydia Cabrera and the Construction of an Afro-Cuban Cultural Identity (Envisioning Cuba)
by Edna M. Rodriguez-Plate
Lydia Cabrera (1900-1991), an upper-class white Cuban intellectual, spent many years traveling through Cuba collecting oral histories, stories, and music from Cubans of African descent. Her work is commonly viewed as an extension of the work of her famous brother-in-law, Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, who initiated the study of Afro-Cubans and the concept of transculturation. Here, Edna Rodriguez-Mangual challenges this perspective, proposing that Cabrera's work offers an alternative to th...
This wide-ranging book explores the origins, development, and character of Afro-Caribbean cultures from the slave period to the present day. Richard D. E. Burton focuses on ways in which African traditions—including those in religion, music, food, dress, and family structure—were transformed by interaction with European and indigenous forces to create the particular cultures of Jamaica, Trinidad, and Haiti. He demonstrates how the resulting Afro-Creole cultures have both challenged and reinforce...
Chicanos And Film
To date, film scholarship has not considered the issue of Chicano and Latino representation and participation in the American film industry. Genre criticism in particular has been all but blind to the presence of Chicanos in genres that have, at times, been constructed around a Chicano or Chicana "other" - Westerns, social problem films, and the more recent urban violence film. Additionally, Chicano studies draw upon the scholarship of Chicano politics, narrative and visual art, and cultural stu...
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 marke...
On October 15, 1983, a young mother of six was murdered while walking across her village of Huitzilan de Serdan, Mexico, with her infant son and one of her daughters. This woman, Victoria Bonilla, was among more than one hundred villagers who perished in violence that broke out soon after the Mexican army chopped down a cornfield that had been planted on an unused cattle pasture by forty Nahuat villagers. In this anthropological account, based on years of fieldwork in Huitzilan, James M. Taggart...
When Nathan Wachtel, the historical anthropologist, returned to the village of Chipaya, the site of his extensive fieldwork in the Bolivian Andes, he learned a group of Uru Indians was being incarcerated and tortured for no apparent reason. Even more strangely, no one - not even his closest informant and friend - would speak about it. Wachtel discovered that a series of recent deaths and misfortunes in Chipaya had been attributed to the evil powers of the Urus, a group usually regarded with susp...
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. The relationships between female sex workers and their noncommercial male partners are often assumed to be coercive and anchored in risk, dismissed as “pimp-prostitute” arrangements by researchers and the general public alike. Yet, these stereotypes unjustly erase the complexity of lives we imagine to be consumed by social suffering. Dangerous Love centers a framework of love to rethink sex workers’ intimat...
Gang Strategies in the Northern Triangle: Coerced Criminality as a Form of Human Trafficking argues for a more robust understanding of the issues, dynamics, and contextual factors of human trafficking. Relying on the definition as established by the Palermo Protocol more than two decades ago, this book takes a hard look at the strategies and results of gang “recruitment” in the Northern Triangle countries as a particular and understudied form of human trafficking—gang trafficking. It offers a le...
In Hemispheric Blackface, Danielle Roper examines blackface performance and its relationship to twentieth- and twenty-first-century nationalist fictions of mestizaje, creole nationalism, and other versions of postracialism in the Americas. Challenging both the dominance of the US minstrel tradition and the focus on the nation in blackface studies, Roper maps a hemispheric network of racial impersonation in Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Jamaica, Cuba, and Miami. She analyzes blackface performance in t...
The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940 (Critical Reflections on Latin America)
Caribbean Women (African American Intellectual Heritage)
by Veronica Marie Gregg
In this volume, the first in a two-part anthology of non-fiction writings by Caribbean women, Veronica Marie Gregg has collected works written from the turn of the nineteenth century to 1980. Her selections are guided by a search for answers to the questions: What have West Indian women contributed to the creation of Anglophone Caribbean society, politics, cultures, and intellectual traditions? How is Caribbean womanhood defined and articulated? Beginning with the writings of generations of wome...
Voices in the Kitchen (Rio Grande/Rio Bravo: Borderlands Culture and Tradition)
by Meredith E. Abarca
Through the ages and across cultures, women have carved out a domain in which their cooking allowed them to express themselves, strengthen family relationships, and create a world of shared meanings with other women. In ""Voices in the Kitchen"", Meredith E. Abarca features the voices of her mother and several other family members and friends, seated at their kitchen tables, to share the grassroots world view of these working-class Mexican and Mexican American women. In the kitchen, Abarca demon...
Shaped over a period of twenty years, this is an elegantly written, scholarly but highly accessible, collection of essays that are essentially a map of how one of the Caribbean's most distinguished historians has sought to discover himself through practise of his craft. It covers new ground in Indo-Caribbean history primarily, but it also explores innovatively aspects of the intellectual legacy of four eminent Caribbean writers and thinkers: Guyanese poet, Martin Carter, Guyanese historian, Walt...
Chilean musician and artist Violeta Parra (1917–1967) is an inspiration to generations of artists and activists across the globe. Her music is synonymous with resistance, and it animated both the Chilean folk revival and the protest music movement Nueva Cancion (New Song). Her renowned song ""Gracias a la vida"" has been covered countless times, including by Joan Baez, Mercedes Sosa, and Kacey Musgraves. A self-taught visual artist, Parra was the first Latin American to have a solo exhibition at...
Sport in the Black Atlantic (Globalizing Sport Studies)
by Janelle Joseph
This book outlines the ways sport helps to create transnational social fields that interconnect migrants dispersed across a region known as the Black Atlantic: England, North America and the Caribbean. Many Caribbean men's stories about their experiences migrating to Canada, settling in Toronto, finding jobs and travelling involved some contact with a cricket and social club. It offers a unique contribution to black diaspora studies through showing sport in Canada as a means of contending with a...
This book examines the emergence of the black middle classes in urban Brazil, after 30 years of black mobilization and against the backdrop of deep economic, cultural, and political transformations taking place in recent decades within the country. One of the consequences of such transformations is said to be the restructuring of gender, race, and class relations. Utilizing qualitative research techniques such as ethnography, interviews, life histories, and focus groups among Afro-descendant fam...
Mas que un indio: "More than an Indian." Two decades ago, the phrase expressed a common-sense prescription for upward mobility in a racist society: to better themselves, Indians had to abandon their culture and identity. Ironically, today it captures the predicament of ladinos, members of Guatemala's dominant culture. In the 1990s, Maya people organized in diverse ways to challenge racism and achieve basic rights.They achieved a broad recognition of their cultural rights during the same time tha...