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The border between the United States and Mexico, despite attempts at containment, remains a vast and uniquely malleable yet indefinable region. With Border Culture, Ilan Stavans has collected essays representative of the tangled experiences and issues central to life between cultures. Divided into two sections, Border Culture covers topics essential to better understanding this often misunderstood region and state-of-mind. The first section, "Considerations," culls essays covering socio-economi...

Haiti, long noted for poverty and repression, has a powerful and too-often-overlooked history of resistance. Women in Haiti have played a large role in changing the balance of political and social power, even as they have endured rampant and devastating state-sponsored violence, including torture, rape, abuse, illegal arrest, disappearance, and assassination.Beverly Bell, an activist and an expert on Haitian social movements, brings together thirty-eight oral histories from a diverse group of Ha...

In this groundbreaking study based on archival research about Chicana and Chicano prisoners-known as Pintas and Pintos-as well as fresh interpretations of works by renowned Pinta and Pinto authors and activists, B. V. Olguin provides crucial insights into the central roles that incarceration and the incarcerated have played in the evolution of Chicana/o history, cultural paradigms, and oppositional political praxis. This is the first text on prisoners in general, and Chicana/o and Latina/o priso...

Marketing in the Emerging Markets of Latin America provides a much needed analysis of business and marketing in Latin America. The book highlights the diverse characteristics of the Latin American business and marketing environment and the dynamic nature of regional and country markets. Addressing a broad variety of historical, political, economic, social, cultural and legal issues, the book offers unique insights into the enormous opportunities and challenges the region presents for implementin...

The story of how Mesoamerican food activists faced down Monsanto . . . and wonRight before the 2014 World Cup, US trade interests pressured Guatemala’s legislature into lifting its national ban on genetically modified (GM) crops and criminalizing traditional seed saving practices. Maya elders responded with a campaign of mass civil disobedience, blocking highways until the Guatemalan Congress repealed this “Monsanto Law.” Uniting rural and urban Guatemalans, this uprising spotlighted the existen...

What does it mean to be accompanied? How can autonomy and a sense of self emerge through one's involvement with others? This book examines the formation of self among the Urarina, an Amazonian people of lowland Peru. Based on detailed ethnography, the analysis highlights the role of intimate but asymmetrical attachments and dependencies which begin in the womb, but can extend beyond human society to include a variety of animals, plants, spirits and material objects. It thereby raises fundamental...

Drawing on both personal experience and critical theory, Carole Boyce Davies illuminates the dynamic complexity of Caribbean culture and traces its migratory patterns throughout the Americas. Both a memoir and a scholarly study, Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zones explores the multivalent meanings of Caribbean space and community in a cross-cultural and transdisciplinary perspective. From her childhood in Trinidad and Tobago to life and work in communities and universities in Nigeria,...

This extraordinary ethnography is the first devoted to the study of revenge. The contributors describe this social phenomenon in fourteen tribal societies, comparing its violent manifestations as well as its more idiosyncratic forms. Blood revenge at spear point is common in certain regions of aboriginal lowland South America; in other areas revenge is implicated in seemingly unrelated areas of daily life, from child naming to explanations for sickness.Revenge is a universal human motive that re...

The Xilixana Yanomami, an Indian tribe of the northern Amazon Basin in Brazil, has been widely studied as the largest indigenous people to retain a traditional way of life. Breaking new ground, this book presents the most complete account available of the Yanomami before and after their encounter with the modern world.

A Mexican Dream and Other Compositions presents a rare collection of interwoven essays chronicling the fascinating history of the Cigarroa family and their influence on the Texas-Mexico border landscape. Barbara González Cigarroa brings to life stories of her ancestors and other family members, including: Rebecca Iriarte, who raised her fi ve children during the Mexican Revolution of 1910; Judge Manuel J. Raymond, one of the last of the border patrones who expertly navigated contrasting culture...

This book examines the roots of systemic aggression against women in contemporary Mexico, and the connection between social practices and the institutional permissiveness of the Mexican State with regard to gendered violence. Since the democratic transition at the end of the 1990s, Mexico has registered an increase in the intensity and types of violence that have made life in some regions almost unsustainable. The chapters in this volume consider that capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy are...

Blackness Without Ethnicity draws on fifteen years of his research in Bahia, Rio Suriname, and Amsterdam. Sansone uses his findings to explore the very different ways that race and ethnicity are constructed in Brazil and the rest of Latin America. He compares these Latin American conceptions of race to dominate notions of race that are defined by a black-white polarity and clearly identifiable ethnicities, formulations he sees as highly influenced by the US and to a lesser degree Western Europe....

In Violence and Desire in Brazilian Lesbian Relationships, Allen examines the lives of Brazilian women in same-sex relationships. This examination contributes to interdisciplinary discussions of female same-sex sexuality, violence, race, and citizenship. Using fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, primarily with Afro-Brazilian women in the city of Salvador da Bahia, Allen argues that Brazilian lesbian women reject Brazilian cultural norms that encourage male domination and female submission...

Since 2006, Venezuela has witnessed an explosion of different forms of popular power and participatory democracy. Over 47,000 grassroots neighborhood-based communal councils and 3,000 communes have been constructed. In Communes and the Venezuelan State: The Struggle for Participatory Democracy in a Time of Crisis, Anderson Bean offers a critical analysis of these experiments in popular and workers' power and their potential for societal transformation within and beyond Venezuela. Drawing on exte...

In Love and its Entanglements among the Enxet of Paraguay: Social and Kinship Relations within a Market Economy, Stephen Kidd examines the social discourse and value systems of the Indigenous Enxet people. Kidd’s analysis focuses on how the Enxet navigate the market economy in Paraguay through their values of egalitarianism, generosity, and personal autonomy.

In Social Movements and Radical Populism in the Andes: Ecuador and Bolivia in Comparative Perspective, Jennifer N. Collins examines why the new left took the form of radical populism in Ecuador and Bolivia and how social movements were impacted by this development. Using a Laclauian approach, Collins argues that anti-neoliberal social movements provided the groundwork for populist identity formation. This book also offers a nuanced and insightful explanation for the decline of Ecuador's indigeno...

This book highlights important but insufficiently documented dimensions of the experience of English-speaking Caribbean immigrants in the United States. It focuses on successes and challenges of what might be perceived as “living in two worlds.” The central theme, post-migration transnational connections, is informed by new research on the topic. The thrust of the book is on trends, practices, and policies pertaining to transnational issues, and it uses both academic and applied approaches in it...

The idea of "racial democracy" in Latin American populations has traditionally assumed that class is a more significant factor than race. But, despite the emergence of a "mesitizo" class - people who are culturally and racially mixed in the broadest sense - there remains a complex discrimination against blacks. To explain this phenomenon, Peter Wade focuses on the black population of the Choco province in Colombia - an area where the typical Latin American ambiguity surrounding racial identity i...

How the US asylum process fails to protect against claims of gender-based violence Through eyewitness accounts of closed-court proceedings and powerful testimony from women who have sought asylum in the United States because of severe assaults and death threats by intimate partners and/or gang members, Private Violence examines how immigration laws and policies shape the lives of Latin American women who seek safety in the United States. Carol Cleaveland and Michele Waslin describe the women’s h...

This book offers a comprehensive and systematic overview of the flourishing genre of the contemporary Latin American road movie, of which Diarios de motocicleta and Y tu mamá también are only the best-known examples. It offers the first systematic survey of the genre and explains why the road movie is key to contemporary Latin American cinema and society. Proposing the new category of “counter-road movie,” and paying special attention to the genre’s intricate relationship to modernity, Nadia Lie...

This volume explores the recent ‘adolescent turn’ in contemporary Latin American cinema, challenging many of the underlying assumptions about the nature of youth and distinguishing adolescence as a distinct and vital area of study. Its contributors examine the narrative and political potential of teenage protagonists in a range of recent films from the region, acknowledging the distinct emotional registers that are at play throughout adolescence and releasing teenage subjectivities from restrict...

This brief, affordable reader takes a provocative look at critical issues facing the Chican@ communities today and provides thought-provoking questions and writing topics for each reading.

Moving beyond catfish and collard greens to the soul of African American cooking Ranging over the progression from seventeenth-century West African fare to contemporary fusion dishes using \u0022soul food\u0022 ingredients, this book provides an introduction to many aspects of African American foodways. Examining the combination of African, Caribbean, and South American traditions, the volume's contributors offer insights from history, literary studies, sociology, anthropology, and African Ameri...