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...
In the Brazilian Amazon region, cultural “mixture” is expressed in the interaction of city and hinterland, of Indigenous and Black, of religiosity and politics. By examining the multiple cultural and ethnic threads that traverse this landscape, The Amazonian Puzzle sets out to show how the category of caboclo (a powerful spiritual entity to some, and to others a despised peasant of mixed ancestry) reveals deep currents of ethnic recompositions, religious interpenetration, and social hierarchy....
The Latin American (Counter-) Road Movie and Ambivalent Modernity (New Directions in Latino American Cultures)
by Nadia Lie
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 ethnology follows the lives of the Canela Indians of Barra do Corda, Maranhao, Brazil from 1890s to the present. Based on more than five collective years of fieldwork since 1957, it relates how this surviving nation of the Timbira group has retained its traditional culture, including an elaborate bonding system of kinship, ritual, meetings, complex festivals and sex. This case study challenges western conceptions of socialization for sex as well as adult sexual behaviour. Features: * Provi...
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...
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.
Chican@s in the Conversations (A Longman Topics Reader)
by Elizabeth R Kessler and Anne Perrin
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.
Gastropolitics and the Specter of Race (California Studies in Food and Culture, #76)
by Maria Elena Garcia
In recent years, Peru has transformed from a war-torn country to a global high-end culinary destination. Connecting chefs, state agencies, global capital, and Indigenous producers, this “gastronomic revolution” makes powerful claims: food unites Peruvians, dissolves racial antagonisms, and fuels development. Gastropolitics and the Specter of Race critically evaluates these claims and tracks the emergence of Peruvian gastropolitics, a biopolitical and aesthetic set of practices that reinscribe do...
The Xavante in Transition (Human-Environment Interactions)
by Carlos E.A. Coimbra and etc.
"The Xavante in Transition" presents a diachronic view of the long and complex interaction between the Xavante, an indigenous people of the Brazilian Amazon, and the surrounding nation, documenting the effects of this interaction on Xavante health, ecology, and biology.A powerful example of how a small-scale society, buffeted by political and economic forces at the national level and beyond, attempts to cope with changing conditions, this study will be important reading for demographers, economi...
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...
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.
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 book explores how young Cuban filmmakers have expanded the range of sexual subjectivities on screen. It analyzes cine joven (films made by young directors) from the late 1980s to the early 2020s, film reviews, articles, and materials from the Cinematheque of Cuba's archive to illustrate the confluence of sexuality, cinema, and discourses of youth. While sexual and cinematic cultures have their own unique relation to the public sphere, state institutions, and transnational flows, this book e...
An ethnography of the Ecuadorian Amazon that demonstrates the need for a relational, place-based, contingent understanding of harm and toxicity. Reckoning with Harm is a striking ethnographic analysis of the harm resulting from oil extraction. Covering fifty years of settler colonization and industrial transformation of the Ecuadorian Amazon, Amelia Fiske interrogates the relations of harm. She moves between forest-courtrooms and oily waste pits, farms and toxic tours, to explore both the ways...
China in Argentina (Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia)
This is the first book to shed light on the growing presence, influence and expansion of China in the daily life of Argentina. While most previous academic studies focus on the geopolitical and macroeconomics dimensions of the relations between Argentina and China, this book shows at a micro-social level the multiple facets of the economic, political and social influence of China in Argentina. The book presents ethnographic studies of encounters of actors and negotiation of identities from Argen...
In this collective work, researchers from different disciplines reflect upon the challenges and opportunities of decolonizing transpacific studies through the lens of a few paradigmatic case-studies that deal with connections between East Asia and Latin America. The present book offers a productive problematization of the idea of the transpacific as a concept and a space that is not restricted to a single definition. We defend that the transpacific can instead promote an understanding of agents...
Supervivencia indígena en la Nicaragua colonial (Open access titles)
by Linda A. Newson
Race in Contemporary Brazil
Brazil’s traditionally agrarian economy, based initially on slave labor and later on rural labor and tenancy arrangements, established inequalities that have not diminished even with industrial development and urban growth. While fertility and infant mortality rates have dropped significantly and life expectancy has increased during the past thirty years, the gaps in mortality between rich and poor have remained constant. And among the poor of different races, including the 45 percent of Brazil’...
Exploring three major hubs of muralist activity in California, where indigenist imagery is prevalent, Walls of Empowerment celebrates an aesthetic that seeks to firmly establish Chicana/o sociopolitical identity in U.S. territory. Providing readers with a history and genealogy of key muralists' productions, Guisela Latorre also showcases new material and original research on works and artists never before examined in print. An art form often associated with male creative endeavors, muralism in f...
This is an examination of the social structures that shape Latin American societies. Knowledge of demography, rural and urban life, and ethnic and status relationships is critical for understanding the political and economic fabric of those societies. Although the author draws on materials from all the social sciences, the primary frame of reference is sociological. The book presents, in an organized form, the findings from an ever-growing number of studies about Latin American society. The boo...
This informed and accessible book captures the art, energy, passion, and pageantry of over 60 years of lowrider culture—an absolutely iconic Chicano and American phenomenon. Much like rap music and ethnic foods, Chicano lowrider culture has become sufficiently widespread in recent decades to almost be considered "mainstream." However, those outside of lowriding may not realize that this cultural phenomenon is not the result of a recent fad—it originated in the pre–World War II era, and has conti...
Under a Watchful Eye (Ethnographic Studies in Subjectivity, #9) (Ethnographic Studies in Subjectivity Vol.9)
by Harry Walker
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...