Private Violence (Latina/o Sociology)
by Carol Cleaveland and Michele Waslin
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...
She is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body traces the history of the Cuban mulata and her association with hips, sensuality and popular dance. It examines how the mulata choreographs her racialised identity through her hips and enacts an embodied theory called hip(g)nosis. By focusing on her living and dancing body in order to flesh out the process of identity formation, this book makes a claim for how subaltern bodies negotiate a cultural identity that continues to mark their bodies on a daily...
Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives (Dialogos)
Almost eleven of the twelve million Africans who survived the trauma of enslavement in Africa and the horrors of the Middle Passage, remade their lives in territories claimed by Spain or Portugal. Drawing on a wealth of previously unused sources, the authors show that although plantation slavery was a horrible reality for many Africans and their descendants in Latin America, blacks experienced many other realities in Iberian colonies. Paul Lovejoy analyses a treatise by a seventeenth-century Mus...
Blackness and Race Mixture (Johns Hopkins Studies in Atlantic History and Culture)
by Peter Wade
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...
México's Nobodies (SUNY series, Genders in the Global South)
by Christine B. Arce
As cultural mediators, Chamelco's market women offer a model of contemporary Q'eqchi' identity grounded in the strength of the Maya historical legacy. Guatemala's Maya communities have faced nearly five hundred years of constant challenges to their culture, from colonial oppression to the instability of violent military dictatorships and the advent of new global technologies. In spite of this history, the people of San Juan Chamelco, Guatemala, have effectively resisted significant changes to t...
Mobilizing Ethnic Identity in the Andes examines why some groups choose to organize themselves based on ethnic identity, that is, why ethnic identities are mobilized and politicized by some populations and not others. It demonstrates that the mobilization of ethnic identity is a political choice, and it is not necessarily the first or natural choice of a group of people who have grievances with their government. The book provides an argument as to when that choice to mobilize an ethnic, as oppos...
Border Culture (The Ilan Stavans Library of Latino Civilization)
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...
Brazilian Cinema and the Aesthetics of Ruins (World Cinema)
by Guilherme Carréra
Winner of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) 2023 Award for Best First Monograph. Winner of the Association of Moving Image Researchers (AIM) 2022 Award for Best Monograph. Guilherme Carréra’s compelling book examines imagery of ruins in contemporary Brazilian cinema and considers these representations in the context of Brazilian society. Carréra analyses three groups of unconventional documentaries focused on distinct geographies: Brasília - The Age of S...
Revenge in the Cultures of Lowland South America
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 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...
Public Loves, Private Troubles (Contemporary Issues and Methods in Indigenous Studies)
by Meghan Farley Webb
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...
This impassioned and rigorous analysis of the territorial plight of the Q'eqchi Maya of Guatemala highlights an urgent problem for indigenous communities around the world - repeated displacement from their lands. Liza Grandia uses the tools of ethnography, history, cartography, and ecology to explore the recurring enclosures of Guatemala's second largest indigenous group, who number a million strong. Having lost most of their highland territory to foreign coffee planters at the end of the 19th c...
Water for All chronicles how Bolivians democratized water access, focusing on the Cochabamba region, the country's third largest city and most important agricultural valley. Covering the period from 1879 to 2019, Sarah T. Hines examines the conflict over control of the region's water sources, showing how communities of water users increased supply and extended distribution through collective labor and social struggle. Through analysis of a wide variety of sources from agrarian reform case record...
In this book, Amy K. King examines how violence between women in contemporary Caribbean and American texts is rooted in plantation slavery. Analyzing films, television shows, novels, short stories, poems, book covers, and paintings, King shows how contemporary media reuse salacious and stereotypical depictions of relationships between women living within the plantation system to confront its legacy in the present. The vestiges of these relationships--enslavers and enslaved women, employers and d...
Focusing on the Bororo people of west-central Brazil, this book addresses the construction of self-identity through interethnic interaction. By presenting the images the Bororo have of themselves as well as the images of others who have interacted with them, Brazilian anthropologist Sylvia Caiuby Novaes argues convincingly that Bororo self-images are constructed with the aid of a peculiar looking-glass—it is in the images of others that they see themselves. Incorporating contributions from psyc...
David Rieff, author of "Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World", provides a personal and anecdotal examination of the phenomenon of Cuban exiles in south Florida, and their bittersweet experience of being torn between the imagined Eden of their home and their success in America. Exiled since the rise of Castro in 1959, in a foreign city less than 200 miles from their home, but unable to resist America's still-overwhelming attraction, they have transformed Miami from a tourist town to the paradi...
The Miskitu People of Awastara (LLILAS New Interpretations of Latin America)
by Philip A. Dennis
"Most anthropologists who have lived among other people . . . feel a periodic need to go back," writes Philip A. Dennis in the introduction to this book. "Fieldwork gives you a stake in the people themselves, a set of relationships that last the rest of your life . . . and when the time is right, it is important to go back." Dennis first journeyed to Awastara, a village on the northeastern coast of Nicaragua, during 1978-1979 as a postdoctoral student. He had come to study a culture-bound syndro...
In this groundbreaking volume, Juan José Baldrich traces the deep changes affecting Puerto Rican tobacco growers and manufacturers and their export markets from the Spanish colonization of the island to the present. Based on more than twenty years of research in the United States and Puerto Rico, the book sheds light on the important history of tobacco in Puerto Rico while highlighting the people and practices that have indelibly shaped Puerto Rico and its culture. Smoker beyond the Sea: The St...
This is the true story of how, against all odds, a remote Mexican pueblo built its own autonomous cell phone network-without help from telecom companies or the government. Anthropologist Roberto J. Gonzalez paints a vivid and nuanced picture of life in a Oaxaca mountain village and the collective tribulation, triumph, and tragedy the community experienced in pursuit of getting connected. In doing so, this book captures the challenges and contradictions facing Mexico's indigenous peoples today, a...