Salvadoran Migration to Southern California
Beth Baker-Cristales describes the ways in which migrants create multiple - and sometimes contradictory - relations to the states in which they live, demonstrating how the state becomes a central actor in the processes of globalization and transnationalism. Looking at the national state as both a form of governance and a powerful idea, she argues that the national state shapes the ways migrants conceive of themselves and the way they construct social identities. The web of transnational interact...
The early 1980s marked a critical turning point for the rise of modern mass incarceration in the United States. The Mariel Cuban migration of 1980, alongside increasing arrivals of Haitian and Central American asylum-seekers, galvanized new modes of covert warfare in the Reagan administration's globalized War on Drugs. Using newly available government documents, Shull demonstrates how migrant detention operates as a form of counterinsurgency at the intersections of U.S. war-making and domestic c...
São Paulo in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge Advances in Sociology)
This book analyzes in detail the main social, economic and special transformation of the city of São Paulo. In the last 30 years, São Paulo has become a more heterogeneous and less unequal city. Contrary to some expectations, the recent economic transformations did not produce social polarization, and the localized processes of spaces production (and the plural is increasingly important) are more and more key to define their respective growth patterns, social conditions, forms of housing product...
Constructing Collective Identities & Shaping Public Spheres
A collection of essays on the construction of Latin America's collective identities.
Begging as a Path to Progress
This title looks at challenging prejudices about the women and children who beg in Ecuadorian cities. In 1992, Calhuasi, an isolated Andean town, got its first road. Newly connected to Ecuador's large cities, Calhuasi experienced rapid social-spatial change, which Kate Swanson richly describes in ""Begging as a Path to Progress"". Based on nineteen months of fieldwork, Swanson's study pays particular attention to the ideas and practices surrounding youth. While begging seems to be inconsistent w...
Racism and Discourse in Latin America (Perspectives on a Multiracial America)
Racism and Discourse in Latin America investigates how public discourse is involved in the daily reproduction of racism in Latin America. The essays examine political discourse, mass media discourse, textbooks and other forms of text, and talk by the white symbolic elites, looking at the ways these discourses express and confirm prejudices against indigenous people and against people from African descent. The essays show that ethnic and racial inequality in Latin America continue to exacerbate t...
Economic and Financial Developments in Latin America (Centre for the Study of Emerging Markets)
This book evaluates the economic effect of monetary policies and exchange rate arrangements within Latin America. Using theoretical and empirical studies, the text examines pertinent issues in Argentina, Mexico and Brazil, including the role of currency board, inflation targeting and international prudential regulation in banking crisis reduction.
People of Substance is a lively, accessible ethnography of a complex indigenous group of people of the Colombian Amazon who call themselves ‘People of the Center. ’ Carlos David Londoño Sulkin examines this group's understandings and practices relating to selfhood, social organization, livelihood, and symbolism. Through this, he makes a strong case for increased anthropological attention to morality and ethics. Londoño Sulkin explains a number of key issues and debates in Amazonian anthropology...
The forced migration of Africans to the Americas through the trnasatlantic slave trade created primary centres of settlement in the Caribbean, Brazil and the United States – the cornerstones of the New World and the black Americas. However, unlike Brazil and the US, the Caribbean did not (and still does not) have the uniformity of a national framework. Instead, the region presents differing situations and social experiences born of the varying colonial systems from which they were developed. Us...
African-Brazilian Culture and Regional Identity in Bahia, Brazil (New World Diasporas)
by Scott Ickes
Salvador, the capital of the state of Bahia, is often referred to as “Brazil's Black Rome”. Culturally complex, vibrant, and rich with history, its African-descended population is one of the largest in Latin America. Yet despite representing a majority of the population, African-Bahians remain a marginalized racial group within the state as a whole. In African-Brazilian Culture and Regional Identity in Bahia, Brazil, Scott Ickes examines how in the middle of the twentieth century, African-Bahi...
Growing up in Latin America (Children and Youth in Popular Culture)
Growing up in Latin America contributes to the growing body of scholarship on the representation of children and minors in contemporary Latin American literature and film. This volume looks closely at the question of agency and the role of minors as active participants in the complex historical processes of the Latin American continent during the 20th and 21st centuries, both as national citizens and as transnational migrants. Questions of gender, migration, violence, post-coloniality, and preca...
For centuries the Huichol (Wixárika) Indian women of Jalisco, Mexico, have been weaving textiles on backstrap looms. This West Mexican tradition has been passed down from mothers to daughters since pre-Columbian times. Weaving is a part of each woman’s identity—allowing them to express their ancient religious beliefs as well as to reflect the personal transformations they have undergone throughout their lives. In this book anthropologist Stacy B. Schaefer explores the technology of weaving and...
Pottery and Practice
Pottery and Practice examines decorated pottery and its production in prehispanic New Mexico's Lower Rio Puerco area through the lens of practice theory. Arguing that social relations can be interpreted from the mundane practice of everyday life, Eckert shows how the relationship between ethnicity, migration, and ritual practice combined to create a complexly patterned material culture among residents of two fourteenth-century Pueblo villages. Focusing specifically on the social boundaries that...
The Elementary Structuring of Patriarchy (Women on the Move)
Based on an ethnographic study on the Andean Tri-border (between Chile, Peru, and Bolivia), this volume addresses the experience of Aymara cross-border women from Bolivia employed in the rural valleys on the outskirts of Arica (Chile’s northernmost city). As protagonists of transborder mobility circuits, these women are intersectionally impacted by different forms of social vulnerability. With a feminist anthropological perspective, the book investigates how the boundaries of gender are construc...
In this book, John Monaghan explores the culture of the Mixtecs, today one of the largest Native American groups in Mexico. Focusing on the community of Santiago Nuyoo, located in the mountainous Mixteca Alta region, he describes Nuyooteco marriage practices, gift exchange, kinship systems, land tenure, cosmology, ritual, and feasting.
Archaeoastronomy and the Maya
Archaeoastronomy and the Maya illustrates archaeoastronomical approaches to ancient Mayan cultural production. The book is contextualized through a history of archaeoastronomical investigations into Mayan sites, originating in the 19th century discovery of astronomical tables within hieroglyphic books. Early 20th century archaeological excavations revealed inscriptions carved into stone that also preserved astronomical records, along with architecture that was built to reflect astronomical orie...
Taking Health to the Streets in Puerto Rico: Resisting Gastronomic, Psychiatric, and Diabetes Colonialism traces the ways in which diabetes, depression, and food insecurity interact under the rule of US colonization in Puerto Rico as well as the ways in which these illnesses are interlaced with contemporary culture, colonization, and politics. Central to the book, and critical to its unique creative significance and contribution, is the conceptual unification of politicized health and the embodi...
People of the Peyote
Now available in paperback, 'People of the Peyote' explores the Huichol Indians of Mexico, who are best known for their worship of the peyote cactus. Ritually harvested each year, the peyote flower plays a central role in most Huichol observances of the annual ceremonial round. The Huichols have been the most culturally persistent indigenous group in Mexico and have maintained their pre-Christian religion with only minimal accommodation to Catholicism. Eighteen essays explore Huichol ethnography...
The essays gathered in this volume deal with representations of blackness and the performance of black identities in various historically determined societal contexts of the Americas, Benin, and Spain. The book is grounded on the premise that representations constitute, in part, the world in which we live. An important aspect of the struggles of dominated people consists in more or less overtly challenging, manipulating, combatting, negating, and sometimes inverting representations of themselves...
The Two Faces of Fear (Global and Comparative Ethnography)
by Ana Villarreal
Over the past two decades, increased criminal and state violence has profoundly transformed everyday life in Mexico. In The Two Faces of Fear, Ana Villarreal draws on two years of qualitative fieldwork conducted during a major turf war in Monterrey, Mexico to trace the far-reaching impact of fear and violence on social ties, daily practices, and everyday spaces. Villarreal brings two seemingly contradictory faces of fear into focus--its ability to both isolate and concentrate people and resource...
An Ordinary Landscape of Violence (Critical Caribbean Studies)
by Preity R Kumar
An Ordinary Landscape of Violence: Women Loving Women in Guyana tells a new history of queer women in postcolonial Guyana. While the country has experienced a rise in queer activism, especially toward human rights efforts, members of the Guyanese queer community have also been victims of extreme violence. This book asks how a hetero-patriarchal state shapes queer and "women-lovin’ women’s" experiences, and how such women navigate racialized, sexualized, and homophobic violence. With a unique foc...