Chicano history, from the early decades of the twentieth century up to the present, cannot be explained without reference to the determined interventions of the Mexican government, asserts Gilbert G. González. In this pathfinding study, he offers convincing evidence that Mexico aimed at nothing less than developing a loyal and politically dependent emigrant community among Mexican Americans, which would serve and replicate Mexico's political and economic subordination to the United States.

González centers his study around four major agricultural workers' strikes in Depression-era California. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, he documents how Mexican consuls worked with U.S. growers to break the strikes, undermining militants within union ranks and, in one case, successfully setting up a grower-approved union. Moreover, González demonstrates that the Mexican government's intervention in the Chicano community did not end after the New Deal; rather, it continued as the Bracero Program of the 1940s and 1950s, as a patron of Chicano civil rights causes in the 1960s and 1970s, and as a prominent voice in the debates over NAFTA in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Perhaps no other institution has had a more significant impact on Latin American history than the large landed estate—the hacienda. In Mexico, the latifundio, an estate usually composed of two or more haciendas, dominated the social and economic structure of the country for four hundred years. A Mexican Family Empire is a careful examination of the largest latifundio ever to have existed, not only in Mexico but also in all of Latin America—the latifundio of the Sánchez Navarros.

Located in the northern state of Coahuila, the Sánchez Navarro family's latifundio was composed of seventeen haciendas and covered more than 16.5 million acres—the size of West Virginia. Charles H. Harris places the history of the latifundio in perspective by showing the interaction between the various activities of the Sánchez Navarros and the evolution of landholding itself. In his discussion of the acquisition of land, the technology of ranching, labor problems, and production on the Sánchez Navarro estate, and of the family's involvement in commerce and politics, Harris finds that the development of the latifundio was only one aspect in the Sánchez Navarros' rise to power. Although the Sánchez Navarros conformed in some respects to the stereotypes advanced about hacendados, in terms of landownership and the use of debt peonage, in many important areas a different picture emerges. For example, the family's salient characteristic was a business mentality; they built the latifundio to make money, with status only a secondary consideration. Moreover, the family's extensive commercial activities belie the generalization that the objective of every hacendado was to make the estates self-sufficient. Harris emphasizes the great importance of the Sánchez Navarros' widespread network of family connections in their commercial and political activities.

A Mexican Family Empire is based on the Sánchez Navarro papers—75,000 pages of personal letters, business correspondence, hacienda reports and inventories, wills, land titles, and court records spanning the period from 1658 to 1895. Harris's thorough research of these documents has resulted in the first complete social, economic, and political history of a great estate. The geographical and chronological boundaries of his study permit analysis of both continuity and change in Mexico's evolving socioeconomic structure during one of the most decisive periods in its history—the era of transition from colony to nation.

The development of the Mexican financial system as it has related to the remarkable growth of the Mexican economy is examined in this book.

Believing that a better understanding of the past will permit a more nearly accurate appraisal of contemporary problems and facilitate the choice of intelligent policies in the future, the authors present a detailed chronicle and analysis of components of the Mexican financial system, with primary emphasis on the period from 1940 to the mid-1960s.

Separate chapters are devoted to the money and capital market, the formulation and execution of monetary and financial policies, and the nature of Mexican financial experience in both the public and private sectors of the economy. The authors offer a theoretical explanation of the record of Mexican experience, based upon their analysis of relationships between monetary policy, domestic stability, and external equilibrium, as well as upon their analysis of factors governing the growth of domestic indebtedness, the development of financial intermediation, and the operation of the loanable funds market. The final chapter of the book, a review of Mexican experience from 1960 to 1965, speculates with respect to the future course of Mexican financial development and offers specific proposal for future monetary and financial policies.

This record of Mexican financial development contains much that should be of interest to others engaged in related theoretical and empirical studies, including many lessons for those countries confronted with circumstances and problems not too unlike those encountered in Mexico.

Urban Los Angeles is the setting in which Elaine Miller has collected her narratives from Mexican-Americans. The Mexican folk tradition, varied and richly expressive of the inner life not only of a people but also of the individual as each lives it and personalizes it, is abundantly present in the United States. Since it is in the urban centers that most Mexican-Americans have lived, this collection represents an important contribution to the study of that tradition and to the study of the changes urban life effects on traditional folklore.

The collection includes sixty-two legendary narratives and twenty traditional tales. The legendary narratives deal with the virgins and saints as well as with such familiar characters as the vanishing hitchhiker, the headless horseman, and the llorona. Familiar characters appear in the traditional tales—Juan del Oso, Blancaflor, Pedro de Ordimalas, and others. Elaine Miller concludes that the traditional tales are dying out in the city because tale telling itself is not suited to the fast pace of modern urban life, and the situations and characters in the tales are not perceived by the people to be meaningfully related to the everyday challenges and concerns of that life. The legendary tales survive longer in an urban setting because, although containing fantastic elements, they are related to the beliefs and hopes of the narrator—even in the city one may be led to buried treasure on some dark night by a mysterious woman.

The penchant of the informants for the fantastic in many of their tales often reflects their hopes and fears, such as their dreams of suddenly acquiring wealth or their fears of being haunted by the dead. Miller closely observes the teller's relation to the stories—to the duendes, the ánimas, Death, God, the devil—and she notes the tension on the part of the informant in his relation to their religion.

The material is documented according to several standard tale and motif indices and is placed within the context of the larger body of Hispanic folk tradition by the citation of parallel versions throughout the Hispanic world. The tales, transcribed from taped interviews, are presented in colloquial Spanish accompanied by summaries in English.

Mexico’s streams give forth cool green jade and rich gold; its shores provide coral and dainty pearls. Its brown hills yield silver and copper and gems whose colors form a dazzling palette for the jeweler. And Mexico has never lacked the artists to mold its abundant jewels into finished pieces of beauty.

In this enjoyable volume, Mary L. Davis and Greta Pack show us the splendors of Mexican jewelry. After briefly tracing the history of the jewelry of Mexico, they describe the various types and explain the basic techniques used in handling the metals of Mexican jewelry and in displaying the gems. Finally, they examine the creative accomplishments of some influential twentieth-century jewelry makers.

A favorite among travelers, coilectors, and jewelry makers, Mexican Jewelry has become a classic introduction to the richness and variety of this Mexican folk art.

Mexico has a rich literary heritage that extends back over centuries to the Aztec and Mayan civilizations. This major reference work surveys more than five hundred years of Mexican literature from a sociocultural perspective. More than merely a catalog of names and titles, it examines in detail the literary phenomena that constitute Mexico's most significant and original contributions to literature.

Recognizing that no one scholar can authoritatively cover so much territory, David William Foster has assembled a group of specialists, some of them younger scholars who write from emerging trends in Latin American and Mexican literary scholarship. The topics they discuss include pre-Columbian indigenous writing (Joanna O'Connell), Colonial literature (Lee H. Dowling), Romanticism (Margarita Vargas), nineteenth-century prose fiction (Mario Martín Flores), Modernism (Bart L. Lewis), major twentieth-century genres (narrative, Lanin A. Gyurko; poetry, Adriana García; theater, Kirsten F. Nigro), the essay (Martin S. Stabb), literary criticism (Daniel Altamiranda), and literary journals (Luis Peña). Each essay offers detailed analysis of significant issues and major texts and includes an annotated bibliography of important critical sources and reference works.

Winner, Khayrallah Migration Studies Prize, Moise Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies, 2018

Migration from the Middle East brought hundreds of thousands of people to the Americas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the time the Ottoman political system collapsed in 1918, over a third of the population of the Mashriq, i.e. the Levant, had made the transatlantic journey. This intense mobility was interrupted by World War I but resumed in the 1920s and continued through the late 1940s under the French Mandate. Many migrants returned to their homelands, but the rest concentrated in Brazil, Argentina, the United States, Haiti, and Mexico, building transnational lives.

The Mexican Mahjar provides the first global history of Middle Eastern migrations to Mexico. Making unprecedented use of French colonial archives and historical ethnography, Camila Pastor examines how French colonial control over Syria and Lebanon affected the migrants. Tracing issues of class, race, and gender through the decades of increased immigration to Mexico and looking at the narratives created by the Mahjaris (migrants) themselves in both their old and new homes, Pastor sheds new light on the creation of transnational networks at the intersection of Arab, French, and Mexican colonial modernisms. Revealing how migrants experienced mobility as conquest, diaspora, exile, or pilgrimage, The Mexican Mahjar tracks global history on an intimate scale.

Borderlands migration has been the subject of considerable study, but the authorship has usually reflected a north-of-the-border perspective only. Gathering a transnational group of prominent researchers, including leading Mexican scholars whose work is not readily available in the United States and academics from US universities, Mexican Migration to the United States brings together an array of often-overlooked viewpoints, reflecting the interconnectedness of immigration policy.

This collection’s research, principally empirical, reveals significant aspects of labor markets, family life, and educational processes. Presenting recent data and accessible explanations of complex histories, the essays capture the evolving legal frameworks and economic implications of Mexico-US migrations at the national and municipal levels, as well as the experiences of receiving communities in the United States. The volume includes illuminating reports on populations ranging from undocumented young adults to elite Mexican women immigrants, health-care rights, Mexico’s incorporation of return migration, the impact of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals on higher education, and the experiences of young children returning to Mexican schools after living in the United States. Reflecting a multidisciplinary approach, the list of contributors includes anthropologists, demographers, economists, educators, policy analysts, and sociologists.

Underscoring the fact that Mexican migration to the United States is unique and complex, this timely work exemplifies the cross-border collaboration crucial to the development of immigration policies that serve people in both countries.

People of Mexican descent and Anglo Americans have lived together in the U.S. Southwest for over a hundred years, yet relations between them remain strained, as shown by recent controversies over social services for undocumented aliens in California. In this study, covering the Spanish colonial period to the present day, Martha Menchaca delves deeply into interethnic relations in Santa Paula, California, to document how the residential, social, and school segregation of Mexican-origin people became institutionalized in a representative California town.

Menchaca lived in Santa Paula during the 1980s, and interviews with residents add a vivid human dimension to her book. She argues that social segregation in Santa Paula has evolved into a system of social apartness—that is, a cultural system controlled by Anglo Americans that designates the proper times and places where Mexican-origin people can socially interact with Anglos.

This first historical ethnographic case study of a Mexican-origin community will be important reading across a spectrum of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, race and ethnicity, Latino studies, and American culture.

Mexico's petroleum industry has come to symbolize the very sovereignty of the nation itself. Politicians criticize Pemex, the national oil company, at their peril, and President Salinas de Gortari has made clear that the free trade negotiations between Mexico and the United States will not affect Pemex's basic status as a public enterprise. How and why did the petroleum industry gain such prominence and, some might say, immunity within Mexico's political economy?

The Mexican Petroleum Industry in the Twentieth Century, edited by Jonathan C. Brown and Alan Knight, seeks to explain the impact of the oil sector on the nation's economic, political, and social development. The book is a multinational effort—one author is Australian, two British, three North American, and five Mexican. Each contributing scholar has researched and written extensively about Mexico and its oil industry.

Here is an authoritative reference work that makes biographies of prominent Mexican national politicians from the period 1884–1934 available in English. Like the author's biographical directory for the years 1935–2009, it draws on many years of research in Mexico and the United States and seeks not only to provide accurate biographical information about each entry but also, where possible and appropriate, to connect these politicians to more recent leadership generations. Thus, Mexican Political Biographies, 1884-1934 not only is a useful historical source but also provides additional information on the family backgrounds of many contemporary figures.

The work includes those figures who have held specific posts at the national level or who have served as state governors. Each biographical entry contains the following information: date of birth, birthplace, education, elective political office, political party positions, appointive governmental posts at all levels, group activities, nongovernmental positions and professions, relatives, mentors and important friends, military experience, unusual career activities, and published biographical sources.

Another unique feature of the directory is appendixes with complete lists of the names and dates of cabinet members, supreme court justices, senators, deputies, selected ambassadors, and party leaders.

This fourth edition of Roderic Camp's highly respected Mexican Political Biographies is an updated comprehensive biographical directory of leading state and national politicians in Mexico, covering the years 1935–2009. The original edition, published in 1976, was the first and only comprehensive biographical work on contemporary political figures in any language and served as the prototype for the Mexican government's brief foray into its own official biographical directory. The Mexican Supreme Court has cited every biography of justices in the third edition as the basis of its biographies in the late 1980s.

With updates of the existing biographies and appendices, plus almost 1,000 additional biographies, this fourth edition now features close to 3,000 entries and serves as a unique resource list of the chronological occupants of all leading national political posts. The need for such information has become even more pronounced since Mexico's political transformation from a semi-authoritarian to a democratic model.

This latest edition allows readers access to information about Mexican politicians into the new century, and like its earlier versions, will be a valuable tool for government officials, journalists, historians, social scientists, the business community, and students.

Finally, it includes a detailed bibliographic essay that identifies and explains the significance of biographical sources and has been enhanced by numerous up-to-date Internet sources. An added convenience is an accompanying CD that allows readers to search the biographies and appendices, enhancing the longevity, usefulness, and uniqueness of this edition.

The Mexican Revolution is one of the most important and ambitious sociopolitical experiments in modem times. The Revolution developed in three distinct stages: the overthrow of the Díaz dictatorship, the subsequent era of bloodshed and devastation during which radical ideas were written into the constitution, and the much longer span during which the ideas have been put into practice.

The present volume covers the first stage of this development. Idealistic, patriotic hacendado Francisco I. Madero became the catalyst of the Revolution. All peaceful means having failed to secure democratic elections, Madero reluctantly undertook to mold the discontented factions into an effective force for insurrection. But victory brought disunity. Opposition to the Díaz regime, not a positive desire for reform, had held the revolutionaries together. Díaz deposed, Madero could not muster sufficient support to realize more than a fraction of his objectives, and he himself fell victim to counterrevolution.

The years 1913-1920 were the most critical years of the Mexican revolution. This study of the period, a sequel to Cumberland's Mexican Revolution: Genesis under Madero (University of Texas Press, 1952), traces Mexico's course through the anguish of civil war to the establishment of a tenuous new government, the codification of revolutionary aspirations in a remarkable constitution, and the emergence of an activist leadership determined to propel Mexico into the select company of developed nations.

The narrative begins with Huerta's overthrow of Madero in 1913 and the rise of Carranza's Constitutionalist counterchallenge. It concludes with a summary of Carranza's stormy term as constitutional president climaxed by his ouster and overthrow in a revolt spearheaded by Alvaro Obregón. Professor Cumberland has based his study on a wide range of Mexican and U.S. primary sources as well as pertinent secondary studies. He has utilized much new material and has brought to it a mature and sophisticated analysis; the result is a major contribution to the understanding of one of the twentieth century's most significant revolutionary movements.

The sufferings of “ordinary” people under harsh economic conditions can eventually lead to the fall of governments. Given this fact, it becomes important to know how “ordinary” people live—what privations they suffer and what strategies they use to survive in times of economic crisis. The Mexican Urban Household provides this information for Mexico near the end of the twentieth century.

Mexico is now a predominantly urban nation, and this study is the definitive work on the strategies of self-defense of its urban households. It is based on surveys of nearly 10,000 households, conducted during twenty years of field work in five very different cities, with the help of a staff of more than twenty Mexican social scientists, engineers, architects, and social workers.

Far from being a compilation of undigested statistics, however, The Mexican Urban Household uses its rich data to vividly reveal how Mexican families use their every resource to defend themselves against a political and economic system that overwhelms and exploits them. It describes how families band together, sometimes with three generations in one small house, to minimize expenses and pool resources. It explores the limited range of available jobs, from secure but scarce bureaucratic positions to more common and less reliable jobs in blue-collar industries and the informal economy. And, most important, it traces the high cost to families, particularly to women, of the endless struggle to make ends meet.

These important findings outline the dimensions of the economic crisis for ordinary Mexicans. It will be crucial reading not only for everyone interested in the future of Mexico but also for students of development throughout the Third World.

From the mountainous area bordering Arizona and New Mexico, the western range of the Sierra Madres reaches south into Mexico to the state of Jalisco. The eastern range stretches from the Texas border down to Morelia and the Valley of Mexico. Ben Tinker spent years exploring this rugged wilderness and the vast deserts of Sonora and Baja California. Mexican Wilderness and Wildlife condenses a lifetime of outdoor lore and learning.

Tinker provides detailed life sketches of Mexico's Desert Bighorn Sheep, Pronghorn Antelope, Mule Deer, Whitetail Deer, Peccary, Grizzly and Black Bears, Wild Turkey, Jaguar, Mountain Lion, Timber Wolf, Coyote, and Bobcat. Each is illustrated by wildlife artist Doris Tischler, and Tinker describes their habitats, habits, reproduction, and peculiarities. Information is supplied on the physical measurements of several species of major wildlife. Tinker's observations are laced with anecdotes about his experiences in Mexico's remote backcountry—encounters with bandits, survival in the desert mountains, and the chance discovery of archaeological ruins.

The book describes the terrain and flora of the four life zones inhabited by major game and predatory animals. The section on desert water is a fascinating account of how animals thrive among cacti, thorn trees, and creosote bush remote from streams and waterholes. There is also a brief discussion of conservation efforts in Mexico, chapters on trout fishing in the Sierra Madre Occidental and Baja California, and a guide to big game habitats. This volume will be valuable to hunters, conservationists, naturalists, and others interested in the wilderness and wildlife of Mexico.

Ben Tinker collected much of the material for this book during the years he roamed northern Mexico as Federal Game Guardian. Though an American, Tinker had long been familiar with Mexican wildlife through his Sonoran ranching operation and was known for his interest in conservation when he was appointed by Alvaro Obregón in 1922.

Weaving narratives with gendered analysis and historiography of Mexicans in the Midwest, Mexican Women and the Other Side of Immigration examines the unique transnational community created between San Ignacio Cerro Gordo, Jalisco, and Detroit, Michigan, in the last three decades of the twentieth century, asserting that both the community of origin and the receiving community are integral to an immigrant's everyday life, though the manifestations of this are rife with contradictions.

Exploring the challenges faced by this population since the inception of the Bracero Program in 1942 in constantly re-creating, adapting, accommodating, shaping, and creating new meanings of their environments, Luz María Gordillo emphasizes the gender-specific aspects of these situations. While other studies of Mexican transnational identity focus on social institutions, Gordillo's work introduces the concept of transnational sexualities, particularly the social construction of working-class sexuality. Her findings indicate that many female San Ignacians shattered stereotypes, transgressing traditionally male roles while their husbands lived abroad. When the women themselves immigrated as well, these transgressions facilitated their adaptation in Detroit. Placed within the larger context of globalization, Mexican Women and the Other Side of Immigration is a timely excavation of oral histories, archival documents, and the remnants of three decades of memory.

Prior to the millennium, economists and policy makers argued that free trade between the United States and Mexico would benefit both Americans and Mexicans. They believed that NAFTA would be a “win-win” proposition that would offer U.S. companies new markets for their products and Mexicans the hope of living in a more developed country with the modern conveniences of wealthier nations. Blending rigorous economic and statistical analysis with concern for the people affected, Mexican Women in American Factories offers the first assessment of whether NAFTA has fulfilled these expectations by examining its socioeconomic impact on workers in a Mexican border town.

Carolyn Tuttle led a group that interviewed 620 women maquila workers in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. The responses from this representative sample refute many of the hopeful predictions made by scholars before NAFTA and reveal instead that little has improved for maquila workers. The women’s stories make it plain that free trade has created more low-paying jobs in sweatshops where workers are exploited. Families of maquila workers live in one- or two-room houses with no running water, no drainage, and no heat. The multinational companies who operate the maquilas consistently break Mexican labor laws by requiring women to work more than nine hours a day, six days a week, without medical benefits, while the minimum wage they pay workers is insufficient to feed their families. These findings will make a crucial contribution to debates over free trade, CAFTA-DR, and the impact of globalization.

2020 Second Place, Best Nonfiction Multi Author, International Latino Book Awards

Collecting the perspectives of scholars who reflect on their own relationships to particular garments, analyze the politics of dress, and examine the role of consumerism and entrepreneurialism in the production of creating and selling a style, meXicana Fashions examines and searches for meaning in these visible, performative aspects of identity.

Focusing primarily on Chicanas but also considering trends connected to other Latin American communities, the authors highlight specific constituencies that are defined by region (“Tejana style,” “L.A. style”), age group (“homie,” “chola”), and social class (marked by haute couture labels such as Carolina Herrera and Oscar de la Renta). The essays acknowledge the complex layers of these styles, which are not mutually exclusive but instead reflect a range of intersections in occupation, origin, personality, sexuality, and fads. Other elements include urban indigenous fashion shows, the shifting quinceañera market, “walking altars” on the Days of the Dead, plus-size clothing, huipiles in the workplace, and dressing in drag. Together, these chapters illuminate the full array of messages woven into a vibrant social fabric.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year

According to census projections, by 2050 nearly one in three U.S. residents will be Latino, and the overwhelming majority of these will be of Mexican descent. This dramatic demographic shift is reshaping politics, culture, and fundamental ideas about American identity. Neil Foley, a leading Mexican American historian, offers a sweeping view of the evolution of Mexican America, from a colonial outpost on Mexico’s northern frontier to a twenty-first-century people integral to the nation they have helped build.

“Compelling…Readers of all political persuasions will find Foley’s intensively researched, well-documented scholarly work an instructive, thoroughly accessible guide to the ramifications of immigration policy.”
—Publishers Weekly

“For Americans long accustomed to understanding the country’s development as an east-to-west phenomenon, Foley’s singular service is to urge us to tilt the map south-to-north and to comprehend conditions as they have been for some time and will likely be for the foreseeable future…A timely look at and appreciation of a fast-growing demographic destined to play an increasingly important role in our history.”
—Kirkus Reviews

Mexico and Mexicans have been involved in every aspect of making the United States from colonial times until the present. Yet our shared history is a largely untold story, eclipsed by headlines about illegal immigration and the drug war. Placing Mexicans and Mexico in the center of American history, this volume elucidates how economic, social, and cultural legacies grounded in colonial New Spain shaped both Mexico and the United States, as well as how Mexican Americans have constructively participated in North American ways of production, politics, social relations, and cultural understandings.

Combining historical, sociological, and cultural perspectives, the contributors to this volume explore the following topics: the Hispanic foundations of North American capitalism; indigenous peoples’ actions and adaptations to living between Mexico and the United States; U.S. literary constructions of a Mexican “other” during the U.S.-Mexican War and the Civil War; the Mexican cotton trade, which helped sustain the Confederacy during the Civil War; the transformation of the Arizona borderlands from a multiethnic Mexican frontier into an industrializing place of “whites” and “Mexicans”; the early-twentieth-century roles of indigenous Mexicans in organizing to demand rights for all workers; the rise of Mexican Americans to claim middle-class lives during and after World War II; and the persistence of a Mexican tradition of racial/ethnic mixing—mestizaje—as an alternative to the racial polarities so long at the center of American life.

Few developments in the history of the Spanish colonial system in Mexico have been more carelessly treated or more often misinterpreted than the attempt to establish constitutional government in New Spain under the Spanish monarchy during the 1809–1814 and 1820–1822 periods. Yet the broad outlines of the Mexican constitutional system were laid then, largely through the insistent efforts of the Mexican deputies to the Cortes, the Spanish legislative body. Some of the delegates also grasped this opportunity to inform their countrymen and train them in the effectiveness of parliamentary debate and resolution as a more intelligent road to democratic and representative government.

The 70 Mexican deputies (of the 160 elected) who actively participated in the sessions of the Cortes either helped draw up the Constitution of 1812, which initiated provisions for many needed reforms relating to military, religious, economic, educational, judicial, and governmental affairs in Mexico, or contributed to the enabling acts consequent to these provisions. The prime reason for calling the Cortes, however, and especially for inviting the participation of the Mexicans, was to attempt to maintain New Spain’s loyalty to the mother country, an unrealized objective in the long run, although much constructive discussion of this goal was offered by the Mexican delegates.

These eight essays trace the establishment and implementation of the Mexican electoral system, both national and municipal, and of reforms in the economic, journalistic, religious, and military systems. They serve as an informative introduction to the revolutionary role the Cortes of Spain played in Mexican history and as a record of the contribution of Mexican delegates to the beginning of liberal reform in their country.

From reviews of the Spanish edition:

“Meyer’s perceptive commentary on Mexican power politics presents new insights into the petroleum lobbies in Mexico City and Washington. With unbiased empathy he shows the validity of Mexico’s complaints about foreigners’ deriving an overabundance of profit from a nonrenewable natural resource. He understands United States history and never abuses his license to criticize.” —Hispanic American Historical Review

“This useful addition to the literature on twentieth-century Mexican–United States diplomatic relations is a scholarly work, worthy of consideration by all students of the subject.”—American Historical Review

Mexico and the United States in the Oil Controversy, 1917–1942 explores the relationship between the United States and Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century, with special attention to the Mexican nationalization of the oil industry. Relying on Mexican archival material never before analyzed, the author presents a unique perspective on the period following the Mexican Revolution and Mexico’s efforts to diminish its economic dependency on the United States. This work not only describes the political and economic struggle between the Mexican government and the U.S. oil companies but also serves to illustrate in general the nature of dependency between Latin American countries and the United States. It will be of interest not only to Mexican specialists but also to diplomatic and economic historians.

Just as Mexican national life has come to center on the sprawling, dynamic, almost indefinable metropolis of Mexico City, so recent Mexican cinema has focused on the city not merely as a setting for films but almost as a protagonist in its own right, whose conditions both create meaning for and receive meaning from the human lives lived in its midst. Through close readings of fourteen recent critically acclaimed films, this book watches Mexican cinema in this process of producing cultural meaning through its creation, enaction, and interpretation of the idea of Mexico City.

David William Foster analyzes how Mexican filmmakers have used Mexico City as a vehicle for exploring such issues as crime, living space, street life, youth culture, political and police corruption, safety hazards, gender roles, and ethnic and social identities. The book is divided into three sections. "Politics of the City" examines the films Rojo amanecer,Novia que te vea,Frida, naturaleza viva, and Sexo, pudor y lágrimas. "Human Geographies" looks at El Callejón de los Milagros,Mecánica nacional,El castillo de la pureza,Todo el poder, and Lolo. "Mapping Gender" discusses Danzón,De noche vienes,Esmeralda,La tarea,Lola, and Entre Pancho Villa y una mujer desnuda.

Mexico in Its Novel is a perceptive examination of the Mexican reality as revealed through the nation's novel. The author presents the Mexican novel as a cultural phenomenon: a manifestation of the impact of history upon the nation, an attempt by a people to come to grips with and understand what has happened and is happening to them.

Written in a clear and graceful style, this study examines the life of the novel as a genre against the background of Mexican chronology. It begins with a survey of the mid-twentieth-century novel, the Mexican novel which came of age in the period following the 1947 publication of Agustín Yáñez's The Edge of the Storm. During this time the novel resolved some of its most complicated problems and, as a result, offered a wider and deeper view of reality.

Having established this circumstance, John Brushwood goes back in time to the Conquest and then moves forward to the twentieth-century novel. Passing from the Colonial Period into the nineteenth century, the author recognizes the relationship between Romanticism and the desire for logical social behavior, and then views this relationship in the perspective of the Reform, an attempt to bring order out of chaos. The novel under the Díaz dictatorship is seen in three different phases, and the last Díaz chapter actually moves into the Revolution itself. The novel during the years of fighting is considered along with the first post-Revolutionary fiction. From that point the developing conflict within Mexican reality itself—a conflict between introversion and extroversion, nationalism and cosmopolitanism—reaches out to seek its solution in the novels of the first chapter.

Mexican drug networks are large and violent, engaging in activities like the trafficking of narcotics, money laundering, extortion, kidnapping, and mass murder. Despite the impact of these activities in Mexico and abroad, these illicit networks are remarkably resilient to state intervention.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews with US and Mexican law enforcement, government officials, organized crime victims, and criminals, Nathan P. Jones examines the comparative resilience of two basic types of drug networks—“territorial” and “transactional”—that are differentiated by their business strategies and provoke wildly different responses from the state. Transactional networks focus on trafficking and are more likely to collude with the state through corruption, while territorial networks that seek to control territory for the purpose of taxation, extortion, and their own security often trigger a strong backlash from the state.

Timely and authoritative, Mexico's Illicit Drug Networks and the State Reaction provides crucial insight into why Mexico targets some drug networks over others, reassesses the impact of the war on drugs, and proposes new solutions for weak states in their battles with drug networks.

The Mexican economy underwent a process of growth and transformation in the twentieth century, which was confirmed by the indexes and figures that economists use to chart the rate of growth, even allowing for possible inaccuracies in these figures.

This volume of six essays makes readily available to English-speaking readers a selection of significant contributions by outstanding Mexican economists dealing with the mid-twentieth-century growth of the Mexican economy.

Enrique Pérez López provides an overview of the development of the gross national product in the economy and the structural changes that were imperative if basic social goals were to be implemented and the optimal adjustments to changing world conditions effected. Ernesto Fernández Hurtado discusses the process of accommodation and cooperation between the public and the private sectors that has contributed significantly to economic growth, stressing particularly the role of agriculture. Mario Ramón Beteta describes central bank policy and the functioning of the Central Bank, showing how control over credit and the banking system assures stability and accelerating growth through its credit rationing.

Alfredo Navarrete R. traces the sources of domestic savings that have provided 90 percent of the capital employed in the economy since the Revolution, and Ifigenia M. de Navarrete demonstrates that rapid economic growth has not resulted in a more equitable distribution of income. Victor Urquidi stresses the balanced growth, achieved by allocating public capital formation to basic infrastructure, that has helped develop agriculture as well as industry, and indicates the nature of the structural change that must occur if the economy is to expand rapidly.

In his introduction Tom E. Davis compares growth in Mexico with developments during the same period in Chile and Argentina.

The country reached its midcentury standard of living after fifty years of drastic social and political changes under a constitution that altered the system and the concept of private property and the role of the state. These new concepts brought about changes in the structure of production and social relationships, together with a rise to new cultural, technical, and moral levels. These changes, in turn, placed Mexico in a new position with new problems. A question that must be answered is whether the economic goals of the future require a reappraisal of social relationships and of the ways of administering and utilizing the country’s resources and potential productivity.

“Not a mirror but a magnifying glass”—such, in the poet Mayakovsky’s words, was the theater of Vsevolod Meyerhold. The first to insist on the primacy of the director’s role, indeed the first to conceive of it as a role, this passionately dedicated Russian director tore down the fourth wall and forced the actors and audience together into one inescapable community of experience.

Yet Meyerhold recorded few of his theories in writing, and the intensity and brilliance of his work must be recaptured through the actors and artists who helped create the performances. Focusing on Meyerhold’s postrevolutionary career, Paul Schmidt has assembled in this book journals, letters, reminiscences, and, of special interest, actual rehearsal notes that build a fascinating, intimate picture of Meyerhold as a theorist and as a man.

Included are Meyerhold’s frantic notes to his teacher, friend, and bête noire Stanislavsky; detailed descriptions of how he trained his actors in “biomechanics”; and memories by such students as Eisenstein and such friends as Pasternak and Ehrenburg. One chapter deals with Meyerhold’s never-realized conception of Boris Godunov, while another describes his direction of Camille, which starred Zinaida Raikh, his wife, and which played its 725th and last performance on the day Stalin’s government liquidated Meyerhold’s theater. Paul Schmidt’s introduction and headnotes enhance our understanding of Meyerhold as a pioneer of modern theater.

Praise for Mezcal:

"Mezcal is also a lyrical meditation upon the ultimate strength of the land, specifically the desert Southwest, and how that land prevails and endures despite every effort of modern industry and development to rape and savage it in the name of progress. Mezcal lingers in the mind as only the very best books manage to do."—Harry Crews

"The author . . . excavates his own tormented life—and its relation to the land he loves—in a series of powerful, imagistic autobiographical essays. Like the desert he cherishes, this memoir is harsh yet lovely, full of sour self-truth. . . . A potent presentation of the wounds of one man's life, packed with indelible impressions; but there's little healing here, making this a bitter if beautiful read."—Kirkus Review

"In Mezcal . . . Bowden drops the journalistic veil, exploring the ecology of his interior landscape at least as thoroughly as the changing scenery that surrounds him. . . . Others—Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey—have already staked inviolate claims on the Southwestern deserts. But Bowden owns the complex terrain where, like a mezcal-inspired mirage, the Sonoran sun-belt overlaps the gray convolutions of the American mind."—Los Angeles Times

An increasing number of U.S. Latinos are seeking to become more proficient in Spanish. The Spanish they may have been exposed to in childhood may not be sufficient when they find themselves as adults in more demanding environments, academic or professional. Heritage language learners appear in a wide spectrum of proficiency, from those who have a low level of speaking abilities, to those who may have a higher degree of bilingualism, but not fluent. Whatever the individual case may be, these heritage speakers of Spanish have different linguistic and pedagogical needs than those students learning Spanish as a second or foreign language.

The members of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP) have identified teaching heritage learners as their second greatest area of concern (after proficiency testing). Editors Ana Roca and Cecilia Colombi saw a great need for greater availability and dissemination of scholarly research in applied linguistics and pedagogy that address the development and maintenance of Spanish as a heritage language and the teaching of Spanish to U.S. Hispanic bilingual students in grades K-16. The result is Mi lengua: Spanish as a Heritage Language in the United States.

Mi lengua delves into the research, theory, and practice of teaching Spanish as a heritage language in the United States. The editors and contributors examine theoretical considerations in the field of Heritage Language Development (HLD) as well as community and classroom-based research studies at the elementary, secondary, and university levels. Some chapters are written in Spanish and each chapter presents a practical section on pedagogical implications that provides practice-related suggestions for the teaching of Spanish as a heritage language to students from elementary grades to secondary and college and university levels.

    Mice in the Freezer, Owls on the Porch is in many ways a love story—about a quiet scientist and his flamboyant wife, but also about their passions for hunting, for wild lands, and for the grouse and raptor species that they were instrumental in saving from destruction.
    From the papers and letters of Frederick and Frances Hamerstrom, the reminiscences of contemporaries, and her own long friendship with this extraordinary couple who were her neighbors, Helen Corneli draws an intimate picture of Fran and "Hammy" from childhood through the genesis and maturation of a romantic, creative, and scientific relationship. Following the Hamerstroms as they give up a life of sophisticated convention and comfort for the more "civilized" (as Aldo Leopold would have it) pleasures of living and conducting on-the-spot research into diminishing species, Corneli captures the spirit of the Hamerstroms, their profession, and the natural and human environments in which they worked. A nuanced account of the labors, adventures, and achievements that distinguished the Hamerstroms over the years—and that inspired a generation of naturalists—this book also provides a dramatic account of conservation history over the course of the twentieth century, particularly in Wisconsin during the eventful years from the 1920s through the 1970s.

Brunette highlights Haneke's brilliant use of uncompromising visual and aural techniques to express complex themes. His most recent films contain what has become his hallmark: a moment of violence or shock that is not intended to be exploitative, but that nevertheless goes beyond the conventional boundaries of most art cinema. Lauded for graphically revealing the powerful influence of contemporary media on social behavior, his films offer a chilling critique of contemporary consumer society. Brunette discusses Haneke's major releases in English, French, and German, including the film that first brought him to international attention, Benny's Video. The first full-length study of Haneke's work in any language, this book also includes an interview with the director that explores his motivations and methods.

From April to August 1961, recent Harvard graduate Michael Clark Rockefeller was sound recordist and still photographer on a remarkable multidisciplinary expedition to the Dani people of highland New Guinea. In five short months he produced a wonderful body of work, including over 4,000 black-and-white negatives.

In this catalogue, photographer Kevin Bubriski explores Rockefeller's journey into the culture and community of the Dani and into rapport with the people whose lives he chronicled. The book reveals not only the young photographer's growing fluency in the language of the camera, but also the development of his personal way of seeing the Dani world around him. Although Rockefeller's life was cut tragically short on an expedition to the Asmat in the fall of 1961, his photographs are as vivid today as they were the moment they were made.

Featuring over 75 photographs, this beautiful volume is the first publication of a substantial body of Michael Rockefeller's visual legacy. Rockefeller's extraordinary photographs reveal both the resilient spirit of the Dani people and the anthropological and aesthetic eye of a young man full of promise. In a Foreword, Robert Gardner provides a personal recollection of Michael Rockefeller's experience in the New Guinea highlands.

At the time of his death in 1984, at the age of fifty-eight, Michel Foucault was widely regarded as one of the most powerful minds of this century. Hailed by distinguished historians and lionized on his frequent visits to America, he continues to provoke lively debate. The nature and merits of his accomplishments remain tangled in controversy. Rejecting traditional liberal and Marxist "dreams of solidarity," Foucault became the very model of the modern intellectual, replacing Sartre as the figure of the eminent Parisian and cosmopolitan master thinker.

Foucault himself discouraged biographical questions, claiming that he was "not at all interesting." Didier Eribon's captivating account overthrows that assertion. As a journalist well acquainted with Foucault for years before his death, Eribon was particularly well placed to conduct the dozens of interviews which are the cornerstone of this book. He has drawn upon eyewitness accounts by Foucault's closest associates from all phases of his life--his mother, his schoolteachers, his classmates, his friends and enemies in academic life, and his celebrated companions in political activism, including Simone Signoret and Yves Montand. Eribon has methodically retraced the footsteps of his peripatetic subject, from France to Sweden to Poland to Germany to Tunisia to Brazil to Japan to the United States. The result is a concise, crisply readable, meticulously documented narrative that debunks the many myths and rumors surrounding the brilliant philosophe--and forces us to consider seriously the idea that all his books are indeed, just as Foucault said near the end of his life, "fragments of an autobiography."

Who was this man, Michel Foucault? In the late 1950s Foucault emerged as a budding young cultural attaché, friendly with Gaullist diplomats. By the mid-1960s he appeared as one of the avatars of structuralism, positioning himself as a new star in the fashionable world of French thought. A few months after the May 1968 student revolt, with Gaullism apparently shaken, he emerged as an ultra-leftist and a fellow traveler of Maoists. Yet during this same period, Eribon shows, he was quietly and adroitly campaigning for a chair in the College de France--the very pinnacle of the French academic system. This book does more than follow the career of one extraordinary intellectual. It reconstructs the cultural, political, and intellectual life of France from the postwar years to the present. It is the story of a man and his time.