The central objective of Men in a Developing Society is to show, as concretely as possible, how men experience a period of rapid economic development, particularly in the areas of migration, occupational mobility, and status attainment. It is based mainly on a sample of 1,640 men in Monterrey, Mexico, a large and rapidly growing manufacturing metropolis in northern Mexico with much in-migration, and a sample of 380 men in Cedral, San Luis Potosí, a small, economically depressed community with high rates of out-migration, much of it to Monterrey.

The study of men in Monterrey is perhaps the most thorough one yet conducted of geographic and social mobility in a Latin American city. In part, this was possible because of the innovation of collecting complete life histories that record what each man was doing for any given year in the lay areas of residence, education, family formation, and work. These data permit the effective use of the concepts of life cycle and cohort analysis in the interpretation of the men's geographic and occupational mobility.

The experience of the Monterrey men in adapting to the varied changes required by their mobility was not found to be as difficult as is often indicated in the social science literature on the consequences of economic development. In part this may be because Monterrey, in comparison with most other Latin American cities, has been unusually successful in its economic growth. The impact of migration also was lessened because most of the men had visited the city prior to moving there and many had friends or relatives in the city.

The age of the migrants upon arrival in Monterrey made a significant difference in subsequent occupational mobility; those of nonfarm background who arrived before age 25 fared better than natives of the city. Although it appears that status inheritance in Monterrey is somewhat higher than in industrialized countries, a considerable proportion of men do move up the occupational ladder. And perhaps as important, the Monterrey men, whether or not they themselves are moving up, perceive the society as an open one.

The very success of Monterrey's development created conditions that would bring about changes in the educational, economic, and cultural expectations of its inhabitants. Thus, paradoxically, the general satisfaction and the lack of group and class conflict in Monterrey over the previous decades may well have given rise to future dissatisfaction and conflict.

In November 1532, a group of 168 Spaniards seized the Inca emperor Atahuallpa in the town of Cajamarca, in the northern Peruvian highlands. Their act, quickly taken as a symbol of the conquest of a vast empire, brought them unprecedented rewards in gold and silver; it made them celebrities, gave them first choice of positions of honor and power in the new Peru of the Spaniards, and opened up the possibility of a splendid life at home in Spain, if they so desired. Thus they became men of consequence, at the epicenter of a swift and irrevocable transformation of the Andean region. Yet before that memorable day in Cajamarca they had been quite unexceptional, a reasonable sampling of Spaniards on expeditions all over the Indies at the time of the great conquests.

The Men of Cajamarca is perhaps the fullest treatment yet published of any group of early Spaniards in America. Part I examines general types, characteristics, and processes visible in the group as representative Spanish immigrants, central to the establishment of a Spanish presence in the New World’s richest land. The intention is to contribute to a changing image of the Spanish conqueror, a man motivated more by pragmatic self-interest than by any love of adventure, capable and versatile as often as illiterate and rough. Aiming at permanence more than new landfalls, these men created the governmental units and settlement distribution of much of Spanish America and set lasting patterns for a new society.

Part II contains the men’s individual biographies, ranging from a few lines for the most obscure to many pages of analysis for the best-documented figures. The author traces the lives of the men to their beginnings in Spain and follows their careers after the episode in Cajamarca.

Part travelogue, part cookbook, Mercados takes us on a tour of Mexico’s most colorful destinations—its markets—led by an award-winning, preeminent guide whose passion for Mexican food attracted followers from around the globe. Just as David Sterling’s Yucatán earned him praise for his “meticulously researched knowledge” (Saveur) and for producing “a labor of love that well documents place, people and, yes, food” (Booklist), Mercados now invites readers to learn about local ingredients, meet vendors and cooks, and taste dishes that reflect Mexico’s distinctive regional cuisine.

Serving up more than one hundred recipes, Mercados presents unique versions of Oaxaca’s legendary moles and Michoacan’s carnitas, as well as little-known specialties such as the charcuterie of Chiapas, the wild anise of Pátzcuaro, and the seafood soups of Veracruz. Sumptuous color photographs transport us to the enormous forty-acre, 10,000-merchant Central de Abastos in Oaxaca as well as tiny tianguises in Tabasco. Blending immersive research and passionate appreciation, David Sterling’s final opus is at once a must-have cookbook and a literary feast for the gastronome.

The rise of merchant capital in Mecca conditioned the development of Meccan social, economic, religious, and political structure. Mahmood Ibrahim traces the roots of capitalism from the emergence of merchants as the main force in Mecca through the first civil war in Islam (656–661). Through a rereading of original Arabic sources and drawing from modern scholarship on the subject, Ibrahim offers a new interpretation of the rise of Islam.

He argues that Islam contributed certain institutional beliefs and practices that unblocked obstacles and helped merchants gain political and economic hegemony over western Asia. Ibrahim contends that, with the conquest of Mecca, the newly formed Muslim state spread its control to the rest of Arabia, which mobilized a significant social force and allowed for further expansion outside Arabia, thus extending merchant control to include new surplus-producing regions, a vast network of trade routes, and wider markets.

This extensively researched study offers a new interpretation of the history of Islam, including the formation of Islamic society and the unfolding of the first civil war. In offering a better understanding of the Umayyad Caliphate that ruled Islam for a century to come, Ibrahim helps lay the groundwork for understanding the Middle East as it is today.

Of interest to scholars of Middle Eastern studies, this important work will be necessary reading for students of Near Eastern and North African history, as well as students of the history of Medieval Europe.

Healing practices in Mesoamerica span a wide range, from traditional folk medicine with roots reaching back into the prehispanic era to westernized biomedicine. These sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing practices have attracted attention from researchers and the public alike, as interest in alternative medicine and holistic healing continues to grow.

Responding to this interest, the essays in this book offer a comprehensive, state-of-the-art survey of Mesoamerican healers and medical practices in Mexico and Guatemala. The first two essays describe the work of prehispanic and colonial healers and show how their roles changed over time. The remaining essays look at contemporary healers, including bonesetters, curers, midwives, nurses, physicians, social workers, and spiritualists. Using a variety of theoretical approaches, the authors examine such topics as the intersection of gender and curing, the recruitment of healers and their training, healers' compensation and workload, types of illnesses treated and recommended treatments, conceptual models used in diagnosis and treatment, and the relationships among healers and between indigenous healers and medical and political authorities.

New case studies documenting ten thousand years of cuisines across the cultures of Oaxaca, Mexico, from the earliest gathered plants, such as guajes, to the contemporary production of tejate and its health implications.

Among the richest culinary traditions in Mexico are those of the “eight regions” of the state of Oaxaca. Mesquite Pods to Mezcal brings together some of the most prominent scholars in Oaxacan archaeology and related fields to explore the evolution of the area’s world-renowned cuisines. This volume, the first to address food practices across Oaxaca through a long-term historical lens, covers the full spectrum of human occupation in Oaxaca, from the early Holocene to contemporary times. Contributors consider the deep history of agroecological management and large-scale landscape transformation, framing food production as a human-environment relation. They explore how, after the arrival of the Spanish, Oaxacan cuisines adapted, diets changed, and food became a stronger marker of identity. Examining the present, further studies document how traditional foodways persist and what they mean for contemporary Oaxacans, whether they are traveling ancient roads, working outside the region, or rebuilding after an earthquake. Together, the original case studies in this volume demonstrate how new methods and diverse theoretical approaches can come together to trace the development of a rich food tradition, one that is thriving today.

Seeking a closer connection with nature than the manicured lawns of suburbia, naturalist Fred Gehlbach and his family built a house on the edge of a wooded ravine in Central Texas in the mid-1960s. On daily walks over the hills, creek hollows, and fields of the ravine, Gehlbach has observed the cycles of weather and seasons, the annual migrations of birds, and the life cycles of animals and plants that also live in the ravine.

In this book, Gehlbach draws on thirty-five years of journal entries to present a composite, day-by-day almanac of the life cycles of this semiwild natural island in the midst of urban Texas. Recording such events as the hatching of Eastern screech owl chicks, the emergence of June bugs, and the first freeze of November, he reminds us of nature's daily, monthly, and annual cycles, from which humans are becoming ever more detached in our unnatural urban environments. The long span of the almanac also allows Gehlbach to track how local and even global developments have affected the ravine, from scars left by sewer construction to an increase in frost-free days probably linked to global warming.

This long-term record of natural cycles provides one of only two such baseline data sets for North America. At the same time, the book is an eloquent account of one keen observer's daily interactions with his wild and human neighbors and of the lessons in connectedness and the "play of life" that they teach.

Winner, Senior Book Prize, American Ethnological Society

Starting with the post-structuralist idea that truth systems are lodged in discourse, and that discourse varies from society to society, Greg Urban seeks to discover the nature and extent of that variation. His journey to an Amerindian society in which dreams are more prominent than everyday aspects of the sensible world leads him to radically reformulate one of the main problematics of Western thought: the relationship between our sensations of the world and the understandings we form of them.

Metaphysical Community proposes that this dichotomy comes from the interplay between two sides of discourse-its intelligible side as a carrier of meanings, and its sensible side as thing-in-the-world that must be replicated. This insight leads to the heart of the book-the exploration of the uneasy tension that binds experience and understanding, phenomena and noumena.

Urban challenges basic assumptions that underlie social and cultural anthropology and much of the social sciences and humanities. His provocative insights will be of interest to all those concerned with anthropology, cultural studies, literary criticism, the sociology and politics of culture, and philosophy.

What Metiernich wanted at the peak of his career, why he wanted it, and the methods by which he achieved his goals are questions brilliantly answered in this survey and analysis of the Austrian chancellor's diplomacy during the period when he was the pre-eminent figure in European politics.

Metternich's single-minded objective during 1820–1823 was to preserve the Austrian hegemony he had gained in Central Europe after long wars, enormous effort, and great sacrifice. If the internal security and international-power position secured by Austria at the Congress of Vienna were to be defended against the impact of widespread revolution in Europe, it was imperative that peace in Europe and the status quo be maintained. This required an unyielding opposition to all political movements that might disturb the equilibrium, especially French chauvinism and the spread of French constitutional ideas.

A one-man distillate of the doctrine of absolute monarchy, Metternich was the relentless foe of any cause, just or unjust, that threatened European repose. Hence, when the revolution in Naples seriously menaced Austrian hegemony in Italy, Metternich determined that the constitutional regime in Naples must be overthrown by an Austrian armed force, an absolute monarchy restored, and an Austrian army of occupation kept there. Nor did he scruple to use duplicity, secret negotiation, trickery, or deceit against ally and adversary alike in his effort to enlist them in the common cause of all thrones. At the Congress of Troppau, Metternich succeeded not only in defeating Russian ideas for peaceful intervention and a moderate constitution at Naples, but also in converting Tsar Alexander to thoroughly conservative views, thereby making Russia a powerful supporter of Austrian policies and knowingly alienating England, formerly Austria's closest ally.

Paul W. Schroeder brings to this bookexceptional scholarship and an objectivity hard to attain when dealing with a personality. Although Metternich, as Schroeder sees him, doubtless helped to maintain European peace and order, his real greatness consisted not in his European principles, but in his ability to defend Austrian interests under the guise of European principles. The evidence, gathered from documentary material in the Haus Hof- und Staatsarchiv in Vienna, has forced the author to the conclusion that Metternich was no real statesman. The very qualities that distinguished him as a brilliant diplomat—keen vision, cogent analysis, fertility of expedients, farsightedness, flexibility, and firmness of purpose—were converted into those of blindness to reality, superficial analysis, sterility of expedients, dogmatism, and failure of will when confronted with fundamental problems of state and society.

The Mexican American population is the fastest growing major racial/ethnic group in the United States. During the decade 1970–1980, the Mexican origin population increased from 4.5 million to 8.7 million persons. High fertility, not immigration, was responsible for nearly two-thirds of this growth.

Recent and historical evidence shows that women of Mexican origin or descent bear significantly more children than other white women in the United States. Mexican American Fertility Patterns clarifies the nature and magnitude of these fertility differences by analyzing patterns of childbearing both across ethnic groups and within the Mexican American population.

Using data from the 1970 and 1980 U.S. Censuses and from the 1976 Survey of Income and Education, the authors evaluate various hypotheses of cultural, social, demographic, and/or economic factors as determinants of fertility differences. Empirical analyses center on the interrelationships between fertility and generational status, language usage and proficiency, and female education. This timely report concludes that Mexican American fertility is closest to that of other whites under conditions of greater access to the opportunity structures of the society.

The Mexican American orquesta is neither a Mexican nor an American music. Relying on both the Mexican orquesta and the American dance band for repertorial and stylistic cues, it forges a synthesis of the two. The ensemble emerges historically as a powerful artistic vehicle for the expression of what Manuel Peña calls the "dialectic of conflict." Grounded in ethnic and class conflict, this dialectic compels the orquesta and its upwardly mobile advocates to waver between acculturation and ethnic resistance. The musical result: a complex mesh of cultural elements—Mexican and American, working- and middle-class, traditional and contemporary.

In this book, Manuel Peña traces the evolution of the orquesta in the Southwest from its beginnings in the nineteenth century through its pinnacle in the 1970s and its decline since the 1980s. Drawing on fifteen years of field research, he embeds the development of the orquesta within a historical-materialist matrix to achieve the optimal balance between description and interpretation. Rich in ethnographic detail and boldly analytical, his book is the first in-depth study of this important but neglected field of artistic culture.

Among the protest movements of the 1960s, the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) emerged as one of the principal Chicano organizations seeking social change. By the time MAYO evolved into the Raza Unida Party (RUP) in 1972, its influence had spread far beyond its Crystal City, Texas, origins. Its members precipitated some thirty-nine school walkouts, demonstrated against the Vietnam War, and confronted church and governmental bodies on numerous occasions.

Armando Navarro here offers the first comprehensive assessment of MAYO's history, politics, leadership, ideology, strategies and tactics, and activist program. Interviews with many MAYO and RUP organizers and members, as well as first-hand knowledge drawn from his own participation in meetings, presentations, and rallies, enrich the text.

This wealth of material yields the first reliable history of this extremely vocal and visible catalyst of the Chicano Movement. The book will add significantly to our understanding of Sixties protest movements and the social and political conditions that gave them birth.

Honorable Mention, Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award, presented by the Racial and Ethnic Minorities Section of the American Sociological Association, 2015

With Mexican Americans constituting a large and growing segment of U.S. society, their assimilation trajectory has become a constant source of debate. Some believe Mexican Americans are following the path of European immigrants toward full assimilation into whiteness, while others argue that they remain racialized as nonwhite. Drawing on extensive interviews with Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants in Texas, Dowling’s research challenges common assumptions about what informs racial labeling for this population. Her interviews demonstrate that for Mexican Americans, racial ideology is key to how they assert their identities as either in or outside the bounds of whiteness. Emphasizing the link between racial ideology and racial identification, Dowling offers an insightful narrative that highlights the complex and highly contingent nature of racial identity.

Up to 750,000 Mexican American men served in World War II, earning more Medals of Honor and other decorations in proportion to their numbers than any other ethnic group. Mexican American women entered the workforce on the home front, supporting the war effort and earning good wages for themselves and their families. But the contributions of these men and women have been largely overlooked as American society celebrates the sacrifices and achievements of the "Greatest Generation." To bring their stories out of the shadows, this book gathers eleven essays that explore the Mexican American experience in World War II from a variety of personal and scholarly perspectives.

The book opens with accounts of the war's impact on individuals and families. It goes on to look at how the war affected school experiences; how Mexican American patriotism helped to soften racist attitudes; how Mexican Americans in the Midwest, unlike their counterparts in other regions of the country, did not experience greater opportunities as a result of the war; how the media exposed racist practices in Texas; and how Mexican nationals played a role in the war effort through the Bracero program and through the Mexican government's championing of Mexican Americans' rights. As a whole, the collection reveals that World War II was the turning point that gave most Mexican Americans their first experience of being truly included in American society, and it confirms that Mexican Americans of the "Greatest Generation" took full advantage of their new opportunities as the walls of segregation fell.

Formal anarchist organizations disappeared in Mexico after the 1910 Revolution, but anarchist principles survive in the popular resistance movements against the post-revolutionary governments. In this book, Donald Hodges offers the first comprehensive treatment of the intellectual foundations, history, politics, and strategy of Mexican anarchism since the Revolution.

Hodges interviewed leading Mexican anarchists, including Mónico Rodríguez Gómez, and gained access to documents of numerous guerrilla organizations, such as the previously missing "Plan de Cerro Prieto." Using both original and published sources, he shows how the political heirs of Ricardo Flores Magón, Mexico's foremost anarchist, agitated for workers' self-management and agrarian reform under the cover of the Mexican Communist party, how they played an important role in the student rebellion, and how, in the face of a labor movement that has come under government control, anarchism is currently experiencing a rebirth under another name.

The Mexican aristocracy today is simultaneously an anachronism and a testimony to the persistence of social institutions. Shut out from political power by the democratization movements of the twentieth century, stripped of the basis of its great wealth by land reforms in the 1930s, the aristocracy nonetheless maintains a strong sense of group identity through the deeply held belief that their ancestors were the architects and rulers of Mexico for nearly four hundred years.

This expressive ethnography describes the transformation of the Mexican aristocracy from the onset of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, when the aristocracy was unquestionably Mexico's highest-ranking social class, until the end of the twentieth century, when it had almost ceased to function as a superordinate social group. Drawing on extensive interviews with group members, Nutini maps out the expressive aspects of aristocratic culture in such areas as perceptions of class and race, city and country living, education and professional occupations, political participation, religion, kinship, marriage and divorce, and social ranking. His findings explain why social elites persist even when they have lost their status as ruling and political classes and also illuminate the relationship between the aristocracy and Mexico's new political and economic plutocracy.

Was the Royal Academy of San Carlos, founded in 1785 by the King of Spain, beneficial or detrimental to the development of a valid, living art in Mexico? The answer lies in the archives of the school, but nobody thought about constructing an aesthetic history from them until Jean Charlot accidentally discovered their extent and interest while searching for other material.

In this straightforward, documented account he presents not merely opinions and criticism but evidence, including curricula and contemporary drawings by students and teachers.

Since Pre-Conquest art there have been, it is usually assumed, two periods in Mexican art: the Colonial and the Modern. Between these peaks lies the dark Academy-dominated hiatus called Neo-Classicism, an episode that this treatise makes the first attempt to under-stand. The academic canons imported from Europe during this period were undeniably wrong for the indigenous people, and especially wrong at a time when a revolutionary Mexico was struggling for its own identity. But instead of throwing out this strange episode as foreign and imitative, it now becomes possible to see it as a period of acculturation through which the Mexican spirit emerged.

Aside from its interest as aesthetic history, this book makes an important contribution to the social history of Mexico. Some provocative ideas emerge: the interrelations between cultural and political attitudes, the historical impact of events and personalities on ideology. In the seesaw of political and financial fortunes, the worst moments of confusion were often the most pregnant artistically, with mexicanidad rising inevitably when official guidance weakened. As social history this account constitutes an interesting parallel to similar cultural experiences in the United States and in other countries of the Americas.

Charlot presents this material without special pleading, but not without appraisal. He writes: “… in the periods when the Academy was most strictly run along academic lines, it helped the young, by contrast, to realize the meaning of freedom. When the school was manned by men blind to the Mexican tradition, and sensitive only to European values, their stubborn stand became a most healthy invitation to artistic revolution.”

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.

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.

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

Don Vasco de Quiroga (1470-1565) was the first bishop of Michoacán in Western Mexico. Driven by the desire to convert the native Purhépecha-Chichimec peoples to a purified form of Christianity, free of the corruptions of European Catholicism, he sought to establish New World Edens in Michoacán by congregating the people into pueblo-hospital communities, where mendicant friars could more easily teach them the fundamental beliefs of Christianity and the values of Spanish culture.

In this broadly synthetic study, Bernardino Verástique explores Vasco de Quiroga's evangelizing project in its full cultural and historical context. He begins by recreating the complex and not wholly incompatible worldviews of the Purhépecha and the Spaniards at the time of their first encounter in 1521. With Quiroga as a focal point, Verástique then traces the uneasy process of assimilation and resistance that occurred on both sides as the Spaniards established political and religious dominance in Michoacán. He describes the syncretisms, or fusions, between Christianity and indigenous beliefs and practices that arose among the Purhépecha and relates these to similar developments in other regions of Mexico.

Written especially for students and general readers, this book demonstrates how cultural and geographical environments influence religious experience, while it adds to our understanding of the process of indigenous appropriation of Christian theological concepts in the New World.

Winner, Award of Merit for Non-Fiction, The Philosophical Society of Texas, 2015

Before Abstract Expressionism of New York City was canonized as American postwar modernism, the United States was filled with localized manifestations of modern art. One such place where considerable modernist activity occurred was Texas, where artists absorbed and interpreted the latest, most radical formal lessons from Mexico, the East Coast, and Europe, while still responding to the state’s dramatic history and geography. This barely known chapter in the story of American art is the focus of Midcentury Modern Art in Texas.

Presenting new research and artwork that has never before been published, Katie Robinson Edwards examines the contributions of many modernist painters and sculptors in Texas, with an emphasis on the era’s most abstract and compelling artists. Edwards looks first at the Dallas Nine and the 1936 Texas Centennial, which offered local artists a chance to take stock of who they were and where they stood within the national artistic setting. She then traces the modernist impulse through various manifestations, including the foundations of early Texas modernism in Houston; early practitioners of abstraction and non-objectivity; the Fort Worth Circle; artists at the University of Texas at Austin; Houston artists in the 1950s; sculpture in and around an influential Fort Worth studio; and, to see how some Texas artists fared on a national scale, the Museum of Modern Art’s “Americans” exhibitions.

The first full-length treatment of abstract art in Texas during this vital and canon-defining period, Midcentury Modern Art in Texas gives these artists their due place in American art, while also valuing the quality of Texan-ness that subtly undergirds much of their production.

The World Health Organization is currently promoting a policy of replacing traditional or lay midwives in countries around the world. As part of an effort to record the knowledge of local midwives before it is lost, Midwives and Mothers explores birth, illness, death, and survival on a Guatemalan sugar and coffee plantation, or finca, through the lives of two local midwives, Doña Maria and her daughter Doña Siriaca, and the women they have served over a forty-year period.

By comparing the practices and beliefs of the mother and daughter, Sheila Cosminsky shows the dynamics of the medicalization process and the contestation between the midwives and biomedical personnel, as the latter try to impose their system as the authoritative one. She discusses how the midwives syncretize, integrate, or reject elements from Mayan, Spanish, and biomedical systems. The midwives’ story becomes a lens for understanding the impact of medicalization on people’s lives and the ways in which women’s bodies have become contested terrain between traditional and contemporary medical practices. Cosminsky also makes recommendations for how ethno-obstetric and biomedical systems may be accommodated, articulated, or integrated. Finally, she places the changes in the birthing system in the larger context of changes in the plantation system, including the elimination of coffee growing, which has made women, traditionally the primary harvesters of coffee beans, more economically dependent on men.

Few episodes in Texas history have excited more popular interest than the Mier Expedition of 1842. Nineteen-year-old Joseph D. McCutchan was among the 300 Texans who, without the cover of the Lone Star flag, launched their own disastrous invasion across the Rio Grande.

McCutchan's diary provides a vivid account of his experience—the Texans' quick dispatch by Mexican troops at the town of Mier, the hardships of a forced march to Mexico City, over twenty months of imprisonment, and the journey back home after release. Although there are other firsthand accounts of the Mier Expedition, McCutchan was the only diarist who followed the Tampico route to Mexico City. His account documents a different experience than that of the main body of prisoners who marched to the national capital by way of Monterrey, Saltillo, and Agua Nueva.

Among the last of the prisoners to be freed, McCutchan covers in his journal the whole period of confinement from December 26, 1842, to the final release on September 16, 1844.

The McCutchan diary is set apart from other Mier accounts not only by the new information it provides, but also by Joseph Milton Nance's superb editing. Nance is an acknowledged authority on the hostilities between Texas and Mexico during the era of the Texas Republic. He has transcribed, edited, and annotated the diary with characteristic scholarship and painstaking attention to detail.

The digital storytelling project Humanizing Deportation invites migrants to present their own stories in the world’s largest and most diverse archive of its kind. Since 2017, more than 300 community storytellers have created their own audiovisual testimonial narratives, sharing their personal experiences of migration and repatriation. With Migrant Feelings, Migrant Knowledge, the project’s coordinator, Robert Irwin, and other team members introduce the project’s innovative participatory methodology, drawing out key issues regarding the human consequences of contemporary migration control regimes, as well as insights from migrants whose world-making endeavors may challenge what we think we know about migration.

In recent decades, migrants in North America have been treated with unprecedented harshness. Migrant Feelings, Migrant Knowledge outlines this recent history, revealing stories both of grave injustice and of seemingly unsurmountable obstacles overcome. As Irwin writes, “The greatest source of expertise on the human consequences of contemporary migration control are the migrants who have experienced them,” and their voices in this searing collection jump off the page and into our hearts and minds.

Migration and continuity have shaped both the Chicano people and their oral and written literature. In this pathfinding study of Chicano literature, Teresa McKenna specifically explores how these works arise out of social, political, and psychological conflict and how the development of Chicano literature is inextricably embedded in this fact.

McKenna begins by appraising the evolution of Chicano literature from oral forms—including the important role of the corrido in the development of Chicano poetry. In subsequent chapters she examines the works of Richard Rodriguez and Rolando Hinojosa. She also devotes a chapter to the development of the Chicana voice in Chicano literature. Her epilogue considers the parallel development of Chicano literary theory and discusses some possible directions for research.

In McKenna's own words, "I believe that the future of this literature, as that of all literatures by people of color in the United States, rests largely on its being effectively introduced into the curricula at all levels, as well as its entrance into the critical consciousness of literary theory." This book will be an important step in that process.

Much has been written about Millennials, but until now their growing presence in the field of architecture has not been examined in depth. In an era of significant challenges stemming from explosive population growth, climate change, and the density of cities, Millennials in Architecture embraces the digitally savvy disruptors who are joining the field at a crucial time as it grapples with the best ways to respond to a changing physical world.

Taking a clear-eyed look at the new generation in the context of the design professions, Darius Sollohub begins by situating Millennials in a line of generations stretching back to early Modernism, exploring how each generation negotiates the ones before and after. He then considers the present moment, closely evaluating the significance of Millennial behaviors and characteristics (from civic-mindedness to collaboration, and time management in a 24/7 culture), all underpinned by fluency in the digital world. The book concludes with an assessment of the profound changes and opportunities that Millennial disruption will bring to education, licensure, and firm management. Encouraging new alliances, Millennials in Architecture is an essential resource for the architectural community and its stakeholders.

Milton and This Pendant World is an interpretation of the great English poet “in an age increasingly skeptical, in a culture dominated by the assumptions of the natural and historical sciences and by the illusions of progress and enlightenment.”

Those are the words of the author of this book, George Wesley Whiting, an eminent and devoted Miltonian. Believing that Milton has a vital message for the modern world, Whiting has abandoned the usual pattern for examining a poet—study of versification, meter, and other poetic devices. Instead, he presents an exposition of the spiritual and moral meaning of Milton’s poetry, which can still have truth and beauty for this doubting age.

The literary image of the pendant world was familiar in Milton’s seventeenth century, but is meaningless to most people of our day. The comforting picture of the world hanging from heaven on a golden chain signifies God’s close watchfulness over humanity and the inseparable bond which links us to the spiritual kingdom.

The author declares that the search for God and the struggle to overcome the spiritual and material forces that impede the search represent the most vital of all human efforts; for unless this search is our primary motivation, life is without meaning, without final purpose.

Whiting also observes that true Christianity stands not for the impoverishment of humanity and our enslavement to the Deity, but rather for human moral health, harmonious development, and spiritual welfare. In order to save civilization from destruction at the hands of its friends—secularists, specialists, militarists, and politicians—we must have a renaissance of the spirit, a cultural synthesis in which a revitalized religion, enriched by philosophy and science, renews the ideals of Christianity.

The inhabitants of the department of Antioquía in north-central Colombia have played a unique role in that country’s economic history. During the colonial period Antioqueño placer miners supplied a substantial portion of New Granada’s gold exports. Their nineteenth-century descendants pioneered investments in lode mining, colonization, international commerce, banking, stock raising, tobacco, and coffee. In the twentieth century, Antioqueños initiated the industrialization of the regional capital, Medellín.

Many theories have been set forth to account for the special energy and initiative of Antioqueños. They range from ethnic and psychological interpretations (Antioqueños are descended from Jews or Basques; they are driven to succeed because of status deprivation) to historical explanations that emphasize their geographic isolation, mining heritage, or the coffee-export economy. In Miners, Merchants, and Farmers in Colonial Colombia, Ann Twinam critiques these theories and sets forth her own revisionist interpretation of Antioqueño enterprise. Rather than emphasize the alien or deviant in Antioqueño psychology or culture, Twinam re-creates the region’s late colonial economic and social structure and attributes the origins of Antioqueño enterprise to a particular mix of human and natural resources that directed the region’s development toward capital accumulation and reinvestment.

Although the existing limitations of their colonial environment may have forced Antioqueños along enterprising pathways initially, the continuation of Antioqueño investments to the present day suggests that their adaptation to a specific economic reality became a way of life transcending the historical conditions that created it.

In 1690, a dramatic account of piracy was published in Mexico City. The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez described the incredible adventures of a poor Spanish American carpenter who was taken captive by British pirates near the Philippines and forced to work for them for two years. After circumnavigating the world, he was freed and managed to return to Mexico, where the Spanish viceroy commissioned the well-known Mexican scholar Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora to write down Ramírez's account as part of an imperial propaganda campaign against pirates.

The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez has long been regarded as a work of fiction—in fact, as Latin America's first novel—but Fabio López Lázaro makes a convincing case that the book is a historical account of real events, albeit full of distortions and lies. Using contemporary published accounts, as well as newly discovered documents from Spanish, English, French, Portuguese, and Dutch archives, he proves that Ramírez voyaged with one of the most famous pirates of all time, William Dampier. López Lázaro's critical translation of The Misfortunes provides the only extensive Spanish eyewitness account of pirates during the period in world history (1650–1750) when they became key agents of the European powers jockeying for international political and economic dominance. An extensive introduction places The Misfortunes within the worldwide struggle that Spain, England, and Holland waged against the ambitious Louis XIV of France, which some historians consider to be the first world war.

Lies and inaccurate information are as old as humanity, but never before have they been so easy to spread. Each moment of every day, the Internet and broadcast media purvey misinformation, either deliberately or accidentally, to a mass audience on subjects ranging from politics to consumer goods to science and medicine, among many others. Because misinformation now has the potential to affect behavior on a massive scale, it is urgently important to understand how it works and what can be done to mitigate its harmful effects.

Misinformation and Mass Audiences brings together evidence and ideas from communication research, public health, psychology, political science, environmental studies, and information science to investigate what constitutes misinformation, how it spreads, and how best to counter it. The expert contributors cover such topics as whether and to what extent audiences consciously notice misinformation, the possibilities for audience deception, the ethics of satire in journalism and public affairs programming, the diffusion of rumors, the role of Internet search behavior, and the evolving efforts to counteract misinformation, such as fact-checking programs. The first comprehensive social science volume exploring the prevalence and consequences of, and remedies for, misinformation as a mass communication phenomenon, Misinformation and Mass Audiences will be a crucial resource for students and faculty researching misinformation, policymakers grappling with questions of regulation and prevention, and anyone concerned about this troubling, yet perhaps unavoidable, dimension of current media systems.

"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 syndrome in which young women are possessed by devils. In the process, he became fascinated by other aspects of Miskitu culture—turtle fishing, Miskitu Christianity, community development efforts—the whole pattern of Miskitu community life. He also formed deep friendships to carry into the future.

Twenty years later he was able to return and continue his ethnographic work. Utilizing ideas from recent interpretive anthropology and a vivid writing style, Dennis describes food habits, language, health practices, religious beliefs, and storytelling, inviting the reader to experience life in Awastara along with him. Building upon earlier work by Mary Helms, Bernard Nietschmann, Edmund Gordon, and Charles Hale, The Miskitu People of Awastara makes its own original contribution. It is the first full-length study of a coastal Miskitu community north of Puerto Cabezas, contrasting life before and after the war years of the 1980s. It will be a valuable addition to the literature on this indigenous group and should appeal to anthropologists and other social scientists, as well as all readers interested in peoples of the Caribbean coast.

In the spring of 1983, a North American couple who were hoping to adopt a child internationally received word that if they acted quickly, they could become the parents of a boy in an orphanage in Honduras. Layers of red tape dissolved as the American Embassy there smoothed the way for the adoption. Within a few weeks, Margaret Ward and Thomas de Witt were the parents of a toddler they named Nelson—an adorable boy whose prior life seemed as mysterious as the fact that government officials in two countries had inexplicably expedited his adoption.

In Missing Mila, Finding Family, Margaret Ward tells the poignant and compelling story of this international adoption and the astonishing revelations that emerged when Nelson's birth family finally relocated him in 1997. After recounting their early years together, during which she and Tom welcomed the birth of a second son, Derek, and created a family with both boys, Ward vividly recalls the upheaval that occurred when members of Nelson's birth family contacted them and sought a reunion with the boy they knew as Roberto. She describes how their sense of family expanded to include Nelson's Central American relatives, who helped her piece together the lives of her son's birth parents and their clandestine activities as guerrillas in El Salvador's civil war. In particular, Ward develops an internal dialogue with Nelson's deceased mother Mila, an elusive figure whose life and motivations she tries to understand.

Floating on air currents over rural countryside and open city spaces, the Mississippi Kite presents a familiar sight to many people across the southern United States, although this graceful hawk is not well known by name. This engaging natural history, illustrated with superb color photographs, provides all a bird watcher needs to become acquainted with the kite, its life cycle, and its fascinating history with humans.

Under various folk names, including Blue Darter, Grasshopper Hawk, and Mosquito Hawk, the Mississippi Kite ranges throughout the southern United States from the coasts of the Carolinas to the plains of the Southwest. The authors describe all aspects of the kite's life cycle, from breeding and nesting, raising young, and hunting and feeding to the kite's annual winter migration to South America. They also trace its intriguing relationship with humans, from its discovery by Europeans in the nineteenth century to the present day.

For bird lovers and ornithologists alike, The Mississippi Kite will be an essential introduction to a bird well worth knowing. A special section on conservation and a selection of references for further reading complement the text.

The Mixe of Oaxaca was the first extensive ethnography of the Mixe, with a special focus on Mixe religious beliefs and rituals and the curing practices associated with them. It records the procedures, design-plan, corresponding prayers, and symbolic context of well over one hundred rituals. Frank Lipp has written a new preface for this edition, in which he comments on the relationship of Mixe religion to current theoretical understandings of present-day Middle American folk religions.

The United States Census 2000 presents a twenty-first century America in which mixed-race marriages, cross-race adoption, and multiracial families in general are challenging the ethnic definitions by which the nation has historically categorized its population. Addressing a wide spectrum of questions raised by this rich new cultural landscape, Mixing It Up brings together the observations of ten noted voices who have experienced multiracialism first-hand.

From Naomi Zack's "American Mixed Race: The United States 2000 Census and Related Issues" to Cathy Irwin and Sean Metzger's "Keeping Up Appearances: Ethnic Alien-Nation in Female Solo Performance," this diverse collection spans the realities of multiculturalism in compelling new analysis. Arguing that society's discomfort with multiracialism has been institutionalized throughout history, whether through the "one drop" rule or media depictions, SanSan Kwan and Kenneth Speirs reflect on the means by which the monoracial lens is slowly being replaced.

Itself a hybrid of memoir, history, and sociological theory, Mixing It Up makes it clear why the identity politics of previous decades have little relevance to the fluid new face of contemporary humanity.

Over the last five centuries, the story of the Americas has been a story of the mixing of races and cultures. Not surprisingly, the issue of miscegenation, with its attendant fears and hopes, has been a pervasive theme in New World literature, as writers from Canada to Argentina confront the legacy of cultural hybridization and fusion.

This book takes up the challenge of transforming American literary and cultural studies into a comparative discipline by examining the dynamics of racial and cultural mixture and its opposite tendency, racial and cultural disjunction, in the literatures of the Americas. Editors Kaup and Rosenthal have brought together a distinguished set of scholars who compare the treatment of racial and cultural mixtures in literature from North America, the Caribbean, and Latin America. From various angles, they remap the Americas as a multicultural and multiracial hemisphere, with a common history of colonialism, slavery, racism, and racial and cultural hybridity.

Between the 1870s, when the great influx of European immigrants began, and the start of World War I, Argentina underwent a radical alteration of its social composition and patterns of economic productivity. Mark Szuchman, in this groundbreaking study, examines the occupational, residential, educational, and economic patterns of mobility of some four thousand men, women, and children who resided in Córdoba, Argentina's most important interior city, during this changeful era.

Through several kinds of samples, Szuchman provides a widely encompassing social picture of Córdoba, describing, among others, the unskilled laborer, the immigrant bachelor in search of roots and identity, the merchant seeking or giving credit, and the member of the elite, blind to some of the realities around him. The challenge that the pursuit of security entailed for most people and the failure of so many to persist successfully form a large part of that picture.

The author has made ample use of quantitative techniques, but secondary materials are also utilized to provide social perspectives that round out and humanize the quantitative data. The use of record linkage as the essential research method makes this work the first book on Argentina to follow similar and very successful research methodologies employed by U.S. historians.

Arvey Foundation Book Award, Association for Latin American Art, 2018

Many Latin American artists and critics in the 1920s drew on the values of modernism to question the cultural authority of Europe. Modernism gave them a tool for coping with the mobility of their circumstances, as well as the inspiration for works that questioned the very concepts of the artist and the artwork and opened the realm of art to untrained and self-taught artists, artisans, and women. Writing about the modernist works in newspapers and magazines, critics provided a new vocabulary with which to interpret and assign value to the expanding sets of abstracted forms produced by these artists, whose lives were shaped by mobility.

The Mobility of Modernism examines modernist artworks and criticism that circulated among a network of cities, including Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Havana, and Lima. Harper Montgomery maps the dialogues and relationships among critics who published in avant-gardist magazines such as Amauta and Revista de Avance and artists such as Carlos Mérida, Xul Solar, and Emilio Pettoruti, among others, who championed esoteric forms of abstraction. She makes a convincing case that, for these artists and critics, modernism became an anticolonial stance which raised issues that are still vital today—the tensions between the local and the global, the ability of artists to speak for blighted or unincorporated people, and, above all, how advanced art and its champions can enact a politics of opposition.

Though the Aztec Empire fell to Spain in 1521, three principal heirs of the last emperor, Moctezuma II, survived the conquest and were later acknowledged by the Spanish victors as reyes naturales (natural kings or monarchs) who possessed certain inalienable rights as Indian royalty. For their part, the descendants of Moctezuma II used Spanish law and customs to maintain and enhance their status throughout the colonial period, achieving titles of knighthood and nobility in Mexico and Spain. So respected were they that a Moctezuma descendant by marriage became Viceroy of New Spain (colonial Mexico's highest governmental office) in 1696.

This authoritative history follows the fortunes of the principal heirs of Moctezuma II across nearly two centuries. Drawing on extensive research in both Mexican and Spanish archives, Donald E. Chipman shows how daughters Isabel and Mariana and son Pedro and their offspring used lawsuits, strategic marriages, and political maneuvers and alliances to gain pensions, rights of entailment, admission to military orders, and titles of nobility from the Spanish government. Chipman also discusses how the Moctezuma family history illuminates several larger issues in colonial Latin American history, including women's status and opportunities and trans-Atlantic relations between Spain and its New World colonies.

Politics, the workings of government and of people in government, has long been a fertile field for exploration by the novelist. The political arena offers many examples of conflict—between individuals, groups, or the individual and the group, or within the individual. It is natural then that a sizable body of fiction has grown up using politics as a main source of action.

In this study Joseph Blotner attempts "to discover the image of American poIitics as presented in American novels over a sixty-year span." His major discussion is limited to 138 novels dealing directly with candidates, officeholders, party officials, or "individuals performing political acts as they are conventionally understood." He also refers to nineteenth-century predecessors, European analogues, or other twentieth-century American novels as they bear on his discussions.

Blotner gives a thorough examination of certain archetypal figures (the young hero, the political boss, and the Southern demagogue), which appear in central or subordinate positions in the action of many political novels. He finds that the novels reflect certain major movements or upheavals in the political history of the United States or the world (in particular, fascism and McCarthyism), and that they also give the political aspects of universal attitudes or problems (corruption, disillusionment, reaction, and the role of women and of the intellectual). The author presents a detailed analysis of each of these subjects, prefacing each analysis by a survey of the historical background out of which the fiction grew, and including a brief and often pungent assessment of the literary merits of each novel discussed. He also surveys a large body of political fiction which cuts across all of these categories: the novel of the future—both utopian and apocalyptic.

The Modern American Political Novel will be of great interest to the student of twentieth-century literature; the political scientist, the sociologist, and even the practicing politician will also find its analyses useful and illuminating.

Designed as a survey and focused on key examples and movements arranged chronologically from 1903 to 2003, this is the first comprehensive history of modern architecture in Latin America in any language.

Runner-up, University Co-op Robert W. Hamilton Book Award, 2015

Modern Architecture in Latin America: Art, Technology, and Utopia is an introductory text on the issues, polemics, and works that represent the complex processes of political, economic, and cultural modernization in the twentieth century. The number and types of projects varied greatly from country to country, but, as a whole, the region produced a significant body of architecture that has never before been presented in a single volume in any language. Modern Architecture in Latin America is the first comprehensive history of this important production.

Designed as a survey and focused on key examples/paradigms arranged chronologically from 1903 to 2003, this volume covers a myriad of countries; historical, social, and political conditions; and projects/developments that range from small houses to urban plans to architectural movements. The book is structured so that it can be read in a variety of ways—as a historically developed narrative of modern architecture in Latin America, as a country-specific chronology, or as a treatment of traditions centered on issues of art, technology, or utopia. This structure allows readers to see the development of multiple and parallel branches/historical strands of architecture and, at times, their interconnections across countries. The authors provide a critical evaluation of the movements presented in relationship to their overall goals and architectural transformations.

Reading a play and watching it performed onstage are quite different experiences. Likewise, studying a country's theatrical tradition with reference only to playtexts overlooks the vital impact of a play's performance on the audience and on the whole artistic community. In this performance-centered approach to Brazilian theatre since the 1940s, David George explores a total theatrical language—the plays, the companies that produced them, and the performances that set a standard for all future stagings.

George structures the discussion around several important companies. He begins with Os Comediantes, whose revolutionary 1943 staging of Nelson Rodrigues' Vestido de Noiva (Bridal Gown) broke with the outmoded comedy-of-manners formula that had dominated the national stage since the nineteenth century. He considers three companies of the 1950s and 1960s—Teatro Brasileiro de Comédia, Teatro de Arena, and Teatro Oficina—along with the 1967 production of O Rei da Vela (The Candle King) by Teatro Oficina.

The 1970s represented a wasteland for Brazilian theatre, George finds, in which a repressive military dictatorship muzzled artistic expression. The Grupo Macunaíma brought theatre alive again in the 1980s, with its productions of Macunaíma and Nelson 2 Rodrigues.

Common to all theatrical companies, George concludes, was the desire to establish a national aesthetic, free from European and United States models. The creative tension this generated and the successes of modern Brazilian theatre make lively reading for all students of Brazilian and world drama.

Modern Hebrew for Beginners—which is now revised and updated—and Modern Hebrew for Intermediate Students are the core of a multimedia program for the college-level Hebrew classroom developed at the University of Texas at Austin in the early 2000s. Within an intensive framework of instruction that assumes six weekly hours in the classroom, the program provides for two semesters of instruction, at the end of which most successful students will reach the intermediate-mid or intermediate-high levels of proficiency in speaking and reading, and some will reach advanced-low proficiency, as defined by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL).

In addition to a variety of written exercises, the workbook includes vocabulary lists, reading selections, discussions of cultural topics, illustrations of grammar points, notes on registers, suggestions for class and individual activities, and glossaries. The workbook is complemented by a website (http://www.laits.utexas.edu/hebrew) that provides short video segments originally scripted and filmed in Israel and the United States, vocabulary flashcards with sound, interactive exercises on topics included in the workbook, sound files parallel to the reading selections in the workbook, and additional materials that enhance the learning experience. The stability of the workbook, combined with the dynamic nature of the website and the internet searches the students are directed to conduct, allows language instructors to reshape the curriculum and adapt it to the needs of their students and the goals of their programs.

Modern Hebrew for Intermediate Students—which is now revised and updated—and Modern Hebrew for Beginners are the core of a multimedia program for the college-level Hebrew classroom developed at the University of Texas at Austin in the early 2000s. Within an intensive framework of instruction that assumes six weekly hours in the classroom, the program provides for two semesters of instruction, at the end of which most successful students will reach the intermediate-mid or intermediate-high levels of proficiency in speaking and reading, and some will reach advanced-low proficiency, as defined by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL).

In addition to a variety of written exercises, the workbook includes vocabulary lists, reading selections, discussions of cultural topics, illustrations of grammar points, notes on registers, suggestions for class and individual activities, and glossaries. The workbook is complemented by a website (http://www.laits.utexas.edu/hebrew) that provides short video segments originally scripted and filmed in Israel and the United States, vocabulary flashcards with sound, interactive exercises on topics included in the workbook, sound files parallel to the reading selections in the workbook, and additional materials that enhance the learning experience. The stability of the workbook, combined with the dynamic nature of the website and the internet searches the students are directed to conduct, allows language instructors to reshape the curriculum and adapt it to the needs of their students and the goals of their programs.

A comparative study of contemporary Israeli and Palestinian diasporas.

Exilic and diasporic experience have become ubiquitous in recent decades. Jews, lacking a homeland, spread to various parts of the world, making the Jewish diaspora paradigmatic. But after the establishment of Israel in 1948, a different kind of diaspora emerged, as more than a tenth of Israeli citizens have chosen to leave their newly established state and resettle. Meanwhile, about half of all Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, now reside in exile, predominantly as a result of the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Recognizing that Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian-Arab societies coexist and are engaged in constant relations, Nahum Karlinsky assembles an impressive array of contributors to explore these diasporas alongside one another and in dialogue with other diasporic communities. The collected essays cover such topics as the experiences of Palestinian exiles within Israel, the demographics of today’s Israeli diaspora, the unique place of Israeli Jews in the United States, literatures of Palestinian transnationals, the emergence of Berlin as a queer Israeli-Jewish immigrant enclave, and self-reflections on voluntary exile. The Modern Israeli and Palestinian Diasporas challenges and reimagines the very notion of a homeland.

The phenomenon of celebrity burst upon the world scene about a century ago, as movies and modern media brought exceptional, larger-than-life personalities before the masses. During the same era, modernist authors were creating works that defined high culture in our society and set aesthetics apart from the middle- and low-brow culture in which celebrity supposedly resides. To challenge this ingrained dichotomy between modernism and celebrity, Jonathan Goldman offers a provocative new reading of early twentieth-century culture and the formal experiments that constitute modernist literature's unmistakable legacy. He argues that the literary innovations of the modernists are indeed best understood as a participant in the popular phenomenon of celebrity.

Presenting a persuasive argument as well as a chronicle of modernism's and celebrity's shared history, Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity begins by unraveling the uncanny syncretism between Oscar Wilde's writings and his public life. Goldman explains that Wilde, in shaping his instantly identifiable public image, provided a model for both literary and celebrity cultures in the decades that followed. In subsequent chapters, Goldman traces this lineage through two luminaries of the modernist canon, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, before turning to the cinema of mega-star Charlie Chaplin. He investigates how celebrity and modernism intertwine in the work of two less obvious modernist subjects, Jean Rhys and John Dos Passos. Turning previous criticism on its head, Goldman demonstrates that the authorial self-fashioning particular to modernism and generated by modernist technique helps create celebrity as we now know it.

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book

Modernismo arose in Spanish American literature as a confrontation with and a response to modernizing forces that were transforming Spanish American society in the later nineteenth century. In this book, Cathy L. Jrade undertakes a full exploration of the modernista project and shows how it provided a foundation for trends and movements that have continued to shape literary production in Spanish America throughout the twentieth century.

Jrade opens with a systematic consideration of the development of modernismo and then proceeds with detailed analyses of works-poetry, narrative, and essays-that typified and altered the movement's course. In this way, she situates the writing of key authors, such as Rubén Darío, José Martí, and Leopoldo Lugones, within the overall modernista project and traces modernismo's influence on subsequent generations of writers.

Jrade's analysis reclaims the power of the visionary stance taken by these creative intellectuals. She firmly abolishes any lingering tendency to associate modernismo with affectation and effete elegance, revealing instead how the modernistas' new literary language expressed their profound political and epistemological concerns.

Examines the role of architecture in the history of global development and decolonization.

In Modernism’s Magic Hat, Ijlal Muzaffar examines how modern architects and planners help resolve one of the central dilemmas of the mid-twentieth-century world order: how to make decolonization plausible without accounting for centuries of capital drain under colonial rule. In the years after World War II, architects and planners found extensive opportunities in new international institutions—such as the World Bank, the UN, and the Ford Foundation—and helped shape new models of global intervention that displaced the burden of change onto the inhabitants. Muzaffar argues that architecture in this domain didn’t just symbolically represent power, but formed the material domain through which new modes of power acquired sense. Looking at a series of architectural projects across the world, from housing in Ghana to village planning in Nigeria and urban planning in Venezuela and Pakistan, Muzaffar explores how architects and planners shaped new ideas of time, land, climate, and the decolonizing body, making them appear as sources of untapped value. What resulted, Muzaffar argues, is a widespread belief in spontaneous Third World “development” without capital, which continues to foreclose any global discussion of colonial theft.

“Ask an authority on Brazilian culture what he considers to be the most significant artistic event in Brazil during this century,” observes John Nist, “and he will quickly reply, ‘The Modern Art Week Exhibition, staged in Sao Paulo in February, 1922.’ This public demonstration and aesthetic manifesto represented a cut with the past, a violent break with tradition unparalleled in Brazilian history. The fact that Brazilians still discuss the poetical renovation achieved by Modernism shows how strongly the movement attacked and questioned traditional attitudes, cherished preconceptions, prejudiced aspects of a national sensibility that still persists, in some quarters, to this day. As a movement of research and experimentation, Modernism was, in the words of its principal prophet, Mário de Andrade, ‘a rupture, a revolt against the national intelligence.’ In time it became a national affirmation that resulted in the integration of Brazilian literature into the literature of the Western world—an integration too long overlooked by members of the English-speaking community.”

The literary revolution thus unleashed in 1922 in Latin America’s largest country is the subject of this book by Nist. Initially fostered by the Brazilian poets in response to new challenges in painting, sculpture, architecture, and music, the Modernist Movement has passed through four clear phases, which are traced by the author: first, the destructive and iconoclastic phase, 1922–1930; second, the serious and socially concerned phase, 1930–1940; third, the aesthetically formal phase, 1940–1950; fourth, the Concretist experimental phase, 1950 to the mid-1960s.

With similar competence Nist examines the fourfold achievement sought by these same poets: (1) a new age of humanity as well as a new artistic attitude; (2) a new aesthetic purity; (3) the termination of the divorce between humanity and nature, artist and human; (4) the discovery and establishment of a common ground between culture and spontaneity, tradition and originality, social and natural reality.

In addition to presenting the origin and evolution of the Modernist Movement from a historical perspective, the author pays critical attention to the artistic achievements of the leading poets of twentieth-century Brazil: Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira, Jorge de Lima, Cassiano Ricardo, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Cecília Meireles, Vinícius de Moraes, Augusto Frederico Schmidt, Murilo Mendes, João Cabral de Melo Neto, Domingos Carvalho da Silva, and others of similar stature.

Since the mid 1970s, there has been an extraordinary renewal of interest in early modern architecture, both as a way of gaining insight into contemporary architectural culture and as a reaction to neoconservative postmodernism. This book undertakes a critical reappraisal of the notion of modernity in Mexican architecture and its influence on a generation of Mexican architects whose works spanned the 1920s through the 1960s.

Nine essays by noted architects and architectural historians cover a range of topics from broad-based critical commentaries to discussions of individual architects and buildings. Among the latter are the architects Enrique del Moral, Juan O'Gorman, Carlos Obregón Santacilia, Juan Segura, Mario Pani, and the campus and stadium of the Ciudad Universitaria in Mexico City.

Relatively little has been published in English regarding this era in Mexican architecture. Thus, Modernity and the Architecture of Mexico will play a groundbreaking role in making the underlying assumptions, ideological and political constructs, and specific architect's agendas known to a wide audience in the humanities. Likewise, it should inspire greater appreciation for this undervalued body of works as an important contribution to the modern movement.

2022 PROSE Award Finalist in Architecture and Urban Planning
2022 Association for Latin American Art Arvey Foundation Book Award, Honorable Mention

Throughout the early twentieth century, waves of migration brought working-class people to the outskirts of Buenos Aires. This prompted a dilemma: Where should these restive populations be situated relative to the city’s spatial politics? Might housing serve as a tool to discipline their behavior?

Enter Antonio Bonet, a Catalan architect inspired by the transatlantic modernist and surrealist movements. Ana María León follows Bonet's decades-long, state-backed quest to house Buenos Aires's diverse and fractious population. Working with totalitarian and populist regimes, Bonet developed three large-scale housing plans, each scuttled as a new government took over. Yet these incomplete plans—Bonet's dreams—teach us much about the relationship between modernism and state power.

Modernity for the Masses finds in Bonet's projects the disconnect between modern architecture’s discourse of emancipation and the reality of its rationalizing control. Although he and his patrons constantly glorified the people and depicted them in housing plans, Bonet never consulted them. Instead he succumbed to official and elite fears of the people's latent political power. In careful readings of Bonet's work, León discovers the progressive erasure of surrealism's psychological sensitivity, replaced with an impulse, realized in modernist design, to contain the increasingly empowered population.

This is a fascinating inquiry into the factors that determine the acceptance or rejection of capitalism by the industrial working class. Combining classical social theory, historical evidence, and survey data, Waisman explores the relationship between the degree of modernization and the legitimacy of the capitalist social order.

Propositions about the interaction between established elites and emerging working classes are illustrated with three typical cases: Disraelian Britain, Bismarckian Germany, and Peronist Argentina. From the contrasting theories of Marx and Bakunin, the author derives hypotheses concerning the position of the working class in the economy and the consequences this has for legitimacy. He finds that countries at middle levels of industrial development—mostly latecomers to industrialization in Southern Europe and advanced areas of Latin America—have the greatest difficulty in establishing capitalism as a legitimate social order. They are advanced enough to have a large working class, yet underdeveloped enough to have a dissatisfied one.

Since its founding in 1930 the Peruvian Aprista party (APRA) has occupied a place of signal importance in the Peruvian political spectrum, and it is one of the most important political parties to appear in twentieth-century Latin America. Modernization, Dislocation, and Aprismo is the first major analysis of the social and political bases of the Aprista movement. Previous studies of APRA had been chiefly descriptive in nature and did not utilize modern social science approaches in analyzing the movement.

Peter F. Klarén’s major thesis is that APRA emerged in the 1930s as a direct political response to the far-reaching dislocative impact of modernization within the Peruvian sugar industry, a process that unfolded over a period of about four decades beginning in the 1890s and that substantially upset and transformed the traditional structure of society along the north coast.

Jolted by the effects of modernization, elements of the old middle and lower sectors grew increasingly hostile to the existing order. Joined by the new proletariat that was beginning to voice its collective grievances by means of the unionization process, this large, alienated segment of northern society responded overwhelmingly in 1931 to the reformist appeal of the new Aprista party. APRA, many of whose leaders were products of this environment, best expressed politically the general mood of alienation and rebellion of the area’s discontented. The eruption of the bloody and abortive Trujillo Revolution of 1932 is considered as the culmination of this process of social and economic dislocation.

In addition to presenting a major new interpretation of the origins of the Aprista movement, this study places the Aprista party in the larger Latin American context by comparing APRA with other political movements in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Cuba that were responding to similar modernization phenomena.

This study is based not only on a large body of official party literature and local newspapers for the period, but also on the newly discovered records of the Archivo de la Cámara de Comercio, Agricultura e Industria of the Department of La Libertad for the years 1904–1932.

Morocco is hailed by academics, international NGO workers, and the media as a trailblazer in women’s rights and legal reforms. The country is considered a model for other countries in the Middle East and North African region, but has Morocco made as much progress as experts and government officials claim? In Modernizing Patriarchy, Katja Žvan Elliott examines why women’s rights advances are lauded in Morocco in theory but are often not recognized in reality, despite the efforts of both Islamist and secular feminists.

In Morocco, female literacy rates remain among the lowest in the region; many women are victims of gender-based violence despite legal reforms; and girls as young as twelve are still engaged to adult men, despite numerous reforms. Based on extensive ethnographic research and fieldwork in Oued al-Ouliya, Modernizing Patriarchy offers a window into the life of Moroccan Muslim women who, though often young and educated, find it difficult to lead a dignified life in a country where they are expected to have only one destiny: that of wife and mother. Žvan Elliott exposes their struggles with modernity and the legal reforms that are supposedly ameliorating their lives. In a balanced approach, she also presents male voices and their reasons for criticizing the prevailing women’s rights discourse. Compelling and insightful, Modernizing Patriarchy exposes the rarely talked about reality of Morocco’s approach toward reform.

In a career that took him from the cotton fields of East Texas to the concert stage at Carnegie Hall and beyond, Lightnin’ Hopkins became one of America’s greatest bluesmen, renowned for songs whose topics effortlessly ranged from his African American roots to space exploration, the Vietnam War, and lesbianism, performed in a unique, eccentric, and spontaneous style of guitar playing that inspired a whole generation of rock guitarists. Hopkins’s music directly and indirectly influenced an amazing range of artists, including Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Tom Waits, and Bob Dylan, as well as bands such as the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and ZZ Top, with whom Hopkins performed.

Mojo Hand follows Lightin’ Hopkins’s life and music from the acoustic country blues that he began performing in childhood, through the rise of 1950s rock ’n’ roll, which nearly derailed his career, to his reinvention and international success as a pioneer of electric folk blues from the 1960s to the 1980s. The authors draw on 130 vivid oral histories, as well as extensive archival and secondary sources, to provide the fullest account available of the development of Hopkins’s music; his idiosyncratic business practices, such as shunning professional bookers, managers, and publicists; and his durable and indelible influence on modern roots, blues, rock ’n’ roll, singer-songwriter, and folk music. Mojo Hand celebrates the spirit and style, intelligence and wit, and confounding musical mystique of a bluesman who shaped modern American music like no one else.

As movies took the country by storm in the early twentieth century, Americans argued fiercely about whether municipal or state authorities should step in to control what people could watch when they went to movie theaters, which seemed to be springing up on every corner. Many who opposed the governmental regulation of film conceded that some entity—boards populated by trusted civic leaders, for example—needed to safeguard the public good. The National Board of Review of Motion Pictures (NB), a civic group founded in New York City in 1909, emerged as a national cultural chaperon well suited to protect this emerging form of expression from state incursions.

Using the National Board’s extensive files, Monitoring the Movies offers the first full-length study of the NB and its campaign against motion-picture censorship. Jennifer Fronc traces the NB’s Progressive-era founding in New York; its evolving set of “standards” for directors, producers, municipal officers, and citizens; its “city plan,” which called on citizens to report screenings of condemned movies to local officials; and the spread of the NB’s influence into the urban South. Ultimately, Monitoring the Movies shows how Americans grappled with the issues that arose alongside the powerful new medium of film: the extent of the right to produce and consume images and the proper scope of government control over what citizens can see and show.

In 1983, a group of citizens in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, formed Sna Jtz'ibajom, the Tzotzil-Tzeltal Maya writers' cooperative. In the two decades since, this group has evolved from writing and publishing bilingual booklets to writing and performing plays that have earned them national and international renown.

Anthropologist Robert M. Laughlin has been a part of the group since its beginnings, and he offers a unique perspective on its development as a Mayan cultural force. The Monkey Business Theatre, or Teatro Lo'il Maxil, as this branch of Sna Jtz'ibajom calls itself, has presented plays in virtually every corner of the state of Chiapas, as well as in Mexico City, Guatemala, Honduras, Canada, and in many museums and universities in the United States. It has presented to the world, for the first time in drama, a view of the culture of the Mayas of Chiapas.

In this work, Laughlin presents a translation of twelve of the plays created by Sna Jtz'ibajom, along with an introduction for each. Half of the plays are based on myths and half on the social, political, and economic problems that have confronted—and continue to confront—the Mayas of Chiapas.

Jack the Ripper. Jeffrey Dahmer. John Wayne Gacy. Locusta of Gaul. If that last name doesn’t seem to fit with the others, it’s likely because our modern society largely believes that serial killers are a recent phenomenon. Not so, argues Debbie Felton—in fact, there’s ample evidence to show that serial killers stalked the ancient world just as they do the modern one.

Felton brings this evidence to light in Monsters and Monarchs, and in doing so, forces us to rethink the assumption that serial killers arise from problems unique to modern society. Exploring a trove of stories from classical antiquity, she uncovers mythological monsters and human criminals that fit many serial killer profiles: the highway killers confronted by the Greek hero Theseus, such as Procrustes, who tortured and mutilated their victims; the Sphinx, or “strangler,” from the story of Oedipus; child-killing demons and witches, which could explain abnormal infant deaths; and historical figures such as Locusta of Gaul, the most notorious poisoner in the early Roman Empire. Redefining our understanding of serial killers and their origins, Monsters and Monarchs changes how we view both ancient Greek and Roman society and the modern-day killers whose stories still captivate the public today.

Montana has been the "last best place" for so many people. A century ago, Native Americans gathered here to perform the Ghost Dance—a last, doomed attempt to make white settlers vanish and bring back the old ways of life. Today, people are still pouring into Montana, looking for the pristine wilderness they saw in A River Runs through It.

The reality of Montana—indeed, of all the West—has never matched the myths, but this book eloquently explores how the search for a perfect place is driving growth, development, and resource exploitation in Big Sky country. In ten personal essays, John Wright looks at such things as Montana myths; old-timers; immigrants; elk; ways of seeing the landscape; land conservation and land trusts; the fate of the Blackfoot, Bitterroot, and Paradise valleys; and some means of preserving the last, best places.

These reflections offer a way of understanding Montana that goes far beyond the headlines about militia groups and celebrities' ranches. Montana never was or will be a pristine wilderness, but Wright believes that much can be saved if natives and newcomers alike see what stands to be lost. His book is a wake-up call, not a ghost dance.

After the Revolution of 1910, a powerful group of Monterrey businessmen led by the Garza-Sada family emerged as a key voice of the Mexican private sector. The Monterrey Elite and The Mexican State is the first major historical study of the "Grupo Monterrey," the business elite that transformed Monterrey into a premier industrial center, the "Pittsburgh" of Mexico.

Drawing on archival resources in the United States and Mexico and the work of previous scholars, Alex Saragoza examines the origins of the Monterrey elite. He argues that a "pact" between the new state and business interests was reached by the 1940 presidential elections—an accord that paved the way for the "alliance for profits" that has characterized relations between the Mexican state and capitalists since that time.

More than a standard business history, this study delves into both the intimate social world of the Garza-Sadas and their allies and the ideas, beliefs, and vision of the Monterrey elite that set it apart from and often against the Mexican government. In so doing, The Monterrey Elite and the Mexican State reveals the underlying forces that led to the most historic battle between the private sector and the Mexican state: the dramatic showdown in 1936 between the Garza-Sadas and then President Lázaro Cárdenas in Monterrey, Nuevo León.

From ancient Maya cities in Mexico and Central America to the Taj Mahal in India, cultural heritage sites around the world are being drawn into the wave of privatization that has already swept through such economic sectors as telecommunications, transportation, and utilities. As nation-states decide they can no longer afford to maintain cultural properties—or find it economically advantageous not to do so in the globalizing economy—private actors are stepping in to excavate, conserve, interpret, and represent archaeological and historical sites. But what are the ramifications when a multinational corporation, or even an indigenous village, owns a piece of national patrimony which holds cultural and perhaps sacred meaning for all the country's people, as well as for visitors from the rest of the world?

In this ambitious book, Lisa Breglia investigates "heritage" as an arena in which a variety of private and public actors compete for the right to benefit, economically and otherwise, from controlling cultural patrimony. She presents ethnographic case studies of two archaeological sites in the Yucatán Peninsula—Chichén Itzá and Chunchucmil and their surrounding modern communities—to demonstrate how indigenous landholders, foreign archaeologists, and the Mexican state use heritage properties to position themselves as legitimate "heirs" and beneficiaries of Mexican national patrimony. Breglia's research masterfully describes the "monumental ambivalence" that results when local residents, excavation laborers, site managers, and state agencies all enact their claims to cultural patrimony. Her findings make it clear that informal and partial privatizations—which go on quietly and continually—are as real a threat to a nation's heritage as the prospect of fast-food restaurants and shopping centers in the ruins of a sacred site.

Every society builds, and many, if not all, utilize architectural structures as markers to define place, patron, or experience. Often we consider these architectural markers as “monuments” or “monumental” buildings. Ancient Rome, in particular, is a society recognized for the monumentality of its buildings. While few would deny that the term “monumental” is appropriate for ancient Roman architecture, the nature of this characterization and its development in pre-Roman Italy is rarely considered carefully. What is “monumental” about Etruscan and early Roman architecture?

Delving into the crucial period before the zenith of Imperial Roman building, Monumentality in Etruscan and Early Roman Architecture addresses such questions as, “What factors drove the emergence of scale as a defining element of ancient Italian architecture?” and “How did monumentality arise as a key feature of Roman architecture?” Contributors Elizabeth Colantoni, Anthony Tuck, Nancy A. Winter, P. Gregory Warden, John N. Hopkins, Penelope J. E. Davies, and Ingrid Edlund-Berry reflect on the ways in which ancient Etruscans and Romans utilized the concepts of commemoration, durability, and visibility to achieve monumentality. The editors’ preface and introduction underscore the notion of architectural evolution toward monumentality as being connected to the changing social and political strategies of the ruling elites.

By also considering technical components, this collection emphasizes the development and the ideological significance of Etruscan and early Roman monumentality from a variety of viewpoints and disciplines. The result is a broad range of interpretations celebrating both ancient and modern perspectives.

Set in the High Atlas in pre-modern Morocco, Moon and Henna Tree chronicles the rise and fall of a local potentate, Hmmu. Not content with the territory left to him upon his father’s death, Hmmu, under the influence of his scheming advisor, Ibn al-Zara, begins a campaign to acquire those lands that adjoin his, either through marriage or physical force.

Ahmed Toufiq’s subtle investigation of the abuse of power and its effects on those who suffer under its tyranny also provides a unique look at Amazigh (Berber) culture. While most of Toufiq’s contemporaries focus on modern urban Morocco, he provides a fascinating, and accurate, account of the customs and traditions of a large, yet often ignored, segment of the population. Moon and Henna Tree (in the original Arabic) won the Moroccan Book Prize in 1989.

Collecting the interpretations of outstanding writers on the literature and history of modern Britain, this book deals with a rich variety of themes, some familiar, many unexpected, taking the reader on a highly engaging excursion through British life and intellectual biography. The scope includes not only the personalities, politics, and culture of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, but also the interaction of British and other societies throughout the world.

2022 Art in Service to the Environment Award, Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter
Honorable Mention, 2022 Nonfiction Prize, Writers' League of Texas

Writers explore a city’s relationship with chronic catastrophic flooding.

Shortly after Hurricane Harvey dumped a record 61 inches of rain on Houston in 2017, celebrated writer and Bayou City resident Lacy M. Johnson began collecting flood stories. Although these stories attested to the infinite variety of experience in America’s most diverse city, they also pointed to a consistent question: What does catastrophic flooding reveal about this city, and what does it obscure?

More City than Water brings together essays, conversations, and personal narratives from climate scientists, marine ecologists, housing activists, urban planners, artists, poets, and historians as they reflect on the human geography of a region increasingly defined by flooding. Both a literary and a cartographic anthology, More City than Water features striking maps of Houston’s floodplains, waterways, drainage systems, reservoirs, and inundated neighborhoods. Designed by University of Houston seniors from the Graphic Design program, each map, imaginative and precise, shifts our understanding of the flooding, the public’s relationship to it, and the fraught reality of rebuilding. Evocative and unique, this is an atlas that uncovers the changing nature of living where the waters rise.

More Tales of a Low-Rent Birder brings together twenty-five essays that originally appeared in major birding publications. In these pieces, Pete Dunne ranges from wildly humorous to sadly elegiac, as he describes everything from the "field plumage" of the dedicated birder to the lingering death of an accidentally injured golden plover. Running like a thread through all the essays is Dunne's love and respect for the birds he watches, his concern over human threats to their survival, and his tolerance, even affection, for the human "odd birds" that birding attracts. Truly, these essays offer something for everyone interested in birds and the natural habitats our species share.

An expanded edition of revered theorist Michael Löwy's Morning Star: Marxism and Surrealism (previously published in French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Greek), this masterwork collects the author's essays on the ways in which surrealism intersected with a variety of revolutionary political approaches, ranging from utopian ideals to Marxism and situationism. Taking its title from André Breton's essay "Arcane 17," which casts the star as the searing firebrand of rebellion, Löwy's provocative work spans many perspectives. These include surrealist artists who were deeply interested in Marxism and anarchism (Breton among them), as well as Marxists who were deeply interested in surrealism (Walter Benjamin in particular).

Probing the dialectics of innovation, diversity, continuity, and unity throughout surrealism's international presence, Morning Star also incorporates analyses of Claude Cahun, Guy Debord, Pierre Naville, José Carlos Mariátegui and others, accompanied by numerous reproductions of surrealist art. An extraordinarily rich collection, Morning Star promises to ignite new dialogues regarding the very nature of dissent.

This book is one of the first comprehensive studies of Islam as locally understood in the Middle East. Specifically, it is concerned with the prevalent North African belief that certain men, called marabouts, have a special relation to God that enables them to serve as intermediaries and to influence the well-being of their clients and kin. Dale F. Eickelman examines the Moroccan pilgrimage center of Boujad and unpublished Moroccan and French archival materials related to it to show how popular Islam has been modified by its adherents to accommodate new social and economic realities. In the course of his analysis he demonstrates the necessary interrelationship between social history and the anthropological study of symbolism.

Eickelman begins with an outline of the early development of Islam in Morocco, emphasizing the "maraboutic crisis" of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. He also examines the history and social characteristics of the Sherqawi religious lodge, on which the study focuses, in preprotectorate Morocco. In the central portion of the book, he analyzes the economic activities and social institutions of Boujad and its rural hinterland, as well as some basic assumptions the townspeople and tribesmen make about the social order. Finally, there is an intensive discussion of maraboutism as a phenomenon and the changing local character of Islam in Morocco.

In focusing on the "folk" level of Islam, rather than on "high culture" tradition, the author has made possible a more general interpretation of Moroccan society that is in contrast with earlier accounts that postulated a marked discontinuity between tribe and town, past and present.

From the tombs of the elite to the graves of commoners, mortuary remains offer rich insights into Classic Maya society. In Mortuary Landscapes of the Classic Maya: Rituals of Body and Soul, the anthropological archaeologist and bioarchaeologist Andrew K. Scherer explores the broad range of burial practices among the Maya of the Classic period (AD 250–900), integrating information gleaned from his own fieldwork with insights from the fields of iconography, epigraphy, and ethnography to illuminate this society’s rich funerary traditions.

Scherer’s study of burials along the Usumacinta River at the Mexican-Guatemalan border and in the Central Petén region of Guatemala—areas that include Piedras Negras, El Kinel, Tecolote, El Zotz, and Yaxha—reveals commonalities and differences among royal, elite, and commoner mortuary practices. By analyzing skeletons containing dental and cranial modifications, as well as the adornments of interred bodies, Scherer probes Classic Maya conceptions of body, wellness, and the afterlife.

Scherer also moves beyond the body to look at the spatial orientation of the burials and their integration into the architecture of Maya communities. Taking a unique interdisciplinary approach, the author examines how Classic Maya deathways can expand our understanding of this society’s beliefs and traditions, making Mortuary Landscapes of the Classic Maya an important step forward in Mesoamerican archeology.

Originally published in 2011, The Mosquito Bite Author is the seventh novel by the acclaimed Turkish author Barış Bıçakçı. It follows the daily life of an aspiring novelist, Cemil, in the months after he submits his manuscript to a publisher in Istanbul. Living in an unremarkable apartment complex in the outskirts of Ankara, Cemil spends his days going on walks, cooking for his wife, repairing leaks in his neighbor’s bathroom, and having elaborate imaginary conversations in his head with his potential editor about the meaning of life and art. Uncertain of whether his manuscript will be accepted, Cemil wavers between thoughtful meditations on the origin of the universe and the trajectory of political literature in Turkey, panic over his own worth as a writer, and incredulity toward the objects that make up his quiet world in the Ankara suburbs.

In this compelling study, Rena Steinzor highlights the ways in which the government, over the past twenty years, has failed to protect children from harm caused by toxic chemicals. She believes these failures—under-funding, excessive and misguided use of cost/benefit analysis, distortion of science, and devolution of regulatory authority—have produced a situation in which harm that could be reduced or eliminated instead persists.

Steinzor states that, as a society, we are neglecting our children's health to an extent that we would find unthinkable as individual parents, primarily due to the erosion of the government's role in protecting public health and the environment. At this pace, she asserts, our children will inherit a planet under grave threat. We can arrest these developments if a critical mass of Americans become convinced that these problems are urgent and the solutions are near at hand.

By focusing on three specific case studies—mercury contamination through the human food chain, perchlorate (rocket fuel) in drinking water, and the effects of ozone (smog) on children playing outdoors—Steinzor creates an analysis grounded in law, economics, and science to prove her assertions about the existing dysfunctional system.

Steinzor then recommends a concise and realistic series of reforms that could reverse these detrimental trends and serve as a blueprint for restoring effective governmental intervention. She argues that these recommendations offer enough material to guide government officials and advocacy groups toward prompt implementation, for the sake of America's—and the world's—future generations.

Motherhood played a central role in ancient Greece and Rome, despite the virtual absence of female participation in the public spheres of life. Mothers could wield enormous influence as the reproductive bodies of society and, in many cases, of culture. Yet motherhood and acts of mothering have received relatively little focused and sustained attention by modern scholars, who have concentrated almost exclusively on analyzing depictions of ancient women more generally.

In this volume, experts from across the humanities present a wealth of evidence from legal, literary, and medical texts, as well as art, architecture, ritual, and material culture, to reveal the multilayered dimensions of motherhood in both Greece and Rome and to confront the fact that not all mothers and acts of mothering can be easily categorized. The authors consider a variety of mothers—from the mythical to the real, from empress to prostitute, and from citizen to foreigner—to expose both the mundane and the ideologically charged lives of mothers in the Classical world. Some essays focus on motherhood as a largely private (emotional, intimate) experience, while others explore the ramifications of public, oftentimes politicized, displays of motherhood. This state-of-the art look at mothers and mothering in the ancient world also takes on a contemporary relevance as the authors join current debates on motherhood and suggest links between the lives of ancient mothers and the diverse, often conflicting roles of women in modern Western society.

Amid the high mountains of Egypt's southern Sinai Peninsula stands Jebel Musa, "Mount Moses," revered by most Christians and Muslims as Mount Sinai. (Jewish tradition holds that Mount Sinai should remain terra incognita, unlocated, and does not associate it with this mountain.) In this fascinating study, Joseph Hobbs draws on geography and archaeology, Biblical and Quranic accounts, and the experiences of people ranging from Christian monks to Bedouin shepherds to casual tourists to explore why this mountain came to be revered as a sacred place and how that very perception now threatens its fragile ecology and its sense of holy solitude.

After discussing the physical characteristics of Jebel Musa and the debate that selected it as the most probable Mount Sinai, Hobbs fully describes all Christian and Muslim sacred sites around the mountain. He views Mount Sinai from the perspectives of the centuries-long inhabitants of the region—the monks of the Monastery of St. Katherine and the Jabaliya Bedouins—and of tourists and pilgrims, from medieval Europeans to modern travelers dispirited by Western industrialization.

Hobbs concludes his account with the recent international debate over whether to build a cable car on Mount Sinai and with an unflinching description of the negative impact of tourism on the delicate desert environment. His book raises important, troubling questions for everyone concerned about the fate of the earth's wild and sacred places.