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Labor's Lot
The Power, History, and Culture of Aboriginal Action
Elizabeth A. Povinelli
University of Chicago Press, 1994
How does an Aboriginal community see itself, its work, and its place on the land? Elizabeth Povinelli goes to the Belyuen community of northern Australia to show how it draws from deep connections between labor, language, and the landscape. Her findings challenge Western notions of "productive labor" and longstanding ideas about the role of culture in subsistence economies.

In Labor's Lot, Povinelli shows how everyday activities shape Aboriginal identity and provide cultural meaning. She focuses on the Belyuen women's interactions with the countryside and on Belyuen conflicts with the Australian government over control of local land. Her analysis raises serious questions about the validity of Western theories about labor and culture and their impact on Aboriginal society.

Povinelli's focus on women's activities provides an important counterpoint to recent works centering on male roles in hunter-gatherer societies. Her unique "cultural economy" approach overcomes the dichotomy between the two standard approaches to these studies. Labor's Lot will engage anyone interested in indigenous peoples or in the relationship between culture and economy in contemporary social practice.
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Land of the Tejas
Native American Identity and Interaction in Texas, A.D. 1300 to 1700
By John Wesley Arnn III
University of Texas Press, 2012

Combining archaeological, historical, ethnographic, and environmental data, Land of the Tejas represents a sweeping, interdisciplinary look at Texas during the late prehistoric and early historic periods. Through this revolutionary approach, John Wesley Arnn reconstructs Native identity and social structures among both mobile foragers and sedentary agriculturalists. Providing a new methodology for studying such populations, Arnn describes a complex, vast, exotic region marked by sociocultural and geographical complexity, tracing numerous distinct peoples over multiple centuries.

Drawing heavily on a detailed analysis of Toyah (a Late Prehistoric II material culture), as well as early European documentary records, an investigation of the regional environment, and comparisons of these data with similar regions around the world, Land of the Tejas examines a full scope of previously overlooked details. From the enigmatic Jumano Indian leader Juan Sabata to Spanish friar Casanas's 1691 account of the vast Native American Tejas alliance, Arnn's study shines new light on Texas's poorly understood past and debunks long-held misconceptions of prehistory and history while proposing a provocative new approach to the process by which we attempt to reconstruct the history of humanity.

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Language and Ethnicity among the K'ichee' Maya
Sergio Romero
University of Utah Press, 2015

This book explores the articulation between “accent” and ethnic identification in K’ichee’, a Mayan language spoken by more than one million people in the western highlands of Guatemala. Based on years of ethnographic work, it is the first anthropological examination of the social meaning of dialectal difference in any Mayan language. Romero deconstructs essentialist perspectives on ethnicity in Mesoamerica and argues that ethnic identification among the highland Maya is multiple and layered, the result of a diverse linguistic precipitate created by centuries of colonial resistance.

In K’ichee’, dialect stereotypes—accents—act as linguistic markers embodying particular ethnic registers. K’ichee’ speakers use and recombine their linguistic repertoire—colloquial K’ichee’, traditional K’ichee’ discourse, colloquial Spanish, Standard Spanish, and language mixing—in strategic ways to mark status and authority and to revitalize their traditional culture. The book surveys literary genres such as lyric poetry, political graffiti, and radio broadcasts, which express new experiences of Mayan-ness and anticolonial resistance. It also takes a historical perspective in examining oral and written K’ichee’ discourses from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, including the famous chronicle known as the Popol Vuh, and explores the unbreakable link between language, history, and culture in the Maya highlands. 


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Language, History, and Identity
Ethnolinguistic Studies of the Arizona Tewa
Paul V. Kroskrity
University of Arizona Press, 1993
The Arizona Tewa are a Pueblo Indian group that migrated around 1700 to First Mesa on the Hopi Reservation and who, while speaking Hopi, have also retained their native language. Paul V. Kroskrity examines this curiosity of language and culture, explaining the various ways in which the Tewa use their linguistic resources to successfully adapt to the Hopi and their environment while retaining their native language and the cultural identity it embodies.
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Las Varas
Ritual and Ethnicity in the Ancient Andes
Howard Tsai
University of Alabama Press, 2020
Archaeological data from Las Varas, Peru, that establish the importance of ritual in constructing ethnic boundaries

Recent popular discourse on nationalism and ethnicity assumes that humans by nature prefer “tribalism,” as if people cannot help but divide themselves along lines of social and ethnic difference. Research from anthropology, history, and archaeology, however, shows that individuals actively construct cultural and social ideologies to fabricate the stereotypes, myths, and beliefs that separate “us” from “them.” Archaeologist Howard Tsai and his team uncovered a thousand-year-old village in northern Peru where rituals were performed to recognize and reinforce ethnic identities.

This site—Las Varas—is located near the coast of Peru in a valley leading into the Andes. Excavations revealed a western entrance to Las Varas for those arriving from the coast and an eastern entryway for those coming from the highlands. Rituals were performed at both of these entrances, indicating that the community was open to exchange and interaction, yet at the same time controlled the flow of people and goods through ceremonial protocols. Using these checkpoints and associated rituals, the villagers of Las Varas were able to maintain ethnic differences between themselves and visitors from foreign lands.

Las Varas: Ritual and Ethnicity in the Ancient Andes reveals a rare case of finding ethnicity relying solely on archaeological remains. In this monograph, data from the excavation of Las Varas are analyzed within a theoretical framework based on current understandings of ethnicity. Tsai’s method, approach, and inference demonstrate the potential for archaeologists to discover how ethnic identities were constructed in the past, ultimately making us question the supposed naturalness of tribal divisions in human antiquity.

 
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Latin Numbers
Playing Latino in Twentieth-Century U.S. Popular Performance
Brian Eugenio Herrera
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Latin Numbers is a work of performance history, examining the way in which Latino actors on the twentieth-century stage and screen communicated and influenced American ideas about race and ethnicity. Brian Eugenio Herrera looks at how these performances and performers contributed to American popular understanding of Latinos as a distinct racial and ethnic group. His book tracks the conspicuously “Latin” musical number; the casting of Latino actors; the history of West Side Story; how Latina/o performers confront stereotypes; and the proliferation of the gay Latino character in the AIDS era. With a flair for storytelling and a unique ability to see the deeper meanings embedded in popular culture, Herrera creates a history that will appeal to popular culture enthusiasts, theater aficionados, and those interested in the cultural history of Latinos. The book will also delight readers interested in the memorable (and many of the lesser-known) Latino performances on stage and screen.
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Latinos and Nationhood
Two Centuries of Intellectual Thought
Nicolás Kanellos
University of Arizona Press, 2023
Spanning from the early nineteenth century to today, this intellectual history examines the work of Latino writers who explored the major philosophic and political themes of their day, including the meaning and implementation of democracy, their democratic and cultural rights under U.S. dominion, their growing sense of nationhood, and the challenges of slavery and disenfranchisement of women in a democratic republic that had yet to realize its ideals.

Over the course of two centuries, these Latino or Hispanic intellectuals were natural-born citizens of the United States, immigrants, or political refugees. Many of these intellectuals, whether citizens or not, strove to embrace and enliven such democratic principles as freedom of speech and of the press, the protection of minorities in the Bill of Rights and in subsequent laws, and the protection of linguistic and property rights, among many others, guaranteed by treaties when the United States incorporated their homelands into the Union.

The first six chapters present the work of lesser-known historical figures—most of whom have been consistently ignored by Anglo- and Euro-centric history and whose works have been widely inaccessible until recently—who were revolutionaries, editors of magazines and newspapers, and speechmakers who influenced the development of a Latino consciousness. The last three chapters deal with three foundational figures of the Chicano Movement, the last two of whom either subverted the concept of nationhood or went beyond it to embrace internationalism in an outreach to humanity as a whole.

Latinos and Nationhood sheds new light on the biographies of Félix Varela, José Alvarez de Toledo y Dubois, Francisco Ramírez, Tomás Rivera, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, and Gloria E. Anzaldúa, among others.
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Latinos in New England
edited by Andrés Torres
Temple University Press, 2006
More than one million Latinos now live in New England. This is the first book to examine their impact on the region's culture, politics, and economics. At the same time, it investigates the effects of the locale on Latino residents' lives, traditions, and institutions.Employing methodologies from a variety of disciplines, twenty-one contributors explore topics in three broad areas: demographic trends, migration and community formation, and identity and politics. They utilize a wide range of approaches, including oral histories, case studies, ethnographic inquiries, focus group research, surveys, and statistical analyses. From the "Dominicanization" of the Latino community in Waterbury, Connecticut, to the immigration experiences of Brazilians in Massachusetts, from the influence of Latino Catholics on New England's Catholic churches to the growth of a Latino community in Providence, Rhode Island, the essays included here contribute to a new and multifaceted view of the growing Pan-Latino presence in the birthplace of the United States.
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Latinx Belonging
Community Building and Resilience in the United States
Edited by Natalia Deeb-Sossa and Jennifer Bickham Mendez
University of Arizona Press, 2022

What does it mean to be Latinx? This pressing question forms the core of Latinx Belonging, which brings together cutting-edge research to discuss the multilayered ways this might be answered.

Latinx Belonging is anchored in the claim that Latinx people are not defined by their marginalization but should instead be understood as active participants in their communities and contributors to U.S. society. The volume’s overarching analytical approach recognizes the differences, identities, and divisions among people of Latin American origin in the United States, while also attending to the power of mainstream institutions to shape their lives and identities. Contributors to this volume view “belonging” as actively produced through struggle, survival, agency, resilience, and engagement.

This work positions Latinxs’ struggles for recognition and inclusion as squarely located within intersecting power structures of gender, race, sexuality, and class and as shaped by state-level and transnational forces such as U.S. immigration policies and histories of colonialism. From the case of Latinxs’ struggles for recognition in the arts, to queer Latinx community resilience during COVID-19 and in the wake of mass shootings, to Indigenous youth’s endurance and survival as unaccompanied minors in Los Angeles, the case studies featured in this collection present a rich and textured picture of the diversity of the U.S. Latinx experience in the twenty-first century.

Contributors
Andrés Acosta
Jack “Trey” Allen
Jennifer Bickham Mendez
Stephanie L. Canizales
Christopher Cuevas
Natalia Deeb-Sossa
Yvette G. Flores
Melanie Jones Gast
Monika Gosin
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo
Nolan Kline
Verónica Montes
Yvonne Montoya
Michael De Anda Muñiz
Suzanne Oboler
Gilda L. Ochoa
Dina G. Okamoto
Marco Antonio Quiroga
Michelle Téllez

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Learning to Be Latino
How Colleges Shape Identity Politics
Reyes, Daisy Verduzco
Rutgers University Press, 2018
In Learning to Be Latino, sociologist Daisy Verduzco Reyes paints a vivid picture of Latino student life at a liberal arts college, a research university, and a regional public university, outlining students’ interactions with one another, with non-Latino peers, and with faculty, administrators, and the outside community. Reyes identifies the normative institutional arrangements that shape the social relationships relevant to Latino students’ lives, including school size, the demographic profile of the student body, residential arrangements, the relationship between students and administrators, and how well diversity programs integrate students through cultural centers and retention centers. Together these characteristics create an environment for Latino students that influences how they interact, identify, and come to understand their place on campus.
 
Drawing on extensive ethnographic observations, Reyes shows how college campuses shape much more than students’ academic and occupational trajectories; they mold students’ ideas about inequality and opportunity in America, their identities, and even how they intend to practice politics.  
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Legions of Boom
Filipino American Mobile DJ Crews in the San Francisco Bay Area
Oliver Wang
Duke University Press, 2015
Armed with speakers, turntables, light systems, and records, Filipino American mobile DJ crews, such as Ultimate Creations, Spintronix, and Images, Inc., rocked dance floors throughout the San Francisco Bay Area from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s. In Legions of Boom noted music and pop culture writer and scholar Oliver Wang chronicles this remarkable scene that eventually became the cradle for turntablism. These crews, which were instrumental in helping to create and unify the Bay Area's Filipino American community, gave young men opportunities to assert their masculinity and gain social status. While crews regularly spun records for school dances, weddings, birthdays, or garage parties, the scene's centerpieces were showcases—or multi-crew performances—which drew crowds of hundreds, or even thousands. By the mid-1990s the scene was in decline, as single DJs became popular, recruitment to crews fell off, and aspiring scratch DJs branched off into their own scene. As the training ground for a generation of DJs, including DJ Q-Bert, Shortkut, and Mix Master Mike, the mobile scene left an indelible mark on its community that eventually grew to have a global impact.
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Little Saigons
Staying Vietnamese in America
Karin Aguilar–San Juan
University of Minnesota Press, 2009

Karin Aguilar-San Juan examines the contradictions of Vietnamese American community and identity in two emblematic yet different locales: Little Saigon in suburban Orange County, California (widely described as the capital of Vietnamese America) and the urban "Vietnamese town" of Fields Corner in Boston, Massachusetts. Their distinctive qualities challenge assumptions about identity and space, growth amid globalization, and processes of Americanization.

With a comparative and race-cognizant approach, Aguilar-San Juan shows how places like Little Saigon and Fields Corner are sites for the simultaneous preservation and redefinition of Vietnamese identity. Intervening in debates about race, ethnicity, multiculturalism, and suburbanization as a form of assimilation, this work elaborates on the significance of place as an integral element of community building and its role in defining Vietnamese American-ness.

Staying Vietnamese, according to Aguilar-San Juan, is not about replicating life in Viet Nam. Rather, it involves moving toward a state of equilibrium that, though always in flux, allows refugees, immigrants, and their U.S.-born offspring to recalibrate their sense of self in order to become Vietnamese anew in places far from their presumed geographic home.

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Locating Filipino Americans
Rick Bonus
Temple University Press, 2000
The Filipino American population in the U.S.  is expected to reach more than two million by the next  century. Yet many Filipino Americans contend that years of formal and covert exclusion from mainstream political, social, and economic institutions on the basis of their race have perpetuated racist stereotypes about them, ignored their colonial and immigration history, and prevented them from becoming fully recognized citizens of the nation. Locating Filipino Americans shows how Filipino Americans counter exclusion by actively engaging in alternative practices of community building.

Locating Filipino Americans, an ethnographic study of Filipino American communities in Los Angeles and San Diego, present a multi-disciplinary cultural analysis of the relationship between ethnic identity and social space. Author Rick Bonus argues that alternative community spaces enable Filipino Americans to respond to and resist the ways in which the larger society has historically and institutionally rendered them invisible, silenced, and racialized. Bonus focuses on the "Oriental" stores, the social halls and community centers, and the community newspapers to demonstrate how ethnic identities are publicly constituted and communities are transformed. Delineating the spaces formed by diasporic consciousness, Bonus shows how community members appropriate elements from their former homeland and from their new settlements in ways defined by their critical stances against racism, homogenization, complete assimilation, and exclusionary citizenship. Locating Filipino Americans is one of the few books that offers a grounded approach to theoretical analyses of ethnicity and contemporary culture in the U.S.
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Looking Like the Enemy
Japanese Mexicans, the Mexican State, and US Hegemony, 1897–1945
Jerry García
University of Arizona Press, 2014
At the beginning of the twentieth century, thousands of Japanese citizens sought new opportunities abroad. By 1910, nearly ten thousand had settled in Mexico. Over time, they found work, put down roots, and raised families. But until now, very little has been written about their lives. Looking Like the Enemy is the first English-language history of the Japanese experience in Mexico.
 
Japanese citizens were initially lured to Mexico with promises of cheap and productive land in Chiapas. Many of the promises were false, and the immigrants were forced to fan out across the country, especially to the lands along the US border. As Jerry García reveals, they were victims of discrimination based on “difference,” but they also displayed “markers of whiteness” that linked them positively to Europeans and Americans, who were perceived as powerful and socially advanced. And, García reports, many Mexicans looked favorably on the Japanese as hardworking and family-centered.
 
The book delves deeply into the experiences of the Japanese on both sides of the border during World War II, illuminating the similarities and differences in their treatment. Although some Japanese Mexicans were eventually interned (at the urging of the US government), in general the fear and vitriol that Japanese Americans encountered never reached the same levels in Mexico.
 
Looking Like the Enemy is an ambitious study of a tumultuous half-century in Mexico. It is a significant contribution to our understanding of the immigrant experience in the Western Hemisphere and to the burgeoning field of borderlands studies.
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Lost Histories
Recovering the Lives of Japan’s Colonial Peoples
Kirsten L. Ziomek
Harvard University Press

A grandson’s photo album. Old postcards. English porcelain. A granite headstone. These are just a few of the material objects that help reconstruct the histories of colonial people who lived during Japan’s empire. These objects, along with oral histories and visual imagery, reveal aspects of lives that reliance on the colonial archive alone cannot. They help answer the primary question of Lost Histories: Is it possible to write the history of Japan’s colonial subjects? Kirsten Ziomek contends that it is possible, and in the process she brings us closer to understanding the complexities of their lives.

Lost Histories provides a geographically and temporally holistic view of the Japanese empire from the early 1900s to the 1970s. The experiences of the four least-examined groups of Japanese colonial subjects—the Ainu, Taiwan’s indigenous people, Micronesians, and Okinawans—are the centerpiece of the book. By reconstructing individual life histories and following these people as they crossed colonial borders to the metropolis and beyond, Ziomek conveys the dynamic nature of an empire in motion and explains how individuals navigated the vagaries of imperial life.

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Lost in Transition
Removing, Resettling, and Renewing Appalachia
Aaron D. Purcell
University of Tennessee Press, 2021

In Lost in Transition: Removing, Resettling, and Renewing Appalachia, Aaron D. Purcell presents a thematic and chronological exploration of twentieth-century removal and resettlement projects across southern Appalachia. The book shares complex stories of loss and recollection that have grown and evolved over time.

This edited volume contains seven case studies of public land removal actions in Virginia, Kentucky, the Carolinas, and Tennessee from the 1930s through the 1960s. Some of the removals include the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Norris Basin, Shenandoah National Park and the New River, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and the Keowee-Toxaway Project in northwestern South Carolina. Each essay asks key questions: How did governmental entities throughout the twentieth century deal with land acquisition and removal of families and communities? What do the oral histories of the families and communities, particularly from different generations, tell us about the legacies of these removals? This collection reveals confrontations between past and present, federal agencies and citizens, and the original accounts of removal and resettlement and contemporary interpretations. The result is a blending of practical historical concerns with contemporary nostalgia and romanticism, which often deepen the complexity of Appalachian cultural life.

Lost in Transition provides a nuanced and insightful study of removal and resettlement projects that applies critical analysis of fact, mythology, and storytelling. It illustrates the important role of place in southern Appalachian history. This collection is a helpful resource to anthropologists, folklorists, and Appalachian studies scholars, and a powerful volume of stories for all readers who reflect upon the importance of place and home.

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