According to the Latina health paradox, Mexican immigrant women have less complicated pregnancies and more favorable birth outcomes than many other groups, in spite of socioeconomic disadvantage. Alyshia Gálvez provides an ethnographic examination of this paradox. What are the ways that Mexican immigrant women care for themselves during their pregnancies? How do they decide to leave behind some of the practices they bring with them on their pathways of migration in favor of biomedical approaches to pregnancy and childbirth?
This book takes us from inside the halls of a busy metropolitan hospital’s public prenatal clinic to the Oaxaca and Puebla states in Mexico to look at the ways Mexican women manage their pregnancies. The mystery of the paradox lies perhaps not in the recipes Mexican-born women have for good perinatal health, but in the prenatal encounter in the United States. Patient Citizens, Immigrant Mothers is a migration story and a look at the ways that immigrants are received by our medical institutions and by our society
On November 16, 1989, on the campus of El Salvador's University of Central America, six Jesuits and two women were murdered by members of the Salvadoran army, an army funded and trained by the United States. One of the murdered Jesuits was Ignacio Ellacuría, the university's Rector and a key, although controversial, figure in Salvadoran public life. From an opening account of this terrible crime, Paying the Price asks, Why were they killed and what have their deaths meant? Answers come through Teresa Whitfield's detailed examination of Ellacuría's life and work. His story is told in juxtaposition with the crucial role played by the unraveling investigation of the Jesuits' murders within El Salvador's peace process.
A complex and nuanced book, Paying the Price offers a history of the Church in El Salvador in recent decades, an analysis of Ellacuría's philosophy and theology, an introduction to liberation theology, and an account of the critical importance of the University of Central America. In the end, Whitfield's comprehensive picture of conditions in El Salvador suggest that the Jesuits' murders were almost inevitable. A crime that proved a turning point in El Salvador's civil war, the murders expressed the deep tragedy of the Salvadoran people beyond suffering the heartless cruelty, violence, and deceitfulness of a corrupt military and their patrons in the U.S. government.
Whitfield draws on her extensive research of Jesuit archives and private papers, Ellacuría's diaries, documents declassified by the U.S. government, and 200 interviews conducted with sources ranging from Jesuits to Salvadoran military officers, U.S. officials and congressmen to human rights campaigners.
Using interdisciplinary performance studies and cultural studies frameworks, Laura G. Gutiérrez examines the cultural representation of queer sexuality in the contemporary cultural production of Mexican female and Chicana performance and visual artists. In particular, she locates the analytical lenses of feminist theory and queer theory in a central position to interrogate Mexican female dissident sexualities in transnational public culture.
This is the first book-length study to wed performance studies and queer theory in examining the performative/performance work of important contemporary Mexicana and Chicana cultural workers. It proposes that the creations of several important artists—Chicana visual artist Alma López; the Mexican political cabareteras Astrid Hadad, Jesusa Rodríguez, Liliana Felipe, and Regina Orozco; the Chicana performance artist Nao Bustamante; and the Mexican video artist Ximena Cuevas—unsettle heterosexual national culture. In doing so, they are not only challenging heterosexist and nationalist discourses head-on, but are also participating in the construction of a queer world-making project. Treating the notion of dis-comfort as a productive category in these projects advances feminist and queer theories by offering an insightful critical movement suggesting that queer worlds are simultaneously spaces of desire, fear, and hope.
Gutiérrez demonstrates how arenas formerly closed to female performers are now providing both an artistic outlet and a powerful political tool that crosses not only geographic borders but social, sexual, political, and class boundaries as well, and deconstructs the relationships among media, hierarchies of power, and the cultures of privilege.
Performing Queer Latinidad highlights the critical role that performance played in the development of Latina/o queer public culture in the United States during the 1990s and early 2000s, a period when the size and influence of the Latina/o population was increasing alongside a growing scrutiny of the public spaces where latinidad could circulate. Performances---from concert dance and street protest to the choreographic strategies deployed by dancers at nightclubs---served as critical meeting points and practices through which LGBT and other nonnormative sex practitioners of Latin American descent (individuals with greatly differing cultures, histories of migration or annexation to the United States, and contemporary living conditions) encountered each other and forged social, cultural, and political bonds. At a time when latinidad ascended to the national public sphere in mainstream commercial and political venues and Latina/o public space was increasingly threatened by the redevelopment of urban centers and a revived anti-immigrant campaign, queer Latinas/os in places such as the Bronx, San Antonio, Austin, Phoenix, and Rochester, NY, returned to performance to claim spaces and ways of being that allowed their queerness and latinidad to coexist. These social events of performance and their attendant aesthetic communication strategies served as critical sites and tactics for creating and sustaining queer latinidad.
Contributors to this volume include Patricia Fortuny Loret de Mola, Carol Girón Solórzano, Silvia Irene Palma, Lúcia Ribeiro, Mirian Solfs Lizama, José Claúdio Souza Alves, Timothy J. Steigenga, Manuel A. Vásquez, and Philip J. Williams.
Joy is a politicized form of pleasure that goes beyond gratification to challenge norms of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Kristie Soares focuses on the diasporic media of Puerto Rico and Cuba to examine how music, public activist demonstrations, social media, sitcoms, and other areas of culture resist the dominant stories told about Latinx joy. As she shows, Latinx creators compose versions of joy central to social and political struggle and at odds with colonialist and imperialist narratives that equate joy with political docility and a lack of intelligence. Soares builds her analysis around chapters that delve into gozando in salsa music, precise joy among the New Young Lords Party, choteo in the comedy ¿Qué Pasa U.S.A.?, azúcar in the life and death of Celia Cruz, dale as Pitbull’s signature affect, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s use of silliness to take seriously political violence.
Daring and original, Playful Protest examines how Latinx creators resist the idea that joy only exists outside politics and activist struggle.
Curtis shows that girls are often caught between conflicting discourses of Christian teachings about chastity, public health cautions about safe sex, and media enticements about consumer delights. Sexuality's contradictions are exposed: power and powerless¡ness, self-determination and cultural control, violence and pleasure. Pleasures and Perils illuminates the methodological and ethical issues anthropologists face when they conduct research on sex, especially among girls. The sexually explicit narratives conveyed in this book challenge not only the reader's own thoughts on sexuality but also the broader limits and possibilities of ethnography.
Chile has made a public commitment to equality between women and men through the creation of a National Women’s Service, SERNAM. Yet, indigenous Mapuche women and working-class pobladora activists assert that they have been excluded from programs implemented by SERNAM. Decisions about what constitutes "women’s interests" are usually made by middle class, educated, lighter-skinned women, and the priorities and concerns of poor, working-class, and indigenous women have not come to the fore.
Through critical analysis of the role of the state, the diversity of women’s movements, and the social and political position of indigenous peoples in Latin America, Richards provides an illuminating discussion of the ways in which the state defines women’s interests and constructs women’s citizenship. This book makes important contributions to feminist studies, theories of citizenship, and studies of the intersections of class, gender, and race.
Co-winner, Latino Politics Best Book Award, American Political Science Association
The first book about the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the influential work it has done for the Latina/o community, and the issues stemming from its dependence on large philanthropic organizations.
Founded in 1968, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) is the Latino equivalent to the NAACP: a source of legal defense for the Latina/o community in cases centered on education, state immigration laws, redistricting, employment discrimination, and immigrant rights. Unlike the NAACP, however, MALDEF was founded by Mexican American activists in conjunction with the larger philanthropic structure of the Ford Foundation—a relationship that has opened it up to controversy and criticism.
In the first book to examine this little-known but highly influential organization, Benjamin Márquez explores MALDEF’s history and shows how it has thrived and served as a voice for the Latina/o community throughout its six decades of operation. But he also looks closely at large-scale investments of the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and others, considering how their ties to MALDEF have influenced Mexican American and Latinx politics. Its story crafted from copious research into MALDEF and its benefactors, this book brings to light the influence of outside funding on the articulation of minority identities and the problems that come with creating change through institutional means.
Carnegie shows not only that the nation-state is an exhausted form of political organization, but that in the Caribbean the ideological and political reach of the nation-state has always been tenuous at best. Caribbean peoples, he suggests, live continually in breach of the nation-state configuration. Drawing both on his own experiences as a Jamaican-born anthropologist and on the examples provided by those who have always considered national borders as little more than artificial administrative nuisances, Carnegie investigates a fascinating spectrum of individuals, including Marcus Garvey, traders, black albinos, and Caribbean Ba’hais. If these people have not themselves developed a scholarly doctrine of transnationalism, they have, nevertheless, effectively lived its demand and prefigured a postnational life.
This book is a dialogue about poverty in North America, especially in Mexico and the United States. Poverty has different roots and different manifestations, and requires different responses, whether in the Mississippi delta, in Native American reservations, among single-parent families in inner cities, or in Mexico’s rural southern states and in its urban areas.
In this book, twelve poverty scholars in Mexico and the United States contribute to the understanding of the roots of poverty and build knowledge about effective policy alleviation strategies. After setting the context of poverty and place in North America, the book focuses on three areas of policy response: macroeconomic policy, education policy, and safety nets. Within each section, the authors explore the dimensions of the poverty problem and alternative responses. A final chapter by the editors—from the United States and from Mexico—raises provocative questions about poverty in North America as a whole.
This important new work is a study of the everyday lives of the inhabitants of São Paulo in the nineteenth century. Full of vivid detail, the book concentrates on the lives of working women--black, white, Indian, mulatta, free, freed, and slaves, and their struggles to survive. Drawing on official statistics, and on the accounts of travelers and judicial records, the author paints a lively picture of the jobs, both legal and illegal, that were performed by women. Her research leads to some surprising discoveries, including the fact that many women were the main providers for their families and that their work was crucial to the running of several urban industries. This book, which is a unique record of women’s lives across social and race strata in a multicultural society, should be of interest to students and researchers in women’s studies, urban studies, historians, geographers, economists, sociologists, and anthropologists.
Combining theory, criticism, and narrative nonfiction, Carrillo Rowe develops a politics of relation that encourages the formation of feminist alliances across racial and other boundaries within academia. Such a politics of relation is founded on her belief that our subjectivities emerge in community; our affective investments inform and even create our political investments. Thus experience, consciousness, and agency must be understood as coalitional rather than individual endeavors. Carrillo Rowe’s conversations with academic feminists reveal that women who restrict their primary allies to women of their same race tend to have limited notions of feminism, whereas women who build transracial alliances cultivate more nuanced, intersectional, and politically transformative feminisms. For Carrillo Rowe, the institutionalization of feminism is not so much an achievement as an ongoing relational process. In Power Lines, she offers a set of critical, practical, and theoretical tools for building and maintaining transracial feminist alliances.
Latinos are the fastest-growing ethnic group in America and the ascendance of their popular culture has become a huge phenomenon. But beyond J. Lo and Shakira, there is a deeper story to tell about culture, class, and community identities.
Producing Dreams, Consuming Youth takes us behind the scenes in San Antonio, Texas, a major market for Mexican American popular culture. Vicki Mayer brings readers the perspectives of those who produce and consume mass media—including music, television, and newspapers. Through the voices of people ranging from Spanish-language advertising agency executives to English-speaking working-class teenagers, we see how the media brings together communities of Mexican Americans as they pursue cultural dreams, identification, and empowerment. At the heart of the book is a debate about the future of Mexican American media, and thus of the youth market. How and why do media professionals imagine ethnic youths? How do young Mexican Americans accept, negotiate, and resist these images of themselves? Producing Dreams, Consuming Youth emphasizes the paradoxes of media industries that seek to include youths of color while profiting from their creative energies.
Chicana/o history has reached an intriguing juncture. While academic and intellectual studies are embracing new, highly nuanced perspectives on race, class, gender, education, identity, and community, the field itself continues to be viewed as a battleground, subject to attacks from outside academia by those who claim that the discipline promotes racial hatred and anti-Americanism. Against a backdrop of deportations and voter suppression targeting Latinos, A Promising Problem presents the optimistic voices of scholars who call for sophisticated solutions while embracing transnationalism and the reality of multiple, overlapping identities.
Showcasing a variety of new directions, this anthology spans topics such as growth and reassessment in Chicana/o history manifested in a disruption of nationalism and geographic essentialism, the impact of legal history, interracial relations and the experiences of Latino subpopulations in the US South, race and the politics of religious history, transborder feminism in the early twentieth century, and aspirations for a field that increasingly demonstrates the relational dynamics of cultural production. As they reflect on the state of their field, the contributors offer significant insights into sociology, psychology, anthropology, political science, education, and literature, while tracing the history of activism throughout the last century and debating the very concepts of “Chicano” and “Chicano history.” Although the political landscape is fraught with closed-off rhetoric, A Promising Problem encourages diversity of thought and opens the possibilities of historical imagination.
Catholicism has long been recognized as one of the major forces shaping the Hispanic Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic) during the nineteenth century, but the role of Protestantism has not been fully explored. Protestantism and Political Conflict in the Nineteenth-Century Hispanic Caribbean traces the emergence of Protestantism in Cuba and Puerto Rico during a crucial period of national consolidation involving both social and political struggle. Using a comparative framework, Martínez-Fernández looks at the ways in which Protestantism, though officially “illegal” for most of the century, established itself, competed with Catholicism, and took differing paths in Cuba and Puerto Rico.
One of the book’s main goals is to trace the links between religion and politics, particularly with regard to early Protestant activities. Protestants encountered a complex social, economic, and political landscape both in Cuba and in Puerto Rico and soon found that their very presence, coupled with their demands for freedom of worship and burial rights, involved them in a series of interrelated struggles in which the Catholic Church was embroiled along with the other main forces of the period—the peasantry, the agrarian bourgeoisie, the mercantile bourgeoisie, and the colonial state. While the established Catholic Church increasingly identified with the conservative, pro-slavery, and colonialist causes, newly arrived Protestants tended to be nationalistic and to pursue particular economic activities—such as cigar exportation in Cuba and the sugar industry in Puerto Rico. The author argues that the early Protestant communities reflected the socio-cultural milieus from which they emerged and were profoundly shaped by the economic activities of their congregants. This influence, in turn, shaped not only the congregations’ composition, but also their political and social orientations.
In Pueblos, Plains, and Province Joseph P. Sánchez offers an in-depth examination of sociopolitical conflict in seventeenth-century New Mexico, detailing the effects of Spanish colonial policies on settlers’, missionaries’, and Indigenous peoples’ struggle for economic and cultural control of the region. Sánchez explores the rich archival documentation that provides cultural, linguistic, and legal views of the values of the period.
Spanish dual Indian policies for Pueblo and Plains tribes challenged Indigenous political and social systems to conform to the imperial structure for pacification purposes. Meanwhile, missionary efforts to supplant Indigenous religious beliefs with a Christian worldview resulted, in part, in a syncretism of the two worlds. Indigenous resentment of these policies reflected the contentious disagreements between Spanish clergymen and civil authorities, who feuded over Indigenous labor, and encroachment on tribal sovereignties with demands for sworn loyalty to Spanish governance. The little-studied “starvation period” adversely affected Spanish-Pueblo relationships for the remainder of the century and contributed significantly to the battle at Acoma, the Jumano War, and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.
Pueblos, Plains, and Province shows how history, culture, and tradition in New Mexico shaped the heritage shared by Spain, Mexico, the United States, and Native American tribes and will be of interest to scholars and students of Indigenous, colonial, and borderlands history.
Winner of the Critics’ Choice Book awards of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA-CCBA)
The postwar migration of Puerto Rican men and women to Chicago brought thousands of their children into city schools. These children's classroom experience continued the colonial project begun in their homeland, where American ideologies had dominated Puerto Rican education since the island became a US territory. Mirelsie Velázquez tells how Chicago's Puerto Ricans pursued their educational needs in a society that constantly reminded them of their status as second-class citizens. Communities organized a media culture that addressed their concerns while creating and affirming Puerto Rican identities. Education also offered women the only venue to exercise power, and they parlayed their positions to take lead roles in activist and political circles. In time, a politicized Puerto Rican community gave voice to a previously silenced group--and highlighted that colonialism does not end when immigrants live among their colonizers.
A perceptive look at big-city community building, Puerto Rican Chicago reveals the links between justice in education and a people's claim to space in their new home.
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