When railroads connected the United States and Mexico in 1884 and overland travel between the two countries became easier and cheaper, Americans developed an intense curiosity about Mexico, its people, and its opportunities for business and pleasure. Indeed, so many Americans visited Mexico during the Porfiriato (the long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, 1876–1911) that observers on both sides of the border called the hordes of tourists and business speculators a “foreign invasion,” an apt phrase for a historical moment when the United States was expanding its territory and influence.
Americans in the Treasure House examines travel to Mexico during the Porfiriato, concentrating on the role of travelers in shaping ideas of Mexico as a logical place for Americans to extend their economic and cultural influence in the hemisphere. Analyzing a wealth of evidence ranging from travelogues and literary representations to picture postcards and snapshots, Jason Ruiz demonstrates that American travelers constructed Mexico as a nation at the cusp of modernity, but one requiring foreign intervention to reach its full potential. He shows how they rationalized this supposed need for intervention in a variety of ways, including by representing Mexico as a nation that deviated too dramatically from American ideals of progress, whiteness, and sexual self-control to become a modern “sister republic” on its own. Most importantly, Ruiz relates the rapid rise in travel and travel discourse to complex questions about national identity, state power, and economic relations across the U.S.–Mexico border.
Exploring representations of Latinx people from Scarface to Narcos, this book examines how pop culture has framed Latin America as the villain in America’s long and ineffectual War on Drugs.
If there is an enemy in the War on Drugs, it is people of color. That is the lesson of forty years of cultural production in the United States. Popular culture, from Scarface and Miami Vice to Narcos and Better Call Saul, has continually positioned Latinos as an alien people who threaten the US body politic with drugs. Jason Ruiz explores the creation and endurance of this trope, its effects on Latin Americans and Latinx people, and its role in the cultural politics of the War on Drugs.
Even as the focus of drug anxiety has shifted over the years from cocaine to crack and from methamphetamines to opioids, and even as significant strides have been made in representational politics in many areas of pop culture, Latinx people remain an unshakeable fixture in stories narrating the production, distribution, and sale of narcotics. Narcomedia argues that such representations of Latinx people, regardless of the intentions of their creators, are best understood as a cultural front in the War on Drugs. Latinos and Latin Americans are not actually America’s drug problem, yet many Americans think otherwise—and that is in no small part because popular culture has largely refused to imagine the drug trade any other way.
Distinguished by its historical approach, “Queer Futures” examines homonormativity as a phenomenon that emerged in the United States after World War II and gained traction in the 1960s and 1970s. One essay compares Anita Bryant’s antigay campaigns in the late 1970s with those of current same-sex marriage proponents to show how both focus on the abstract figure of the “endangered child.” Another essay explores how the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation’s organizational amnesia has shaped its often conservative agenda. Other essays include a Marxist reading of the transsexual body, an examination of reactionary politics at the core of the movement to repeal the U.S. military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, and a history of how “safe streets” patrols in the 1970s and 1980s became opportunities for urban gentrification and community exploitation.
Contributors. Anna M. Agathangelou, Daniel Bassichis, Aaron Belkin, Nan Alamilla Boyd, Maxime Cervulle, Vincent Doyle, Roderick A. Ferguson, Christina Hanhardt, Dan Irving, Regina Kunzel, Patrick McCreery, Kevin P. Murphy, Tavia Nyong’o, Jason Ruiz, David Serlin, Tamara L. Spira, Susan Stryker, Margot D. Weiss
From steamships to steam rooms and sweat lodges to sweatshops, processes of pleasures and desire have shaped the regulation and classification of bodies in a wide variety of colonial settings. On beaches and online, and in boardrooms, temples, and taverns, sexual practices have always influenced imperial power relations. In the many places and relationships where colonialism still affects economics, sex and sexuality remain a driving—if sometimes hidden—force. The contributors to this provocative issue contemplate empire as a global process involving sexualized subjects and objects, with essays that consider the history of sex and (or in) empire across several disciplines. Their topics include a "bewitched" nun in colonial Peru, contemporary call-center workers in the Philippines, and General Douglas MacArthur’s mixed-race Filipina mistress, among many others.
Ben Cowan is assistant professor of world history at George Mason University. Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández is associate professor of American studies at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries, also published by Duke University Press. Jason Ruiz is assistant professor of American studies at the University of Notre Dame and the author of Americans in the Treasure House: Travel to Porfirian Mexico and the Cultural Politics of Empire.
Contributors: Laura Briggs, Keith Camacho, Ben Cowan, Emmanuel David, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández, Elizabeth Mesok, Rachel Sarah O’Toole, Katrina Phillips, Jason Ruiz
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