Until the 1960s, the Ayoreo people of Paraguay's Chaco region had remained uncontacted by the world. But as development encroached on their territory, the Ayoreo began to experience rapid cultural change. Paola Canova looks at one aspect of this change in Frontier Intimacies: the sexual practices of Ayoreo women, specifically the curajodie, or single women who exchange sex for money or material goods with non-Ayoreo men, often Mennonite settlers.

Weaving personal anecdotes into her extensive research, Canova shows how the advancement of economic and missionary frontiers has reconfigured gender roles, sexual ethics, and notions of desire in the region. Ayoreo women, she shows, have reappropriated their sexual practices, approaching intimate liaisons on their own terms and seeing the involvement of money not as morally problematic but as constitutive of sexual encounters. By using their sexuality to construct an intimate frontier operating according to their own logics, Canova reveals, Ayoreo women expose the fractured workings of frontier capitalism in spaces of rapid transformation. Inviting broader examination of the ways in which contemporary frontier economies are constructed and experienced, Frontier Intimacies brings a captivating new perspective to the economic development of the Chaco region.

You know the scene: amateur soccer players battling over the ball, spectators cheering from the sidelines, vendors selling their wares from carts. Over the past half century, immigration from Latin America has transformed the public landscape in the United States, and numerous communities are witnessing one of the hallmarks of this transformation: the emergence of park soccer. In Fútbol in the Park, David Trouille takes us into the world of Latino soccer players who regularly play in an upscale Los Angeles neighborhood where they are not always welcome. Together on the soccer field, sharing beers after the games, and occasionally exchanging taunts or blows, the men build relationships and a sense of who they are. Through these engrossing, revealing, and at times immortalizing activities, they forge new identities, friendships, and job opportunities, giving themselves a renewed sense of self-worth and community. As the United States becomes increasingly polarized over issues of immigration and culture, Fútbol in the Park offers a close look at the individual lives and experiences of migrants.