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The story of Mai Ya Xiong and her family and their journey from the Ban Vinai refugee camp in Thailand to a new life in Madison, Wisconsin, is extraordinary. Yet it is typical of the stories of the 200,000 Hmong people who now live in the United States and who struggle to adjust to American society while maintaining their own culture as a free people.

Mai Ya's Long Journey follows Mai Ya Xiong, a young Hmong woman, from her childhood in Thailand's Ban Vinai Refugee Camp to her current home in Wisconsin. Mai Ya's parents fled Laos during the Vietnam War and were refugees in Thailand for several years before reaching the United States. But the story does not end there. Students will read the challenges Mai Ya faces in balancing her Hmong heritage and her adopted American culture as she grows into adulthood.

The 2006 Peruvian elections are an appropriate moment to reflect on Alejandro Toledo's term as president and on the broader agenda for building a more inclusive and democratic government. In a country of extreme social inequality, such an aspiration represents an enormous challenge. The sudden collapse of the which Fujimori regime --which had dominated Peru for the 1990s --and Toledo's election victory in 2001 seemed to provide an opportunity for institutional reform and rebuilding. The impetus proved short-lived, as the new president's popularity sank to unprecedented levels and public support for Peru's democratic institutions continued to hemorrhage. This book suggests that the challenges of institutional development run very deep and are not peculiar to any one government. Institutional change in Peru is part of a much wider process of transformation from an oligarchic society.

Contributors include Paulo Drino (University of Manchester), Cynthia Sanborn (Centro de Investigaciones, Universidad del Pacifico, Lima), Carlos Monge (Participacion Ciudadana, Lima), Fernando Rospigliosi (Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, Lima), Pedro Franck (Departamento de Economia, Universidad Catolica, Lima), Fernando Eguren (Centro Peruano de Ciencias Sociales, Lima), Rosemary Thorp (Queen Elizabeth House/St Antony's College, Oxford), Eduardo Dargent (University of Texas,Austin), Coletta Youngers (Washington Office on Latin America,Washington D.C.), Francisco Durand (University of Texas, San Antonio), Jose Tavara (Departamento de Economia, Universidad Catolica, Lima, and OSIPTEL), and Richard Webb (Instituto Cuanto and Central Bank of Peru).

Often dismissed as trivial or even “trash,” celebrity culture offers a unique way of considering what it means to be human. In Mapping the Stars, Claire Sisco King shows how close analysis of the complex and sometimes contradictory forms of celebrity culture can challenge dominant ideas about selfhood. In particular, as a formation that develops across time, mediums, and texts, celebrity is useful for demonstrating how humanness is defined by relationality, contingency, and even vulnerability.

King considers three stars with popular and controversial personas: Norman Rockwell, Will Smith, and Kim Kardashian. Working in very different contexts and with very different public images, these figures nonetheless share a consistent, if not conspicuous, interest in celebrity as a construct. Offering intertextual readings of their public images across such sites as movie posters, magazines, cinema, and social media—and deploying rhetorical theories of metonymy (a linguistic device linking signifiers by shared associations)—King argues that these stars’ self-reflexive attention to the processes by which celebrity is created and constrained creates opportunities for reframing public discourse about what it means to be famous and what it means to be a person.

As workers and consumers, Mexican Americans are a viable—and valuable—part of the broad U.S. economy. Despite that many are hindered by low education (and consequently low wages) and limited opportunities, they have continuously struggled for, and continue to seek, better days and the opportunity to realize their share of the American dream. This book examines the problems that Mexican Americans have experienced in attaining economic parity with non-Hispanic whites. It examines four major topics of particular concern to the economic status of the Mexican American community: - immigration, reviewing the Bracero Program, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, legislation from the 1990s, and the problems faced by immigrants today - education, stressing the importance of economic incentives to invest in education - wealth and poverty, evaluating opportunities and roadblocks as Mexican Americans aspire to middle-class standards of living - the labor market, covering such topics as employment, income, and discrimination. Arturo González has drawn on recent census data to present for the first time in one volume a detailed economic analysis of three generations of Mexican Americans. These statistics reveal a people who are steadily improving economically and provide evidence that stereotypes of Mexican Americans are outdated or erroneous. Mexican Americans and the U.S. Economy shows that economics is an important aspect of the Mexican American experience. The book helps broaden students' understanding of the community’s ongoing struggle, putting the quest for buenos días in clearer perspective.