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Employing the mimetic theory of René Girard as its heuristic, Peacemakers offers a unique analysis of Native American myth and fiction. It explores two important founding myths (Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe and Acoma Pueblo) and analyzes four modern novels: three from the Native American Renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s (N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, James Welch’s Winter in the Blood, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony) and the fourth from the twenty-first century (Sherman Alexie’s Flight). While Native American literary criticism typically points to continuities across the traditional-modern divide, Scott Richard Lyons emphasizes a decisive break happening in the progressive era. Following Girard’s theory, Lyons finds that the Indigenous worlds of sacred tradition and secular modernity confront situations of mimetic desire and violence in significantly different ways, given their different cultural resources. Ultimately problems of violence and desire come down to questions of how people can live together peacefully with a sense of meaning and transcendence, questions that are more “religious” than “political.” Thus, the outlook of Peacemakers is more Shakespearian than Marxian.

Fleeing the social and political turmoil spawned by the Mexican Revolution, massive numbers of Mexican immigrants entered the southwestern United States in the early decades of the twentieth century. But instead of finding refuge, many encountered harsh, anti-Mexican attitudes and violence from an Anglo population frightened by the influx of foreigners and angered by anti-American sentiments in Mexico.

This book examines the response of Mexican immigrants to Anglo American prejudice and violence early in the twentieth century. Drawing on archival sources from both sides of the border, Arturo Rosales traces the rise of "México Lindo" nationalism and the efforts of Mexican consuls to help poor Mexican immigrants defend themselves against abuses and flagrant civil rights violations by Anglo citizens, police, and the U.S. judicial system. This research illuminates a dark era in which civilian and police brutality, prejudice in the courtroom, and disproportionate arrest, conviction, and capital punishment rates too often characterized justice for Mexican Americans.

Detailed and rife with social and cultural implications, Poetry and Violence is a compelling commentary on violence as both human experience and communicative action.

Between 1980 and 1994, Peru endured a bloody internal armed conflict, with some 69,000 people killed in clashes involving two insurgent movements, state forces, and local armed groups. In 2003, a government-sponsored “Truth and Reconciliation Committee” reported that the conflict lasted longer, affected broader swaths of the national territory, and inflicted higher costs in both human and economic terms than any other conflict in Peru’s history. Of those killed, 75 percent were speakers of an indigenous language, and almost 40 percent were among the poorest and most rural members of Peruvian society. These unequal impacts of the violence on the Peruvian people revealed deep and historical disparities within the country.

This collection of original essays by leading international experts on Peruvian politics, society, and institutions explores the political and institutional consequences of Peru’s internal armed conflict in the long 1980s. The essays are grouped into sections that cover the conflict itself in historical, comparative, and theoretical perspectives; its consequences for Peru’s political institutions; its effects on political parties across the ideological spectrum; and its impact on public opinion and civil society. This research provides the first systematic and nuanced investigation of the extent to which recent and contemporary Peruvian politics, civil society, and institutions have been shaped by the country’s 1980s violence.