Results by title

102 books match the query 'Poor' and 8 start with s

cover of Shantytown Protest in Pinochet's Chile

Shantytown Protest in Pinochet's Chile

Cathy Lisa Schneider

Temple University Press, 1995

"Shantytown Protest is one of the richest and most interesting accounts of popular mobilizations in urban Latin America that I have ever seen. The description of popular resistance under conditions of extreme material scarcity and ruthless military repression is fascinating. The book is a major contribution to the research literatures on Third World urbanization and Latin America politics." --Alejandro Portes, John Dewey Professor of Sociology and International Relations, The Johns Hopkins University In 1973 armed forces launched a violent attack against the Chilean presidential palace and Santiago's slums and shantytowns. For ten years, only the Catholic Church was able to defy the military regime. Then, in 1983, students, workers, and shantytown residents stormed the streets demanding the resignation of Augusto Pinochet. The protests raged for three years and, in 1989, democratic elections were held. The following year a new civilian government took office. Cathy Lisa Schneider examines this democratic transition from the bottom up, looking at the struggles of poor people to create and sustain organized resistance, to risk their lives to fight tyranny. Both an oral history based on over a hundred interviews collected in shantytowns and a comparative sociological study that explores political differences among different shantytowns in Santiago, this book analyzes the context in which the urban poor make choices about their lives, and the political histories that shape their vision. "With an anthropologist's sympathetic ear, an activist's reasoned zeal, a social scientist's theoretical sensibility, and a journalist's deft pen, Cathy Schneider has brought to life Chile's burgeoning shantytown politics of the 1980s. From the overthrow of Allende to the fall of Pinochet, she chronicles and explains the swirling of popular struggles. Read her and learn." --Charles Tilly, Director, Center for Studies of Social Change, New School for Social Research "Cathy Schneider's book shows how democratic nation-building depends not only on how elites maneuver, but crucially on how ordinary citizens mobilize on behalf of democracy. She has successfully brought together Latin American studies and social science, the human drama of the shantytown protests with the analytical perspectives of social movement studies." --Sidney Tarrow, Professor of Government, Cornell University
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cover of Shaping the Discourse on Space: Charity and Its Wards in Nineteenth-Century San Juan, Puerto Rico

Shaping the Discourse on Space

Charity and Its Wards in Nineteenth-Century San Juan, Puerto Rico

By Teresita Martínez-Vergne

University of Texas Press, 1999

As an inchoate middle class emerged in Puerto Rico in the early nineteenth century, its members sought to control not only public space, but also the people, activities, and even attitudes that filled it. Their instruments were the San Juan town council and the Casa de Beneficencia, a state-run charitable establishment charged with responsibility for the poor.

In this book, Teresita Martínez-Vergne explores how municipal officials and the Casa de Beneficencia shaped the discourse on public and private space and thereby marginalized the worthy poor and vagrants, "liberated" Africans, indigent and unruly women, and destitute children. Drawing on extensive and innovative archival research, she shows that the men who comprised the San Juan ayuntamiento and the board of charity regulated the public discourse on topics such as education, religious orthodoxy, hygiene, and family life, thereby establishing norms for "correct" social behavior and chastising the "deviant" lifestyles of the working poor.

This research clarifies the ways in which San Juan's middle class defined itself in the midst of rapid social and economic change. It also offers new insights into notions of citizenship and the process of nation-building in the Caribbean.

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cover of Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles

Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles

Chad Berry

University of Illinois Press, 2000

One of the largest internal migrations in U.S. history, the great white migration left its mark on virtually every family in every southern upland and flatland town. In this extraordinary record of ordinary lives, dozens of white southern migrants describe their experiences in the northern "wilderness" and their irradicable attachments to family and community in the South.

Southern out-migration drew millions of southern workers to the steel mills, automobile factories, and even agricultural fields and orchards of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois. Through vivid oral histories, Chad Berry explores the conflict between migrants' economic success and their "spiritual exile" in the North. He documents the tension between factory owners who welcomed cheap, naive southern laborers and local "native" workers who greeted migrants with suspicion and hostility. He examines the phenomenon of "shuttle migration," in which migrants came north to work during the winter and returned home to plant spring crops on their southern farms. He also explores the impact of southern traditions--especially the southern evangelical church and "hillbilly" music--brought north by migrants.

Berry argues that in spite of being scorned by midwesterners for violence, fecundity, intoxication, laziness, and squalor, the vast majority of southern whites who moved to the Midwest found the economic prosperity they were seeking. By allowing southern migrants to assess their own experiences and tell their own stories, Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles refutes persistent stereotypes about migrants' clannishness, life-style, work ethic, and success in the North.

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cover of Strange Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots

Strange Future

Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots

Min Hyoung Song

Duke University Press, 2005

Sometime near the start of the 1990s, the future became a place of national decline. The United States had entered a period of great anxiety fueled by the shrinking of the white middle class, the increasingly visible misery of poor urban blacks, and the mass immigration of nonwhites. Perhaps more than any other event marking the passage through these dark years, the 1992 Los Angeles riots have sparked imaginative and critical works reacting to this profound pessimism. Focusing on a wide range of these creative works, Min Hyoung Song shows how the L.A. riots have become a cultural-literary event—an important reference and resource for imagining the social problems plaguing the United States and its possible futures.

Song considers works that address the riots and often the traumatic place of the Korean American community within them: the independent documentary Sa-I-Gu (Korean for April 29, the date the riots began), Chang-rae Lee’s novel Native Speaker, the commercial film Strange Days, and the experimental drama of Anna Deavere Smith, among many others. He describes how cultural producers have used the riots to examine the narrative of national decline, manipulating language and visual elements, borrowing and refashioning familiar tropes, and, perhaps most significantly, repeatedly turning to metaphors of bodily suffering to convey a sense of an unraveling social fabric. Song argues that these aesthetic experiments offer ways of revisiting the traumas of the past in order to imagine more survivable futures.

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cover of Streets, Bedrooms, and Patios: The Ordinariness of Diversity in Urban Oaxaca

Streets, Bedrooms, and Patios

The Ordinariness of Diversity in Urban Oaxaca

By Michael James Higgins and Tanya L. Coen

University of Texas Press, 2000

Diversity characterizes the people of Oaxaca, Mexico. Within this city of half a million, residents are rising against traditional barriers of race and class, defining new gender roles, and expanding access for the disabled. In this rich ethnography of the city, Michael Higgins and Tanya Coen explore how these activities fit into the ordinary daily lives of the people of Oaxaca.

Higgins and Coen focus their attention on groups that are often marginalized—the urban poor, transvestite and female prostitutes, discapacitados (the physically challenged), gays and lesbians, and artists and intellectuals. Blending portraits of and comments by group members with their own ethnographic observations, the authors reveal how such issues as racism, sexism, sexuality, spirituality, and class struggle play out in the people's daily lives and in grassroots political activism. By doing so, they translate the abstract concepts of social action and identity formation into the actual lived experiences of real people.

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cover of Striving to Save: Creating Policies for Financial Security of Low-Income Families

Striving to Save

Creating Policies for Financial Security of Low-Income Families

Margaret Sherrard Sherraden and Amanda Moore McBride

University of Michigan Press, 2010

"Striving to Save will inform and inspire social policy with its breakthrough approach in understanding how low-income families make ends meet while striving to make a better life for themselves and their families. Scholarly work in savings, debt, household finance, and behavior economics will benefit from this pioneering study that provides real-life context for some of the most important issues of our day."
---Tom Shapiro, Brandeis University
 
"The central contribution of the book is to use original qualitative research to provide readers with a nuanced understanding of the financial difficulties facing low-income households, their financial decision-making processes, and their paths to saving and building assets over time. The
book provides an essential corrective to the unidimensional view of poor households as unable and unwilling to save."
---Michael Barr, University of Michigan
 
In Striving to Save, Margaret Sherrard Sherraden and Amanda Moore McBride examine savings in eighty-four working families with low incomes, including fifty-nine families who participated in a groundbreaking program of matched savings and financial education. In-depth interviews with these families, along with savings and survey data, shed light on saving in low-income households.
 
The book concludes with recommended public policy approaches for increasing savings in households that are striving to save.
 
Margaret Sherrard Sherraden is Professor of Social Work at the University of Missouri, St. Louis.
 
Amanda Moore McBride is Assistant Professor of Social Work at Washington University, St. Louis.
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cover of Stunted Lives, Stagnant Economies: Poverty, Disease, and Underdevelopment

Stunted Lives, Stagnant Economies

Poverty, Disease, and Underdevelopment

Stillwaggon, Eileen

Rutgers University Press, 1998

An important study on the impact of poverty on health and the effect of poor health on national economies and human development

This is a fascinating, lively, and well-written book.  The author has a clear message which she states at the beginning, namely, that health is primarily an economic, not a medical problem, and she follows that to the end.Keith Griffin, University of California, Riverside

Houses made of rags and flattened soda cans, filthy water that breeds disease, counterfeit medicines, no access to decent medical care how can children growing up in such an environment become productive workers contributing to a developing economy? 

Stunted Lives, Stagnant Economies describes in vivid detail the living conditions of the poor in developing countries and the diseases and injuries that result from this environment of need.  Most of the diseases that affect the poor cholera, summer diarrhea, tuberculosis, lice, worms, leprosy result from the poverty of their environment.  Poverty also determines the availability and effectiveness of the medical response.  Using Argentina as a case study, Eileen Stillwaggon argues that making good health available to everyone is not a scientific problem but an economic one. 
The debt crisis of the 1980s and the subsequent structural adjustment policies adopted by most developing countries exacerbated the problems faced by the poor. What kind of future can a nation build when the health of the majority of the population its workforceÑis at risk or compromised because social services have been reduced?  Without adequate health care and social services, people cannot live up to their potential, and the spiral of poverty continues.  But there are ways to fight this cycle of poverty. 
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cover of Sustainability for the Forgotten

Sustainability for the Forgotten

Gary E. Machlis

University of Utah Press, 2024

Opening with the extraordinary story of a young French priest working in 1968 amongst impoverished villages of northeast Brazil, struggling to bring sustenance, sustainability, and hope to these disregarded and willfully ignored communities, this book asks a broad and far-reaching question that challenges the contemporary sustainability movement: What about sustainability for the forgotten?
 
Sustainability for the Forgotten is an incendiary book that confronts the history, policies, and practices of sustainability. It interrogates the usefulness of current sustainability approaches for the poorest of the poor, the chronic underclass, victims of natural disasters, refugees, the oppressed, and asks, how can we do better? With examples that range from the coffeelands of El Salvador to the coal country of American Appalachia, from the streets of Detroit to refugee camps in Greece and the upscale metro centers of the affluent, sustainability is examined with a critical eye and with an emphasis on insuring that the forgotten are heard.
 
At once well-researched and passionate, wide-ranging and sharply focused, Sustainability for the Forgotten is unlike any other book on the sustainability movement. Written with a distinctive voice that is reasoned, unflinching, and often poetic, the book challenges the sustainability movement to follow "a just and necessary path." The result is a provocative statement on the future of sustainability and a call to action that is ultimately hopeful.
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