Results by title

This rich collection considers the accordion and its myriad forms, from the concertina, button accordion, and piano accordion familiar in European and North American music to the exotic-sounding South American bandoneon and the sanfoninha. Capturing the instrument's spread and adaptation to many different cultures in North and South America, contributors illuminate how the accordion factored into power struggles over aesthetic values between elites and working-class people who often were members of immigrant and/or marginalized ethnic communities. Specific histories and cultural contexts discussed include the accordion in Brazil, Argentine tango, accordion traditions in Colombia and the Dominican Republic, cross-border accordion culture between Mexico and Texas, Cajun and Creole identity, working-class culture near Lake Superior, the virtuoso Italian-American and Klezmer accordions, Native American dance music, and American avant-garde.

Contributors are María Susana Azzi, Egberto Bermúdez, Mark DeWitt, Joshua Horowitz, Sydney Hutchinson, Marion Jacobson, James P. Leary, Megwen Loveless, Richard March, Cathy Ragland, Helena Simonett, Jared Snyder, Janet L. Sturman, and Christine F. Zinni.

The narrow Darién Gap, the only land bridge connecting South and Central America, encompasses a spectacularly hostile jungle, covered in steep mountains, dense rainforests, and flood-prone marshes. Known in Spanish as el infierno verde, or “the green hell,” it is one of the most inhospitable places in the world. Its terrain is too treacherous for roads, yet hundreds of thousands of refuge seekers contend with its horrors every year in the hopes of reaching the United States, still some three thousand miles away. And of the countless who set out for the border, an untold number never arrive.
 
In this book, journalist Belén Fernández travels through the Darién Gap to report on the dehumanizing and deadly stretch of land that has become a mass graveyard for migrants. Fernández’s journey brings her into contact with refuge seekers, people smugglers, law enforcement officials, and many more whose stories bring life to a place overwhelmingly associated with death. Combining history, on-the-ground reporting, travelogue, memoir, and searing politico-economic analysis, she shines light on a largely made-in-the-USA crisis that has come to define our modern era.
 
Engrossing and heartrending, The Darién Gap is a poignant and compassionate indictment of structural inequality and institutionalized inhumanity in a world where the have-nots must risk death for a chance at a better life—or any life at all.

Wherever cattle have been raised on a large scale horsemen have been there to handle them; and wherever these horsemen have existed they have left an indelible mark upon the history of the land. Frequently they have been ignorant, violent, and brutal. Always they have been vigorous and individualistic. They have taken their herds into frontier areas, opened new country, fought and driven off earlier inhabitants, participated in revolutions, battled among themselves, and generally lived lives which, colorful and somewhat frightening to their contemporaries, have become robust legends to those who followed them.

Edward Larocque Tinker portrays the life of these people in the two Americas, the conditions which created them, and those that ultimately destroyed or transformed them.

"Ever since I was a small boy, when my parents returned from Mexico bringing me a charro outfit complete with saddle and bridle, Latin America has beckoned with the finger of romance," Mr. Tinker recalls. "As soon as I was old enough, I made many trips to Mexico and, in the days of Porfirio Díaz, learned to know it from the border to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. During the Revolution I was with General Álvaro Obregón when he was a Teniente Coronel in his Sonora Campaign, and, although I was only a lawyer on a holiday, took care of his wounded in the battel of San Joaquín. Later, in Pancho Villa's train, I was present at Celaya when he was defeated by Obregón.

"Always an ardent horseman, I worked many a roundup with the vaqueros of Sonora and Chihuahua, and with the cowboys of our Southwest. . . .

"I saw the similarity between the American cowboy, the Argentine Gaucho, and the Vaquero of Mexico. They all received their gear and technique of cattle handling from Spain, and developed the same independence, courage, and hardihood. I thought if these qualities were better known they might serve as a bridge to closer understanding throughout the Americas."

From his study of the lives of these horsemen, Tinker proceeds to an examination of the literature that evolved among and then about them.

The first and largest part of the book deals with the gaucho of Argentina and Uruguay. The second and third sections examine the charro of Mexico and the cowboy of the United States.

Bartosik-Velez seeks to explain the meaning of Christopher Columbus throughout the so-called New World, first in the British American colonies and the United States, as well as in Spanish America, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She argues that, during the pre- and post-revolutionary periods, New World societies commonly imagined themselves as legitimate and powerful independent political entities by comparing themselves to the classical empires of Greece and Rome. Columbus, who had been construed as a figure of empire for centuries, fit perfectly into that framework. By adopting him as a national symbol, New World nationalists appeal to Old World notions of empire.

Tierra Santa follows photographer Carolyn Brown into the Americas, from the temple mountains of the Maya and the kivas of the Pueblo Southwest to the candlelit churches of colonial Mexico and Guatemala. Over decades of travel, Brown has photographed wherever people have recognized something holy, whether an ancient plaza open to the sky or a village chapel at the end of a dirt road.

The photographs do more than document. In a bank of flickering candles and a hillside terraced into a pyramid, Brown finds the vitality that many cultures have felt in these places—the sense that earth and sky were already sacred and that human beings have only answered its call. Essays by leading scholars of archaeology, anthropology, and colonial history trace how successive peoples made room for the divine. Brown's own reflections close the book with a pilgrimage through the Sierra Gorda.

Together, the images and essays offer an invitation to look slowly and to notice. Stay with them long enough and these places begin to stir memory and awe, along with a profound sense that the sacred was here long before we arrived and remains, patiently, wherever we're willing to see it.

Weaving strands of Chicana and Mexicana subjectivities, Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas explores political and theoretical agendas, particularly those that undermine the patriarchy, across a diverse range of Latina authors. Within this range, calls for a coalition are clear, but questions surrounding the process of these revolutionary dialogues provide important lines of inquiry. Examining the works of authors such as Sandra Cisneros, Laura Esquivel, Carmen Boullosa, and Helena María Viramontes, Anna Sandoval considers resistance to traditional cultural symbols and contemporary efforts to counteract negative representations of womanhood in literature and society.

Offering a new perspective on the oppositional nature of Latina writers, Sandoval emphasizes the ways in which national literatures have privileged male authors, whose viewpoint is generally distinct from that of women—a point of departure rarely acknowledged in postcolonial theory. Applying her observations to the disciplinary, historical, and spatial facets of literary production, Sandoval interrogates the boundaries of the Latina experience. Building on the dialogues begun with such works as Sonia Saldivar-Hull's Feminism on the Border and Ellen McCracken's New Latina Narrative, this is a concise yet ambitious comparative approach to the historical and cultural connections (as well as disparities) found in Chicana and Mexicana literature.

Contributors: Marc Becker, Jacob Blanc, Tanya Harmer, Patricia Harms, Lazar Jeifets, Victor Jeifets, Adriana Petra, Margaret M. Power, Frances Peace Sullivan, Tony Wood, Kevin A. Young, and Jacob Zumoff