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4 books match the query 'Ramírez, Catherine S.'

cover of Children of Cuarón: Speculative Futures Through Cinematic Fiction

Children of Cuarón

Speculative Futures Through Cinematic Fiction

Matt Garcia

Rutgers University Press, 2027

Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men thrusts readers into a gripping near-future world where environmental collapse and global infertility have fortified borders and torn apart the fabric of society. Its stark depictions of mass deportation, lawless border zones, and the desperate fight for survival echo powerfully through Octavia Butler’s prophetic novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, where environmental breakdown, migration, childbirth, and the resilience of women’s bodies form the core of her visionary storytelling. Remarkably, the futures imagined in these works are no longer distant—Butler’s 2024 has arrived, and Cuarón’s 2027 is nearly here. Children of Cuarón: Speculative Futures Through Cinematic Fiction ignites bold, necessary conversations about borders, immigration, and the urgent political, environmental, and social challenges facing our world today. By examining how speculative fiction dares to imagine what comes next, this book invites readers to confront the realities of our present—and the possibilities of our future—with fresh eyes and uncompromising clarity.

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cover of Migrant Bioprecarity: Latinx Lives and Embodied Vulnerability

Migrant Bioprecarity

Latinx Lives and Embodied Vulnerability

Catherine S. Ramírez and Jonathan Xavier Inda, editors

Duke University Press, 2027

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cover of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship

Precarity and Belonging

Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship

Catherine S. Ramírez

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Precarity and Belonging examines how the movement of people and their incorporation, marginalization, and exclusion, under epochal conditions of labor and social precarity affecting both citizens and noncitizens, have challenged older notions of citizenship and alienage. This collection brings mobility, precarity, and citizenship together in order to explore the points of contact and friction, and, thus, the spaces for a possible politics of commonality between citizens and noncitizens.The editors ask: What does modern citizenship mean in a world of citizens, denizens, and noncitizens, such as undocumented migrants, guest workers, permanent residents, refugees, detainees, and stateless people? How is the concept of citizenship, based on assumptions of deservingness, legality, and productivity, challenged when people of various and competing statuses and differential citizenship practices interact with each other, revealing their co-constitutive connections? How is citizenship valued or revalued when labor and social precarity impact those who seemingly have formal rights and those who seemingly or effectively do not? This book interrogates such binaries as citizen/noncitizen, insider/outsider, entitled/unentitled, “legal”/“illegal,” and deserving/undeserving in order to explore the fluidity--that is, the dynamism and malleability--of the spectra of belonging.
 
 
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cover of The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory

The Woman in the Zoot Suit

Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory

Catherine S. Ramírez

Duke University Press, 2009

The Mexican American woman zoot suiter, or pachuca, often wore a V-neck sweater or a long, broad-shouldered coat, a knee-length pleated skirt, fishnet stockings or bobby socks, platform heels or saddle shoes, dark lipstick, and a bouffant. Or she donned the same style of zoot suit that her male counterparts wore. With their striking attire, pachucos and pachucas represented a new generation of Mexican American youth, which arrived on the public scene in the 1940s. Yet while pachucos have often been the subject of literature, visual art, and scholarship, The Woman in the Zoot Suit is the first book focused on pachucas.

Two events in wartime Los Angeles thrust young Mexican American zoot suiters into the media spotlight. In the Sleepy Lagoon incident, a man was murdered during a mass brawl in August 1942. Twenty-two young men, all but one of Mexican descent, were tried and convicted of the crime. In the Zoot Suit Riots of June 1943, white servicemen attacked young zoot suiters, particularly Mexican Americans, throughout Los Angeles. The Chicano movement of the 1960s–1980s cast these events as key moments in the political awakening of Mexican Americans and pachucos as exemplars of Chicano identity, resistance, and style. While pachucas and other Mexican American women figured in the two incidents, they were barely acknowledged in later Chicano movement narratives. Catherine S. Ramírez draws on interviews she conducted with Mexican American women who came of age in Los Angeles in the late 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s as she recovers the neglected stories of pachucas. Investigating their relative absence in scholarly and artistic works, she argues that both wartime U.S. culture and the Chicano movement rejected pachucas because they threatened traditional gender roles. Ramírez reveals how pachucas challenged dominant notions of Mexican American and Chicano identity, how feminists have reinterpreted la pachuca, and how attention to an overlooked figure can disclose much about history making, nationalism, and resistant identities.

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