When the Soviet Union dissolved, so did the easy credit, cheap oil, and subsidies it had provided to Cuba. The bottom fell out of the Cuban economy, and many expected that Castro's revolution-the one that had inspired the Left throughout Latin America and elsewhere-would soon be gone as well. More than a decade later, the revolution lives on, albeit in a modified form. Following the collapse of Soviet communism, Castro legalized the dollar, opened the island to tourism, and allowed foreign investment, small-scale private enterprise, and remittances from exiles in Miami. Capitalism, God, and a ... View More...
Lives from an invisible community--the migrant farmworkers of the United States The Grapes of Wrath brought national attention to the condition of California's migrant farmworkers in the 1930s. Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers' grape and lettuce boycotts captured the imagination of the United States in the 1960s and '70s. Yet today, the stories of the more than 800,000 men, women, and children working in California's fields--one third of the nation's agricultural work force--are rarely heard, despite the persistence of wage theft, dangerous working conditions, and uncertain futures. Th... View More...
As the twenth-first century begins, Latinas/os represent 45 percent of the residents of Los Angeles County, making them the largest racial/ethnic group in the region. At the same time, the shift from manufacturing to a service-based economy in the area has contributed to a decline in good-paying jobs, significantly impacting working class families. These transformations have created a backlash that has included state propositions impacting Latinas/os and escalating anti-immigrant rhetoric--and Latina/os of all backgrounds are making their voices heard. Until recently, most research on Latinas/... View More...
There is a new generation of Latina/o dramatists afoot. According to Caridad Svich, editor of Out of the Fringe: Contemporary Latina/Latino Theatre and Performance, "There is a wave of dramatists, storytellers and poets, creating work intensely personal and idiosyncratic, eerie and lyrical, metaphysical and emotive. Flourishing within the margins of an already marginalized theatrical environment, they align themselves with resurgent poetry and the spoken-word movement, with alternative music and literature scenes; their work is bred on the economics of poetry and the nurturing of their work ou... View More...
Latinos are now the largest so-called minority group in the United States--the result of a growth trend that began in the mid-twentieth century--and the influence of Latin cultures on American life is reflected in everything from politics to education to mass cultural forms such as music and television. Yet very few volumes have attempted to analyze or provide a context for this dramatic historical development. The Columbia History of Latinos in the United States Since 1960 is among the few comprehensive histories of Latinos in America. This collaborative, interdisciplinary volume provides not... View More...
A comprehensive look at Hispanic voters in the United States Making up 14.2 percent of the American population, Hispanics are now the largest minority group in the United States. Clearly, securing the Hispanic vote is more important to political parties than ever before. Yet, despite the current size of the Hispanic population, is there a clear Hispanic politics? Who are Hispanic voters? What are their political preferences and attitudes, and why? The first comprehensive study of Hispanic voters in the United States, New Faces, New Voices paints a complex portrait of this diverse and growing p... View More...
Here is a voice seldom heard, the voice of Latin America's majority, those who bear the burdens of society. If we are to understand Honduras, Central America, or, for that matter, Latin America, we must listen attentively to this voice. It has much to teach us. It commands the future. --E. Bradford Burns, Professor of History, UCLADon't be Afraid, Gringo is the award-winning oral history of Elvia Alvarado, a courageous campesina peasant] activist in Honduras, the poorest country in Central America. Trained by the Catholic Church to organize women's groups to combat malnutrition, Alvarado bega... View More...
In Buried Indians, Laurie Hovell McMillin presents the struggle of her hometown, Trempealeau, Wisconsin, to determine whether platform mounds atop Trempealeau Mountain constitute authentic Indian mounds. This dispute, as McMillin subtly demonstrates, reveals much about the attitude and interaction - past and present - between the white and Indian inhabitants of this Midwestern town. McMillin's account, rich in detail and sensitive to current political issues of American Indian interactions with the dominant European American culture, locates two opposing views: one that denies a Native America... View More...
This collection brings together innovative historical work on race and national identity in Latin America and the Caribbean and places this scholarship in the context of interdisciplinary and transnational discussions regarding race and nation in the Americas. Moving beyond debates about whether ideologies of racial democracy have actually served to obscure discrimination, the book shows how notions of race and nationhood have varied over time across Latin America's political landscapes.Framing the themes and questions explored in the volume, the editors' introduction also provides an overview... View More...
As a member of Salvador Allende's Personal Guards (GAP), Luz Arce worked with leaders of the Socialist Party during the Popular Unity Government from 1971 to1973. In the months following the coup, Arce served as a militant with others from the Left who opposed the military junta led by Augusto Pinochet, which controlled the country from 1973 to1990. Along with thousands of others in Chile, Arce was detained and tortured by Chile's military intelligence service, the DINA, in their attempt to eliminate alternative voices and ideologies in the country. Arce's testimonial offers the harrowing sto... View More...
Surrounded by one of the largest petrochemical compounds in Argentina, a highly polluted river that brings the toxic waste of tanneries and other industries, a hazardous and largely unsupervised waste incinerator, and an unmonitored landfill, Flammable's soil, air, and water are contaminatedwith lead, chromium, benzene, and other chemicals. So are its nearly five thousand sickened and frail inhabitants. How do poor people make sense of and cope with toxic pollution? Why do they fail to understand what is objectively a clear and present danger? How are perceptions and misperceptionsshared withi... View More...
"Political clientelism" is a term used to characterize the contemporary relationships between political elites and the poor in Latin America in which goods and services are traded for political favors. Javier Auyero critically deploys the notion in Poor People's Politics to analyze the political practices of the Peronist Party among shantytown dwellers in contemporary Argentina.Looking closely at the slum-dwellers' informal problem-solving networks, which are necessary for material survival, and the different meanings of Peronism within these networks, Auyero presents the first ethnography of ... View More...
Covering more than one hundred years of history, this multidisciplinary collection of essays explores the vital connections between popular music and citizenship in Brazil. While popular music has served as an effective resource for communities to stake claims to political, social, and cultural rights in Brazil, it has also been appropriated by the state in its efforts to manage and control a socially, racially, and geographically diverse nation. The question of citizenship has also been a recurrent theme in the work of many of Brazil's most important musicians. These essays explore popular mu... View More...
The story of the growing resistance of Mexican communities to the poverty that forces people to migrate to the United States People across Mexico are being forced into migration, and while 11 percent of that country's population lives north of the US border, the decision to migrate is rarely voluntary. Free trade agreements and economic policies that exacerbate and reinforce extreme wealth disparities make it impossible for Mexicans to make a living at home. And yet when they migrate to the United States, they must grapple with criminalization, low wages, and exploitation. In The Right to Sta... View More...
Recent international interest in the painters of the Mexican mural movement, such as Rivera and Orozco, has brought Latin American art to a wider audience than ever before but has often failed to confront its continuing marginalization within art criticism. Drawing the Line is an exploration of the areas occupied by Latin American art and culture between the ongoing traditions of its indigenous inhabitants, its colonial heritage and its contemporary relationship to the cultural politics of North America and Europe. It looks at the way cultural identity has been constructed by artists from the ... View More...
In this remarkable testimony, Cuban novelist and anthropologist Miguel Barnet presents the narrative of 105-year-old Esteban Montejo, who lived as a slave, as fugitive in the wilderness, and as a soldier in the Cuban War of Independence. Honest, blunt, compassionate, shrewd, and engaging, his voice provides an extraordinary insight into the African culture that took root in the Caribbean.
In this remarkable testimony, Cuban novelist and anthropologist Miguel Barnet presents the narrative of 105-year-old Esteban Montejo, who lived as a slave, as fugitive in the wilderness, and as a soldier in the Cuban War of Independence. Honest, blunt, compassionate, shrewd, and engaging, his voice provides an extraordinary insight into the African culture that took root in the Caribbean.
This book is an original exploration into the history of material culture and consumption in Latin America over the past 500 years with special attention to the categories of food, clothing, shelter, and the arrangement of public and private space. The practice of consumption is related to supply and demand but also to the importance of ritual and the scramble for identity within the ethnic and class arrangements imposed by colonial and postcolonial societies. View More...
