Title: Familia: migration and adaptation in Baja and Alta California, 1800-1975 
Author: Alvarez, Robert R
Published: University of California Press,  1987
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Demography | Latin American History | Latin American Studies | Postcolonial Studies
Publisher's Description: Anthropologists, historians, and sociologists will find here a striking challenge to accepted explanations of the northward movement of migrants from Mexico into the United States. Alvarez investigates the life histories of pioneer migrants and their offspring, finding a human dimension to migration which centers on the family. Spanish, American, and English exploits paved the way for exchange between Baja and Alta California. Alvarez shows how cultural stability actually increased as migrants settled in new locations, bringing their common values and memories with them.   [brief]
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Title: Observations in Lower California 
Author: Baegert, Jacob 1717-1772
Published: University of California Press,  1979
Subjects: History | United States History | California and the West | Californian and Western History
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Title: Mexico's mandarins: crafting a power elite for the twenty-first century
Author: Camp, Roderic Ai
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Politics | Latin American Studies
Publisher's Description: This groundbreaking study marks the culmination of over twenty years of research by one of this country's most prominent Mexico scholars. Roderic Ai Camp provides a detailed, comprehensive examination of Mexico's power elite - their political power, societal influence, and the crucial yet often overlooked role mentoring plays in their rise to the top. In the course of this book, he traces the careers of approximately four hundred of the country's most notable politicians, military officers, clergy, intellectuals, and capitalists. Thoroughly researched and drawn from in-depth interviews with some of Mexico's most powerful players, Mexico's Mandarins provides insight into the machinations of Mexican leadership and an important glimpse into the country's future as it steps onto the global stage.   [brief]
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Title: Zapata lives!: histories and cultural politics in southern Mexico
Author: Stephen, Lynn
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Latin American Studies | Anthropology | Sociology | American Studies | Ethnic Studies | Latin American History | Politics | Postcolonial Studies
Publisher's Description: This richly detailed study chronicles recent political events in southern Mexico, up to and including the July 2000 election of Vicente Fox. Lynn Stephen focuses on the meaning that Emiliano Zapata, the great symbol of land reform and human rights, has had and now has for rural Mexicans. Stephen documents the rise of the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas and shows how this rebellion was understood in other parts of Mexico, particularly in Oaxaca, giving a vivid sense of rural life in southern Mexico. Illuminating the cultural dimensions of these political events, she shows how indigenous Mexicans and others fashioned their own responses to neoliberal economic policy, which ended land reform, encouraged privatization, and has resulted in increasing socioeconomic stratification in Mexico. Mixing original ethnographic material drawn from years of fieldwork in Mexico with historical material from a variety of sources, Stephen shows how activists have appropriated symbols of the revolution to build the contemporary political movement. Her wide-ranging narrative touches on the history of land tenure, racism, gender issues in the Zapatista movement, local political culture, the Zapatista uprising of the 1990s and its aftermath, and more. A significant addition to our knowledge of social change in contemporary Mexico, Zapata Lives! also offers readers a model for engaged, activist anthropology.   [brief]
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Title: Empire and revolution: the Americans in Mexico since the Civil War
Author: Hart, John M. (John Mason) 1935-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | Latin American History | United States History | American Studies | Latin American Studies
Publisher's Description: The deep relationship between the United States and Mexico has had repercussions felt around the world. This sweeping and unprecedented chronicle of the economic and social connections between the two nations opens a new window onto history from the Civil War to today and brilliantly illuminates the course of events that made the United States a global empire. The Mexican Revolution, Manifest Destiny, World War II, and NAFTA are all part of the story, but John Mason Hart's narrative transcends these moments of economic and political drama, resonating with the themes of wealth and power. Combining economic and historical analysis with personal memoirs and vivid descriptions of key episodes and players, Empire and Revolution is based on substantial amounts of previously unexplored source material. Hart excavated recently declassified documents in the archives of the United States government and traveled extensively in rural Mexico to uncover the rich sources for this gripping story of 135 years of intervention, cooperation, and corruption. Beginning just after the American Civil War, Hart traces the activities of an elite group of financiers and industrialists who, sensing opportunities for wealth to the south, began to develop Mexico's infrastructure. He charts their activities through the pivotal regime of Porfirio Díaz, when Americans began to gain ownership of Mexico's natural resources, and through the Mexican Revolution, when Americans lost many of their holdings in Mexico. Hart concentrates less on traditional political history in the twentieth century and more on the hidden interactions between Americans and Mexicans, especially the unfolding story of industrial production in Mexico for export to the United States. Throughout, this masterful narrative illuminates the development and expansion of the American railroad, oil, mining, and banking industries. Hart also shows how the export of the "American Dream" has shaped such areas as religion and work attitudes in Mexico. Empire and Revolution reveals much about the American psyche, especially the compulsion of American elites toward wealth, global power, and contact with other peoples, often in order to "save" them. These characteristics were first expressed internationally in Mexico, and Hart shows that the Mexican experience was and continues to be a prototype for U.S. expansion around the world. His work demonstrates the often inconspicuous yet profoundly damaging impact of American investment in the underdeveloped countries of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Empire and Revolution will be the definitive book on U.S.-Mexico relations and their local and global ramifications.   [brief]
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Title: The romance of democracy: compliant defiance in contemporary Mexico
Author: Gutmann, Matthew C 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | Latino Studies | Latin American Studies | Sociology | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: The Romance of Democracy gives a unique insider perspective on contemporary Mexico by examining the meaning of democracy in the lives of working-class residents in Mexico City today. A highly absorbing and vividly detailed ethnographic study of popular politics and official subjugation, the book provides a detailed, bottom-up exploration of what men and women think about national and neighborhood democracy, what their dreams are for a better society, and how these dreams play out in their daily lives. Based on extensive fieldwork in the same neighborhood he discussed in his acclaimed book The Meanings of Macho, Matthew C. Gutmann now explores the possibilities for political and social change in the world's most populous city. In the process he provides a new perspective on many issues affecting Mexicans countrywide.   [brief]
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Title: The Spanish redemption: heritage, power, and loss on New Mexico's upper Rio Grande
Author: Montgomery, Charles H 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | United States History | Latino Studies | California and the West
Publisher's Description: Charles Montgomery's compelling narrative traces the history of the upper Rio Grande's modern Spanish heritage, showing how Anglos and Hispanos sought to redefine the region's social character by glorifying its Spanish colonial past. This readable book demonstrates that northern New Mexico's twentieth-century Spanish heritage owes as much to the coming of the Santa Fe Railroad in 1880 as to the first Spanish colonial campaign of 1598. As the railroad brought capital and migrants into the region, Anglos posed an unprecedented challenge to Hispano wealth and political power. Yet unlike their counterparts in California and Texas, the Anglo newcomers could not wholly displace their Spanish-speaking rivals. Nor could they segregate themselves or the upper Rio Grande from the image, well-known throughout the Southwest, of the disreputable Mexican. Instead, prominent Anglos and Hispanos found common cause in transcending the region's Mexican character. Turning to colonial symbols of the conquistador, the Franciscan missionary, and the humble Spanish settler, they recast northern New Mexico and its people.   [brief]
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Title: Mexico at the world's fairs: crafting a modern nation 
Author: Tenorio-Trillo, Mauricio 1962-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Latin American History | Latin American Studies | Literature
Publisher's Description: This intriguing study of Mexico's participation in world's fairs from 1889 to 1929 explores Mexico's self-presentation at these fairs as a reflection of the country's drive toward nationalization and a modernized image. Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo contrasts Mexico's presence at the 1889 Paris fair - where its display was the largest and most expensive Mexico has ever mounted - with Mexico's presence after the 1910 Mexican Revolution at fairs in Rio de Janeiro in 1922 and Seville in 1929.Rather than seeing the revolution as a sharp break, Tenorio-Trillo points to important continuities between the pre- and post-revolution periods. He also discusses how, internationally, the character of world's fairs was radically transformed during this time, from the Eiffel Tower prototype, encapsulating a wondrous symbolic universe, to the Disneyland model of commodified entertainment.Drawing on cultural, intellectual, urban, literary, social, and art histories, Tenorio-Trillo's thorough and imaginative study presents a broad cultural history of Mexico from 1880 to 1930, set within the context of the origins of Western nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and modernism.   [brief]
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Title: Three Mile Island: a nuclear crisis in historical perspective
Author: Walker, J. Samuel
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: History | Technology and Instruments | Environment | Technology and Society | United States History
Publisher's Description: Twenty-five years ago, Hollywood released The China Syndrome, featuring Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas as a TVnews crew who witness what appears to be a serious accident at a nuclear power plant. In a spectacular coincidence, on March 28, 1979, less than two weeks after the movie came out, the worst accident in the history of commercial nuclear power in the United States occurred at Three Mile Island. For five days, the citizens of central Pennsylvania and the entire world, amid growing alarm, followed the efforts of authorities to prevent the crippled plant from spewing dangerous quantities of radiation into the environment. This book is the first comprehensive account of the causes, context, and consequences of the Three Mile Island crisis. In gripping prose, J. Samuel Walker captures the high human drama surrounding the accident, sets it in the context of the heated debate over nuclear power in the seventies, and analyzes the social, technical, and political issues it raised. His superb account of those frightening and confusing days will clear up misconceptions held to this day about Three Mile Island. The heart of Walker's suspenseful narrative is a moment-by-moment account of the accident itself, in which he brings to life the players who dealt with the emergency: the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the state of Pennsylvania, the White House, and a cast of scientists and reporters. He also looks at the aftermath of the accident on the surrounding area, including studies of its long-term health effects on the population, providing a fascinating window onto the politics of nuclear power and an authoritative account of a critical event in recent American history.   [brief]
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Title: Migration, mujercitas, and medicine men: living in urban Mexico
Author: Napolitano, Valentina
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | Gender Studies | Latin American Studies | Urban Studies | Sociology | Medical Anthropology | Ethnic Studies | Medical Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Valentina Napolitano explores issues of migration, medicine, religion, and gender in this incisive analysis of everyday practices of urban living in Guadalajara, Mexico. Drawing on fieldwork over a ten-year period, Napolitano paints a rich and vibrant picture of daily life in a low-income neighborhood of Guadalajara. Migration, Mujercitas, and Medicine Men insightfully portrays the personal experiences of the neighborhood's residents while engaging with important questions about the nature of selfhood, subjectivity, and community identity as well as the tensions of modernity and its discontents in Mexican society.   [brief]
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Title: Mayo ethnobotany: land, history, and traditional knowledge in northwest Mexico
Author: Yetman, David 1941-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | Botany | Cultural Anthropology | Latin American Studies
Publisher's Description: The Mayos, an indigenous people of northwestern Mexico, live in small towns spread over southern Sonora and northern Sinaloa, lands of remarkable biological diversity. Traditional Mayo knowledge is quickly being lost as this culture becomes absorbed into modern Mexico. Moreover, as big agriculture spreads into the region, the natural biodiversity of these lands is also rapidly disappearing. This engaging and accessible ethnobotany, based on hundreds of interviews with the Mayos and illustrated with the authors' strikingly beautiful photographs, helps preserve our knowledge of both an indigenous culture and an endangered environment. This book contains a comprehensive description of northwest Mexico's tropical deciduous forests and thornscrub on the traditional Mayo lands reaching from the Sea of Cortés to the foothills of the Sierra Madre. The first half of the book is a highly readable account of the climate, geology, and vegetation of the region. The authors also provide a valuable history of the people, their language, culture, festival traditions, and plant use. The second half of the book is an annotated list of plants presenting the authors' detailed findings on plant use in Mayo culture.   [brief]
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Title: Sanctuaries of Spanish New Mexico/ 
Author: Treib, Marc
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Architecture | Architectural History
Publisher's Description: Among the oldest buildings in the United States, the churches of Spanish New Mexico - made of earth, of stone, of wood - are the surprisingly fragile reminders of a unique amalgam of Spanish architectural ideas and native American Pueblo culture. This book surveys the land and rivers, the people and ideas, that led to this compelling religious architecture; it is also a guide to visiting these churches today.In the ninth century the Anasazi, progenitors of the Pueblo peoples, constructed refined architectural complexes at Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon. Contact with the Spanish in the late 1500s transformed the world of these indigenous peoples, changing their agricultural and living patterns - as well as religious practices. These changes were manifest architecturally in the sanctuaries the Spanish constructed as missions for the Indians or as parish churches for themselves. First built roughly between 1600 and 1829, but continuing to be rebuilt into this century, they were made of the very materials composing the land itself.In Part I, Marc Treib addresses the geographical, anthropological, and architectural aspects of church building in New Mexico and provides background on the church as both an institution and a building type. Part II presents thirty churches in depth and discusses such topics as sitting, construction in adobe and stone, the use of light, ornamentation, and the issues surrounding restoration. Sanctuaries of Spanish New Mexico is the only book in print to include all the major church sites still extant. Richly illustrated, with specially prepared plans of the churches, it will be welcomed by architectural historians and anyone with an interest in the American Southwest.   [brief]
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Title: Tijuana: stories on the border 
Author: Campbell, Federico
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Literature | Chicano Studies | Ethnic Studies | Latin American Studies | Literature in Translation
Publisher's Description: Tijuana is a haunting collection of stories and a novella, all set in the shadowy borderlands between Mexico and the United States. A fresh and evocative voice, Federico Campbell traces many kinds of borders - geographical, psychological, cultural, spiritual - and the "halfway beings" that inhabit them.The novella, "Everything About Seals," is both a passionate love story and a deeply disquieting chronicle of romantic obsession. The narrative voices in Campbell's stories are many-sided, moving from the brash teenager whose gang's symbol is the Mobil Oil flying horse to the confused law student who no longer knows whether his cultural allegiance is to Mexico City or to Los Angeles.Campbell has captured here the ambivalent, fascinating ties between Mexico and the U.S., ties ranging from Hollywood movies to Mexican folklore. The first English-language translation of his work, Tijuana will be welcomed by general readers as well as literary critics, anthropologists, historians, and those interested in the culture of the border.   [brief]
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Title: Building the fourth estate: democratization and the rise of a free press in Mexico
Author: Lawson, Chappell H 1967-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Politics | Latin American Studies | Media Studies
Publisher's Description: Based on an in-depth examination of Mexico's print and broadcast media over the last twenty-five years, this book is the most richly detailed account available of the role of the media in democratization, demonstrating the reciprocal relationship between changes in the press and changes in the political system. In addition to illuminating the nature of political change in Mexico, this accessibly written study also has broad implications for understanding the role of the mass media in democratization around the world.   [brief]
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Title: Peasant and nation: the making of postcolonial Mexico and Peru
Author: Mallon, Florencia E 1951-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | Latin American History | Anthropology | Latin American Studies
Publisher's Description: Peasant and Nation offers a major new statement on the making of national politics. Comparing the popular political cultures and discourses of postcolonial Mexico and Peru, Florencia Mallon provides a groundbreaking analysis of their effect on the evolution of these nation states. As political history from a variety of subaltern perspectives, the book takes seriously the history of peasant thought and action and the complexity of community politics. It reveals the hierarchy and the heroism, the solidarity and the surveillance, the exploitation and the reciprocity, that coexist in popular political struggle.With this book Mallon not only forges a new path for Latin American history but challenges the very concept of nationalism. Placing it squarely within the struggles for power between colonized and colonizing peoples, she argues that nationalism must be seen not as an integrated ideology that puts the interest of the nation above all other loyalties, but as a project for collective identity over which many political groups and coalitions have struggled. Ambitious and bold, Peasant and Nation both draws on monumental archival research in two countries and enters into spirited dialogue with the literatures of post-colonial studies, gender studies, and peasant studies.   [brief]
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Title: Exploring the deep Pacific. 
Author: Raitt, Helen
Published: Norton,  1956
Subjects:
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Title: Oil and revolution in Mexico 
Author: Brown, Jonathan C. (Jonathan Charles) 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Latin American History | Latin American Studies | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: Anyone contemplating the consequences of foreign investment in Latin America will profit from reading this book. As Jonathan Brown shows, the dynamic growth of the Mexican oil industry resulted from both the domination of foreign capital and Mexico's own economic restructuring, conditions similar to those under which free-market reforms are being adopted throughout the hemisphere today.Brown's research into the operations of the British and American oil companies in Mexico between 1880 and 1920 reveals their involvement in the events that led the country to revolution in 1910. He weaves a fascinating, exciting story out of the maneuverings among oil men, politicians, diplomats, and workers in a period of massive social upheaval.Oil companies brought capital, technology, and jobs to Mexico, but they also threatened its deeply rooted social heritage. Brown shows that the Mexican response to this double-edged situation was far more effective than has been recognized. Mexicans of all classes were remarkably successful in imposing their own traditions on the powerful companies.Lively, provocative but evenhanded, with darts of wry humor, this study will engage a wide variety of readers: business, economic, political, labor, and social historians and students of Latin America, foreign investment, and international relations.   [brief]
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Title: Buñuel and Mexico: the crisis of national cinema
Author: Acevedo-Muñoz, Ernesto R 1968-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Latin American History | Latin American Studies
Publisher's Description: Though Luis Buñuel, one of the most important filmmakers of the twentieth century, spent his most productive years as a director in Mexico, film histories and criticism invariably pay little attention to his work during this period. The only English-language study of Buñuel's Mexican films, this book is the first to explore a significant but neglected area of this filmmaker's distinguished career and thus to fill a gap in our appreciation and understanding of both Buñuel's achievement and the history of Mexican film. Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz considers Buñuel's Mexican films - made between 1947 and 1965 - within the context of a national and nationalist film industry, comparing the filmmaker's employment of styles, genres, character types, themes, and techniques to those most characteristic of Mexican cinema. In this study Buñuel's films emerge as a link between the Classical Mexican cinema of the 1930s through the 1950s and the "new" Cinema of the 1960s, flourishing in a time of crisis for the national film industry and introducing some of the stylistic and conceptual changes that would revitalize Mexican cinema.   [brief]
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Title: Refried Elvis: the rise of the Mexican counterculture 
Author: Zolov, Eric
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Latin American History | Popular Culture | Chicano Studies | Latin American Studies | Contemporary Music
Publisher's Description: This powerful study shows how America's biggest export, rock and roll, became a major influence in Mexican politics, society, and culture. From the arrival of Elvis in Mexico during the 1950s to the emergence of a full-blown counterculture movement by the late 1960s, Eric Zolov uses rock and roll to illuminate Mexican history through these charged decades and into the 1970s. This fascinating narrative traces the rechanneling of youth energies away from political protest in the wake of the 1968 student movement and into counterculture rebellion, known as La Onda (The Wave). Refried Elvis accounts for the events of 1968 and their aftermath by revealing a mounting crisis of patriarchal values, linked both to the experience of modernization during the 1950s and 1960s and to the limits of cultural nationalism as promoted by a one-party state.Through an engrossing analysis of music and film, as well as fanzines, newspapers, government documents, company reports, and numerous interviews, Zolov shows how rock music culture became a volatile commodity force, whose production and consumption strategies were shaped by intellectuals, state agencies, transnational and local capital, musicians, and fans alike. More than a history of Mexican rock and roll, Zolov's study demonstrates the politicized nature of culture under authoritarianism, and offers a nuanced discussion of the effects of cultural imperialism that deepens our understanding of gender relations, social hierarchies, and the very meanings of national identity in a transnational era.   [brief]
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Title: Between two islands: Dominican international migration
Author: Grasmuck, Sherri
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Sociology | Latino Studies | Latin American Studies | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Popular notions about migration to the United States from Latin America and the Caribbean are too often distorted by memories of earlier European migrations and by a tendency to generalize from the more familiar cases of Mexico and Puerto Rico. Between Two Islands is an interdisciplinary study of Dominican migration, challenging many widespread, yet erroneous, views concerning the socio-economic background of new immigrants and the causes and consequences of their move to the United States.Eschewing monocausal treatments of migration, the authors insist that migration is a multifaceted process involving economic, political, and socio-cultural factors. To this end, they introduce an innovative analytical framework which includes such determinants as the international division of labor; state policy in the sending and receiving societies; class relations; transnational migrant households; social networks; and gender and generational hierarchies.By adopting this multidimensional approach, Grasmuck and Pessar are able to account for many intriguing paradoxes of Dominican migration and development of the Dominican population in the U.S. For example, why is it that the peak in migration coincided with a boom in Dominican economic growth? Why did most of the immigrants settle in New York City at the precise moment the metropolitan economy was experiencing stagnation and severe unemployment? And why do most immigrants claim to have achieved social mobility and middle-class standing despite employment in menial blue-collar jobs?Until quite recently, studies of international migration have emphasized the male migrant, while neglecting the role of women and their experiences. Grasmuck and Pessar's attempt to remedy this uneven perspective results in a better overall understanding of Dominican migration. For instance, they find that with regard to wages and working conditions, it is a greater liability to be female than to be without legal status. They also show that gender influences attitudes toward settlement, return, and workplace struggle.Finally, the authors explore some of the paradoxes created by Dominican migration. The material success achieved by individual migrant households contrasts starkly with increased socio-economic inequality in the Dominican Republic and polarized class relations in the United States.This is an exciting and important work that will appeal to scholars and policymakers interested in immigration, ethnic studies, and the continual reshaping of urban America.   [brief]
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