Dialogues Across Diasporas focuses on the shared historical legacies of members of the Africana and Latina diasporas, and the cultural impact of the African diaspora in the Americas. This book seeks to emphasize connections rather than divisions among different migratory ethnic communities via a reconfiguration of borders and ethnic identities. This collection of essays has three major goals: first, to foreground shared themes and strategies in the literary productions of women of Africana...

Latin@s' Presence in the Food Industry takes the holistic culinary approach of bringing together multidisciplinary criticism to explore the diverse, and not always readily apparent, ways that Latin@s relate to food and the food industry.The networks Latin@s create, the types of identities they fashion through food, and their relationship to the US food industry are analyzed to understand Latin@s as active creators of food-based communities, as distinctive cultural represen...

Is a native-born tour guide who has sex with tourists—in exchange for dinner or gifts or cash—merely a prostitute or gigolo? What if the tourist continues to send gifts or money to the tour guide after returning home? As this original and provocative book demonstrates, when it comes to sex—and the effects of capitalism and globalization—nothing is as simple as it might seem.Based on ten years of research, Economies of Desire is the first ethnographic study to examine the e...

In the wake of the global financial crisis, new forms of social organization are beginning to take shape. Disparate groups of people are coming together in order to resist corporate globalization and seek a more positive way forward. These movements are not based on hierarchy; rather than looking to those in power to solve their problems, participants are looking to one another. In certain countries in the West, this has been demonstrated by the recent and remarkable rise of the Occupy mov...

Combining anthropological methods and theories with political philosophy, Sian Lazar analyzes everyday practices and experiences of citizenship in a satellite city to the Bolivian capital of La Paz: El Alto, where more than three-quarters of the population identify as indigenous Aymara. For several years, El Alto has been at the heart of resistance to neoliberal market reforms, such as the export of natural resources and the privatization of public water systems. In October 2003, protests ...

As a young militant in the 26th of July Movement, Esteban Morales Domínguez participated in the overthrow of the Batista regime and the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. The revolutionaries, he understood, sought to establish a more just and egalitarian society. But Morales Domínguez, an Afro-Cuban, knew that the complicated question of race could not be ignored, or simply willed away in a post-revolutionary context. Today, he is one of Cuba’s most prominent Afro-Cuban intellectuals and its...

In this compelling study of machismo in Mexico City, Matthew Gutmann overturns many stereotypes of male culture in Mexico and offers a sensitive and often surprising look at how Mexican men see themselves, parent their children, relate to women, and talk about sex. This tenth anniversary edition features a new preface that updates the stories of the book's key protagonists.

In Outlawed, Daniel M. Goldstein reveals how indigenous residents of marginal neighborhoods in Cochabamba, Bolivia, struggle to balance security with rights. Feeling abandoned to the crime and violence that grip their communities, they sometimes turn to vigilante practices, including lynching, to apprehend and punish suspected criminals. Goldstein describes those in this precarious position as "outlawed": not protected from crime by the law but forced to comply with legal measures...

Patients of the State is a sociological account of the extended waiting that poor people seeking state social and administrative services must endure. It is based on ethnographic research in the waiting area of the main welfare office in Buenos Aires, in the line leading into the Argentine registration office where legal aliens apply for identification cards, and among people who live in a polluted shantytown on the capital’s outskirts, while waiting to be allocated better housing...

Brazil is a nation of vast expanses and enormous variation from geography and climate to cultures and languages. Within these boundaries are definable regions in which certain customs, history, and shared views help define an identity and cohesion. In many cases, the pattern of settlement and immigration has influenced the culinary culture of Brazil.This book explores the role that food and cuisine play in the construction of identity on both the regional and national levels in Bra...

Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war culminated in peace accords in 1996, but the postwar transition has been marked by continued violence, including lynchings and the rise of gangs, as well as massive wage-labor exodus to the United States. For the Mam Maya municipality of Todos Santos Cuchumatán, inhabited by a predominantly indigenous peasant population, the aftermath of war and genocide resonates with a long-standing tension between state techniques of governance and ancient community...

The Basque language, Euskara, is one of Europe’s most ancient tongues and a vital part of today’s lively Basque culture. Reclaiming Basque examines the ideology, methods, and discourse of the Basque-language revitalization movement over the course of the past century and the way this effort has unfolded alongside the simultaneous Basque nationalist struggle for autonomy. Jacqueline Urla employs extensive long-term fieldwork, interviews, and close examination of a vast range of doc...