This book deals with a broad range of social issues facing Mexican-origin people in the United States. The studies presented in this volume are brought together by two main themes: (1) social inequalities-cultural, educational, and economic-endured by the Chicano/Mexicano community in the United States and (2) the community's efforts to eradicate the source of those inequalities.The second edition of Chicanas and Chicanos in Contemporary Society takes into consideration th...

Indigenous Struggles for Autonomy: The Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua offers a broad and comprehensive analysis of Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast and the process of autonomy that was initiated in 1987 as part of a wider conflict resolution process during the years of the Sandinista revolution and has continued through to the present day. Over its 30 year period of development, the autonomy process on Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast can be seen as a crucible for the autonomous struggles of minority ...

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...

Living in the northwest of Mexico, the Cucapá people have relied on fishing as a means of subsistence for generations, but in the last several decades, that practice has been curtailed by water scarcity and government restrictions. The Colorado River once met the Gulf of California near the village where Shaylih Muehlmann conducted ethnographic research, but now, as a result of a treaty, 90 percent of the water from the Colorado is diverted before it reaches Mexico. The remaining water is ...

In Dilemmas of Difference Sarah A. Radcliffe explores the relationship of rural indigenous women in Ecuador to the development policies and actors that are ostensibly there to help ameliorate social and economic inequality. Radcliffe finds that development policies’s inability to recognize and reckon with the legacies of colonialism reinforces long-standing social hierarchies, thereby reproducing the very poverty and disempowerment they are there to solve. This ineffectiveness res...

Black behind the Ears is an innovative historical and ethnographic examination of Dominican identity formation in the Dominican Republic and the United States. For much of the Dominican Republic’s history, the national body has been defined as “not black,” even as black ancestry has been grudgingly acknowledged. Rejecting simplistic explanations, Ginetta E. B. Candelario suggests that it is not a desire for whiteness that guides Dominican identity discourses and displays. Instead,...

Mirandé offers a detailed examination of Chicano social history and culture that includes studies of: Chicano labor and the economy; the Mexican immigrant and the U.S.-Mexico border conflict; the evolution of Chicano criminality; the American educational system and its impact on Chicano culture; the tensions between the institutional Church and Chicanos; and the myths and misconceptions of "machismo."

Winner of the Latin American Studies Association Brazil Section Book Awards. Utilizing an ethnographic study of a public university and its users, Cicalo analyzes the practical and symbolic potential that affirmative action has to redress historically-produced and territorialized inequalities in the urban space.

In this book, Martin Carnoy explores the surprising success of the Cuban educational system, where the average elementary school student learns much more than her Latin American peers. In developing the case for Cuba's supportive social context and centralized management of education, Carnoy asks important questions about educational systems in general. How responsible should government be for creating environments that encourage academic achievement? How much autonomy should teachers and ...

Why do very different countries often emulate the same policy model? Two years after Ronald Reagan's income-tax simplification of 1986, Brazil adopted a similar reform even though it threatened to exacerbate income disparity and jeopardize state revenues. And Chile's pension privatization of the early 1980s has spread throughout Latin America and beyond even though many poor countries that have privatized their social security systems, including Bolivia and El Salvador, lack some of the pr...

This indispensable text reader provides a broad-ranging and thoughtfully organized feminist introduction to the ongoing controversies of development in Latin America and the Caribbean. Designed for use in a variety of college courses, the volume collects an influential group of essays first published in Latin American Perspectives-a theoretical and scholarly journal focused on the political economy of capitalism, imperialism, and socialism in the Americas. The reader is organized into them...

In her research with transnational Mexicans, Deborah A. Boehm has often asked individuals: if there were no barriers to your movement between Mexico and the United States, where would you choose to live? Almost always, they desire the freedom to “come and go.” Yet the barriers preventing such movement are many. Because of the United States’ rigid immigration policies, Mexican immigrants often find themselves living long distances from family members and unable to easily...