You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Chicana/o history has reached an intriguing juncture. While academic and intellectual studies are embracing new, highly nuanced perspectives on race, class, gender, education, identity, and community, the field itself continues to be viewed as a battleground, subject to attacks from outside academia by those who claim that the discipline promotes racial hatred and anti-Americanism. Against a backdrop of deportations and voter suppression targeting Latinos, A Promising Problem presents the optimistic voices of scholars who call for sophisticated solutions while embracing transnationalism and the reality of multiple, overlapping identities. Showcasing a variety of new directions, this antholog...
A historical analysis of the conflicting ideas about race and national belonging held by Mexicans and Euro-Americans in southern New Mexico during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth.
The history of heterosexuality in North America across four centuries Heterosexuality is usually regarded as something inherently “natural”—but what is heterosexuality, and how has it taken shape across the centuries? By challenging ahistorical approaches to the heterosexual subject, Heterosexual Histories constructs a new framework for the history of heterosexuality, examining unexplored assumptions and insisting that not only sex but race, class, gender, age, and geography matter to its past. Each of the fourteen essays in this volume examines the history of heterosexuality from a different angle, seeking to study this topic in a way that recognizes plurality, divergence, and inequit...
Argues for the political potential of drag and trans performance in Puerto Rico and its diaspora
The transborder modernization of Mexico and the American Southwest during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transformed the lives of ethnic Mexicans across the political divide. While industrialization, urbanization, technology, privatization, and wealth concentration benefitted some, many more experienced dislocation, exploitative work relations, and discrimination based on race, gender, and class. The Mexican Revolution brought these issues to the fore within Mexican society, igniting a diaspora to el norte. Within the United States, similar economic and social power dynamics plagued Tejanos and awaited the war refugees. Political activism spearheaded by individuals and org...
In the financial chaos of the last few decades, increasing wealth inequality has shaken people's expectations about middle-class stability. At the same time, demographers have predicted the "browning" of the nation's middle class—once considered a de facto "white" category—over the next twenty years as the country becomes increasingly racially diverse. In this book, Joseph O. Jewell takes us back to the turn of the twentieth century to show how evidence of middle-class mobility among Black, Mexican American, and Chinese men generated both new anxieties and varieties of backlash among white populations. Blending cultural history and historical sociology, Jewell chronicles the continually ...
"Maria Lane's Fluid Geographies traces New Mexico's transition in the pre-statehood era from community-based water management to an expert-led structure controlled by engineers and bureaucrats. To understand this shift Lane carefully examines the chief conflict of the period, which pitted Indigenous and Nuevomexicano communities, with their long-established and locally organized systems of irrigation management, against Anglo-American settlers, with their Progressive-era preference for scientific expertise and centralized bureaucratic management of water. The newcomers succeeded in imposing their will, though disputes over water rights wended their way through the district courts of New Mexi...
Five million workers are employed in a variety of settings along the U.S.–Mexico border, yet labor market outcomes on each side often differ. U.S. workers tend to have low earnings and high unemployment compared with the rest of the country, while workers on the Mexican side of the border are often more prosperous than those in the interior. This book sheds new light on these socioeconomic differentials, along with other labor market issues affecting both sides of the border. The contributors take up issues that dominate the current discourse— migration, trade, gender, education, earnings, and employment. They analyze labor conditions and their relationship to immigration, and also provi...
"Enter the religious landscape of California's industrial agriculture in the 1940s. Anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt's early 1940s reconnaissance tour of the social scene in the little town of Wasco offers us a composite picture of religious institutions in a typical industrial-ag town in the state. Anthropologists and sociologists of the time pointed to the proliferation of Pentecostal churches as evidence of industrial farming's undesirable social outcomes. In particular, they noted the enthusiastic and emotional expressions of Pentecostal services and how the recently dispossessed Dust Bowl or "Okie" migrants flocked into these churches. By the 1940s, Dorothea Lange's photograph of the Okie "Migrant Mother" capturing the pathos of white plight had surfaced and caught the national spotlight. California, many noted, had a migration problem, as many "undesirables" flooded into the state. Women such as the one captured in Lange's photograph "Revival Mother" standing and worshipping with eyes closed and raised hands in a makeshift garage church typified the poverty of Pentecostals described by the university researchers"--
The Drug Wars in America, 1940–1973 argues that the US government has clung to its militant drug war, despite its obvious failures, because effective control of illicit traffic and consumption were never the critical factors motivating its adoption in the first place. Instead, Kathleen J. Frydl shows that the shift from regulating illicit drugs through taxes and tariffs to criminalizing the drug trade developed from, and was marked by, other dilemmas of governance in an age of vastly expanding state power. Most believe the 'drug war' was inaugurated by President Richard Nixon's declaration of a war on drugs in 1971, but in fact his announcement heralded changes that had taken place in the two decades prior. Frydl examines this critical interval of time between regulation and prohibition, demonstrating that the war on drugs advanced certain state agendas, such as policing inner cities or exercising power abroad.