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The fear of violent crime dominates Guatemala City. In the midst of unprecedented levels of postwar violence, Guatemalans struggle to fathom the myriad forces that have made life in this city so deeply insecure. Born out of histories of state terror, migration, and US deportation, maras (transnational gangs) have become the face of this new era of violence. They are brutal organizations engaged in extortion, contract killings, and the drug trade, and yet they have also become essential to the emergence of a certain kind of social order. Drawing on years of fieldwork inside prisons, police precincts, and gang-dominated neighborhoods, Anthony W. Fontes demonstrates how gang violence has become indissoluble from contemporary social imaginaries and how these gangs provide cover for a host of other criminal actors. Ethnographically rich and unflinchingly critical, Mortal Doubt illuminates the maras’ role in making and mooring collective terror in Guatemala City while tracing the ties that bind this violence to those residing in far safer environs.
"For years the Catholic Church, Catholic Charities, and the Haitian Multi-Service Center in Boston have helped Haitian refugees and immigrants attain economic independence, health, security, and citizenship in the United States. In Life at the Center,Erica Caple James traces this aid work and discovers at its heart a fundamental paradox, arising from what she calls "corporate Catholicism": social assistance produces and reproduces structural inequalities between providers and recipients, which can deepen aid recipients' dependence and lead to resistance to organized benevolence. James documents how institutional financial deficits harmed clients and providers, yet also how modes of philanthropy that previously caused harm can be redeployed to repair damage and rebuild "charitable brands." The culmination of over a decade of advocacy and research on behalf of the Haitians of Boston, this groundbreaking work exposes how Catholic corporations strengthened-but also eroded-Haitians' civic power"
"Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in the borderlands of northern Bangladesh and eastern India, A Thousand Tiny Cuts chronicles the slow transformation of a connected region into national borderlands and shows the foundational place of gender and sexuality in the meaning and management of threat in relation to mobility. It recasts a singular focus on border fences and border crossings to show, instead, that bordering is an expansive and accumulative reordering of relations of value. Devaluations-of agrarian land and crops, borderland youth undesirable as brides and grooms in their respective national hinterlands, disconnection of regional infrastructures, and social and physical geographies disordered by surveillance-proliferate as the costs of militarization across this ostensibly "friendly" border. Through a textured ethnography of the gendered political economy of mobility across a postcolonial borderlands in South Asia, this ambitious book challenges anthropological understanding of the violence of bordering, migration and citizenship, and transnational inequalities that are based on Euro-American borders and security regimes"--
The first book to expose how the Catholic Church systematically covers up scandal by moving abusers across borders. Clerical sexual abuse is as global as the Roman Catholic Church, with bishops moving credibly accused priests not simply between parishes but also across international borders. Unforgivable follows the movement of one such perpetrator from the Great Plains of central Minnesota to the Indigenous highlands of Guatemala, where this priest had access to children and even raised one as his own. Although Father David Roney is at the center of this particular story, author Kevin Lewis O'Neill offers ample evidence that offshoring priests is a common practice. These maneuvers and the callous indifference of the Church--even once caught red-handed--reveal the limits of justice. They also lay bare the disturbing fact that the scale of clerical sexual abuse is far bigger than anyone has yet considered. Rigorously researched and viscerally important, this book raises urgent questions about holding the Catholic Church accountable.
"Guns are relational: they can be tools of violence or of protection. Bullets injure individuals and communities, creating collective damage. In the United States, gun violence has reached alarming levels, but the effects of firearms sold in this country don't stop at its borders. American guns have torn the social fabric of Mexican society in ways that have entangled the lives of citizens on both sides of the border-Mexicans and Americans-in a vicious circle of violence. While migrants and refugees are fleeing north, seeking safety in the United States, Exit Wounds follows the guns going south, from dealers in Arizona and Texas to crime scenes in Mexico. Through stories of people who live and work with guns on both sides of the border and either side of the law-a businessman who smuggles guns, a girl who becomes a trained assassin, two federal agents who try to stop gun traffickers, a journalist reporting on organized crime-the book grapples with US complicity in violence south of the border and examines the impact of American guns on both countries"--
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.
A Black feminist take on exploitation and care in America's favorite game. Big-time college football promises prestige, drama, media attention, and money. Yet most athletes in this unpaid, amateur system encounter a different reality, facing dangerous injuries, few pro-career opportunities, a free but devalued college education, and future financial instability. In one of the first ethnographies about Black college football players, anthropologist Tracie Canada reveals the ways young athletes strategically resist the exploitative systems that structure their everyday lives. Tackling the Everyday shows how college football particularly harms the young Black men who are overrepresented on gridirons across the country. Although coaches and universities constantly invoke the misleading "football family" narrative, this book describes how a brotherhood among Black players operates alongside their caring mothers, who support them on and off the field. With a Black feminist approach—one that highlights often-overlooked voices—Canada exposes how race, gender, kinship, and care shape the lives of the young athletes who shoulder America's favorite game.
When A Beauty That Hurts first appeared in 1995, Guatemala was one of the world’s most flagrant violators of human rights. An accord brokered by the United Nations brought a measure of peace after three decades of armed conflict, but the country’s troubles are far from over. George Lovell revisits Guatemala to grapple once again with the terror inflicted on its Maya peoples by a military-dominated state.
This comprehensive and practical guide covers the elements, style, and use of annotated bibliographies in the research and writing process for any discipline; key disciplinary conventions; and tips for working with digital sources. Written jointly by a library director and a writing center director, this book is packed with examples of individual bibliography entries and full bibliography formats for a wide range of academic needs. Online resources include sample bibliographies, relevant web links, printable versions of checklists and figures, and further resources for instructors and researchers. Writing the Annotated Bibliography is an essential resource for first-year and advanced composition classes, courses in writing across the disciplines, graduate programs, library science instruction programs, and academic libraries at the secondary level and beyond. It is suitable for both undergraduate and graduate students and for researchers at all levels.
"The Oxford Handbook of Gangs and Society is the premier reference book on gangs for practitioners, policymakers, students, and scholars. This carefully curated volume contains 43 chapters written by the leading experts in the field, who advance a central theme of "looking back, moving forward" by providing state-of-the-art reviews of the literature they created, shaped, and (re)defined. This international, interdisciplinary collective of authors provides readers with a rare tour of the field in its entirety, expertly navigating thorny debates and the at-times contentious history of gang research, while simultaneously synthesizing flourishing areas of study that advance the field into the 21...