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Carolyn Tuttle led a group that interviewed 620 women maquila workers in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. The responses from this representative sample refute many of the hopeful predictions made by scholars before NAFTA and reveal instead that little has improved for maquila workers. The women's stories make it plain that free trade has created more low-paying jobs in sweatshops where workers are exploited. Families of maquila workers live in one- or two-room houses with no running water, no drainage, and no heat. The multinational companies who operate the maquilas consistently break Mexican labor laws by requiring women to work more than nine hours a day, six days a week, without medical benefits...
"In Latin America the state is the prime regulator, coordinator, and pace-setter of the entire national system, the apex of the pyramid from which patronage, wealth, power, and programs flow. The state bears responsibility for the realization of civic needs, providing goods and services to each citizen. Doing so requires the exercise and maintenance of social and political control. It is John Martz's contention that clientelism underlines the fundamental character of Latin American social and political life. As the modernizing bureaucratic state has developed in Latin America, there has been a concurrent shifting away from clientelistic relationships. Yet in one form or another, political cl...
The Lost Cinema of Mexico is the first volume to challenge the dismissal of Mexican filmmaking during the 1960s through 1980s, an era long considered a low-budget departure from the artistic quality and international acclaim of the nation’s earlier Golden Age. This pivotal collection examines the critical implications of discovering, uncovering, and recovering forgotten or ignored films. This largely unexamined era of film reveals shifts in Mexican culture, economics, and societal norms as state-sponsored revolutionary nationalism faltered. During this time, movies were widely embraced by the public as a way to make sense of the rapidly changing realities and values connected to Mexico’s...
This history of Colombia's illegal drug trade--and of the extreme violence it created--describes how in the late 1960s narcotics traffickers from the United States convinced Colombians who had no previous involvement in the drug trade to grow marijuana for export to America. By the early '70s, foreign (mostly American) traffickers began requesting cocaine. This book focuses on the decades of crime and violence the illegal drug trade brought to Colombia and how this social upset was ended in the early 2000s. Six chapters detail the Medellin and Cali cartels' war against the Colombian government, the revolutionary guerrillas' war against the government, the war that paramilitary groups conducted against the guerrillas, and the way in which the government finally put a stop to the cartel-financed bloodshed. In conclusion, the author assesses Colombia's progress and prospects since the end of the violence claimed the lives of some 300,000 between 1975 and 2008.
This book focuses on Gabriel Garcia Marquez's relations with the world of cinema. Far from being an occasional occupation, García Márquez's film work forms an intrinsic part of his overall aesthetic and literary poetics. The book's primary aim is to present a detailed study of Garcia Márquez's wide-ranging filmography, which has never received a comprehensive, systematic analysis. Rocco argues that it should be recognised as an integral part of the author's narrative output, and brought into the mainstream of studies concerning his literary activity. The first part of the book reconstructs the trajectory of Garcia Marquez's career in cinema and his connections with the world of film. The second part looks at all the screenplays written by García Márquez on which actual films have been based. These are examined chronologically, but also analysed according to thematic and aesthetic concerns and placed in relation to the novels and short stories with which they are 'twinned' in terms of the film product. Book jacket.
Annotation VOLUME I: Africa VOLUME II: Europe, Central Asia, and Other Regions (volumes sold separately) "This is a superb manuscript, and one that will become a standard reference in the field for students of conflict and civil war." Robert Bates, Eaton Professor of the Science of Government, Harvard University The two volumes of Understanding Civil War build upon the World Bank's prior research on conflict and violence, particularly on the work of Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, whose model of civil war onset has sparked much discussion on the relationship between conflict and development in what came to be known as the "greed" versus "grievance" debate. The authors systematically apply th...
Winner of the Montserrat Ordóñez Prize 2018 This book provides an original and exciting analysis of Colombian women’s writing and its relationship to feminist history from the 1970s to the present. In a period in which questions surrounding women and gender are often sidelined in the academic arena, it argues that feminism has been an important and intrinsic part of contemporary Colombian history. Focusing on understudied literary and non-literary texts written by Colombian women, it traces the particularities of Colombian feminism, showing how it has been closely entwined with left-wing politics and the country’s history of violence. This book therefore rethinks the place of feminism in Latin American history and its relationship to feminisms elsewhere, challenging many of the predominant critical paradigms used to understand Latin American literature and culture.
A multi-scale ethnography of government pedagogy in Colombia and its impact on peace. Colombia’s 2016 peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas sought to end fifty years of war and won President Juan Manuel Santos the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet Colombian society rejected it in a polarizing referendum, amid an emotive disinformation campaign. Gwen Burnyeat joined the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace, the government institution responsible for peace negotiations, to observe and participate in an innovative “peace pedagogy” strategy to explain the agreement to Colombian society. Burnyeat’s multi-scale ethnography reveals the challenges government officials experienced communicating with skeptical audiences and translating the peace process for public opinion. She argues that the fatal flaw in the peace process lay in government-society relations, enmeshed in culturally liberal logics and shaped by the politics of international donors. The Face of Peace offers the Colombian case as a mirror to the global crisis of liberalism, shattering the fantasy of rationality that haunts liberal responses to “post-truth” politics.
Through the lens of global capitalism theory, William Avilés examines democratization and civil-military relations in Colombia to explain how social and international forces led to the ostensibly contradictory outcome of democratic and economic reform coinciding with political repression. Focusing on the administrations in power from 1990 to the present, Avilés argues that the reduction in the institutional powers of the military within the state reflected changes in the structure of the global economy, the emergence of globalizing technocrats and politicians, and shifts in U.S. foreign policy strategies toward "democracy promotion." These same factors explain Colombia's establishment of a low-intensity democracy—a structure of elite rule in which the strategies of coercion (state and para-state repression) and consensus (competitive elections, civilian control over the military) maintain control and legitimacy. In the age of capitalist globalization, a low-intensity democracy is most concomitant with neoliberalism, establishing the political and economic environment most suitable to the investments of transnational corporations.
Colombia has long suffered under such violence that it is now one of the most convulsed societies in the world. Far from being the result of solely the drug trade, the country's contemporary crisis stems from La Violencia (The Violence), a period of terror, political banditry and peasant unrest that plagued Colombia between the 1940s and the 1960s. The 14 essays in this collection examine La Violencia and its effects on current conditions, placing today's violence in its historical context.