Download or read book Cemeteries of Ambivalent Desire written by Marie Theresa Hernández and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-17 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Growing up as the daughter of a funeral director in Fort Bend County, Texas, Marie Theresa Hernández was a frequent visitor to the San Isidro Cemetery, a burial place for Latino workers at the Imperial Sugar Company, based in nearby Sugar Land. During these years she acquired from her father and mother a sense of what it was like to live as an ethnic minority in Jim Crow Texas. Therefore, returning to the cemetery as an ethnographer offered Hernández a welcome opportunity to begin piecing together a narrative of the lives and struggles of the Mexican American community that formed her heritage. However, Hernández soon realized that San Isidro contained hidden depths. The cemetery was built on the former grounds of an old slave-owning plantation. Her story quickly burgeoned from one of immigrant laborers working the land of the giant sugar company to one of the slave laborers who had worked the sugar plantations decades before, but whose history had been largely wiped out of the narrative of the affluent, white-majority county. Much like an archeologist, Hernández began carefully brushing away layers of time to reveal the fragile, entombed remnants of a complex, unknown past. A professional photographer as well as a scholar, Hernández provides visual images to spur the reader’s imagination and anchor the narrative in historical reality. She mines interviews, newspaper accounts, and other primary sources—interpreted through her own rich sense of place and time—to reconstruct the identity of a community where the Old South, the wealthy New South, and the culture from south of the border all comingle to form an almost iconic symbol for today’s America. In this complex and nuanced, self-reflexive ethnography, Hernández interweaves personal memory and group history, ethnic experience and class . . . even death and life.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of American Folklore and Folklife Studies written by Simon J. Bronner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 856 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of American Folklore and Folklife Studies surveys the materials, approaches, concepts, and applications of the field to provide a sweeping guide to American folklore and folklife, culture, history, and society. Forty-three comprehensive and diverse chapters delve into significant themes and methods of folklore and folklife study; established expressions and activities; spheres and locations of folkloric action; and shared cultures and common identities. Beyond the longstanding arenas of academic focus developed throughout the 350-year legacy of folklore and folklife study, contributors at the forefront of the field also explore exciting new areas of attention that have emerged in the twenty-first century such as the Internet, bodylore, folklore of organizations and networks, sexual orientation, neurodiverse identities, and disability groups. Encompassing a wide range of cultural traditions in the United States, from bits of slang in private conversations to massive public demonstrations, ancient beliefs to contemporary viral memes, and a simple handshake greeting to group festivals, these chapters consider the meanings in oral, social, and material genres of dance, ritual, drama, play, speech, song, and story while drawing attention to tradition-centered communities such as the Amish and Hasidim, occupational groups and their workaday worlds, and children and other age groups. Weaving together such varied and manifest traditions, this handbook pays significant attention to the cultural diversity and changing national boundaries that have always been distinctive in the American experience, reflecting on the relative youth of the nation; global connections of customs brought by immigrants; mobility of residents and their relation to an indigenous, urbanized, and racialized population; and a varied landscape and settlement pattern. Edited by leading folklore scholar Simon J. Bronner, this handbook celebrates the extraordinary richness of the American social and cultural fabric, offering a valuable resource not only for scholars and students of American studies, but also for the global study of tradition, folk arts, and cultural practice.
Download or read book The Injustice Never Leaves You written by Monica Muñoz Martinez and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-03 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Caughey Western History Prize Winner of the Robert G. Athearn Award Winner of the Lawrence W. Levine Award Winner of the TCU Texas Book Award Winner of the NACCS Tejas Foco Nonfiction Book Award Winner of the María Elena Martínez Prize Frederick Jackson Turner Award Finalist “A page-turner...Haunting...Bravely and convincingly urges us to think differently about Texas’s past.” —Texas Monthly Between 1910 and 1920, self-appointed protectors of the Texas–Mexico border—including members of the famed Texas Rangers—murdered hundreds of ethnic Mexicans living in Texas, many of whom were American citizens. Operating in remote rural areas, officers and vigilantes knew they could hang, shoot, burn, and beat victims to death without scrutiny. A culture of impunity prevailed. The abuses were so pervasive that in 1919 the Texas legislature investigated the charges and uncovered a clear pattern of state crime. Records of the proceedings were soon filed away as the Ranger myth flourished. A groundbreaking work of historical reconstruction, The Injustice Never Leaves You has upended Texas’s sense of its own history. A timely reminder of the dark side of American justice, it is a riveting story of race, power, and prejudice on the border. “It’s an apt moment for this book’s hard lessons...to go mainstream.” —Texas Observer “A reminder that government brutality on the border is nothing new.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
Download or read book Colored Men and Hombres Aqu written by Michael A. Olivas and published by Arte Publico Press. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of ten essays commemorates the 50th anniversary of an important but almost forgotten U.S. Supreme court case, Hernandez v. Texas, 347 US 475 (1954), the major case involving Mexican Americans and jury selection, published just before Brown v. Board of Education in the 1954 Supreme Court reporter. This landmark case, the first to be tried by Mexican American lawyers before the U.S. Supreme Court, held that Mexican Americans were a discrete group for purposes of applying Equal Protection. Although the case was about discriminatory state jury selection and trial practices, it has been cited for many other civil rights precedents in the intervening 50 years. Even so, it has not been given the prominence it deserves, in part because it lives in the shadow of the more compelling Brown v. Board case. There had been earlier efforts to diversify juries, reaching back at least to the trial of Gregorio Cortez in 1901 and continuing with efforts by the legendary Oscar Zeta Acosta in Los Angeles in the 1960s. Even as recently as 2005 there has been clear evidence that Latino participation in the Texas jury system is still substantially unrepresentative of the growing population. But in a brief and shining moment in 1954, Mexican-American lawyers prevailed in a system that accorded their community no legal status and no respect. Through sheer tenacity, brilliance, and some luck, they showed that it is possible to tilt against windmills and slay the dragon. Edited and with an introduction by University of Houston law scholar Michael A. Olivas, Colored Men and Hombres Aqui is the first full-length book on this case. This volume contains the papers presented at the Hernandez at 50conference which took place in 2004 at the University of Houston Law Center and also contains source materials, trial briefs, and a chronology of the case.
Download or read book The Virgin of Guadalupe and the Conversos written by Marie-Theresa Hernández and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hidden lives, hidden history, and hidden manuscripts. In The Virgin of Guadalupe and the Conversos, Marie-Theresa Hernández unmasks the secret lives of conversos and judaizantes and their likely influence on the Catholic Church in the New World. The terms converso and judaizante are often used for descendants of Spanish Jews (the Sephardi, or Sefarditas as they are sometimes called), who converted under duress to Christianity in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There are few, if any, archival documents that prove the existence of judaizantes after the Spanish expulsion of the Jews in 1492 and the Portuguese expulsion in 1497, as it is unlikely that a secret Jew in sixteenth-century Spain would have documented his allegiance to the Law of Moses, thereby providing evidence for the Inquisition. On a Da Vinci Code – style quest, Hernández persisted in hunting for a trove of forgotten manuscripts at the New York Public Library. These documents, once unearthed, describe the Jewish/Christian religious beliefs of an early nineteenth-century Catholic priest in Mexico City, focusing on the relationship between the Virgin of Guadalupe and Judaism. With this discovery in hand, the author traces the cult of Guadalupe backwards to its fourteenth-century Spanish origins. The trail from that point forward can then be followed to its interface with early modern conversos and their descendants at the highest levels of the Church and the monarchy in Spain and Colonial Mexico. She describes key players who were somehow immune to the dangers of the Inquisition and who were allowed the freedom to display, albeit in a camouflaged manner, vestiges of their family's Jewish identity. By exploring the narratives produced by these individuals, Hernández reveals the existence of those conversos and judaizantes who did not return to the “covenantal bond of rabbinic law,” who did not publicly identify themselves as Jews, and who continued to exhibit in their influential writings a covert allegiance and longing for a Jewish past. This is a spellbinding and controversial story that offers a fresh perspective on the origins and history of conversos.
Download or read book Comprehensive Immigration Reform written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on the Judiciary. Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Chicana o Struggles for Education written by Guadalupe San Miguel and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-29 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of the history of Mexican American educational reform efforts has focused on campaigns to eliminate discrimination in public schools. However, as historian Guadalupe San Miguel demonstrates in Chicana/o Struggles for Education: Activisim in the Community, the story is much broader and more varied than that. While activists certainly challenged discrimination, they also worked for specific public school reforms and sought private schooling opportunities, utilizing new patterns of contestation and advocacy. In documenting and reviewing these additional strategies, San Miguel’s nuanced overview and analysis offers enhanced insight into the quest for equal educational opportunity to new generations of students. San Miguel addresses questions such as what factors led to change in the 1960s and in later years; who the individuals and organizations were that led the movements in this period and what motivated them to get involved; and what strategies were pursued, how they were chosen, and how successful they were. He argues that while Chicana/o activists continued to challenge school segregation in the 1960s as earlier generations had, they broadened their efforts to address new concerns such as school funding, testing, English-only curricula, the exclusion of undocumented immigrants, and school closings. They also advocated cultural pride and memory, inclusion of the Mexican American community in school governance, and opportunities to seek educational excellence in private religious, nationalist, and secular schools. The profusion of strategies has not erased patterns of de facto segregation and unequal academic achievement, San Miguel concludes, but it has played a key role in expanding educational opportunities. The actions he describes have expanded, extended, and diversified the historic struggle for Mexican American education.
Download or read book Beyond the Latino World War II Hero written by Maggie Rivas-Rodríguez and published by Univ of TX + ORM. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maggie Rivas-Rodríguez ’s edited volume Mexican Americans & World War II brought pivotal stories from the shadows, contributing to the growing acknowledgment of Mexican American patriotism as a meaningful force within the Greatest Generation. In this latest anthology, Rivas-Rodríguez and historian Emilio Zamora team up with scholars from various disciplines to add new insights. Beyond the Latino World War II Hero focuses on home-front issues and government relations, delving into new arenas of research and incorporating stirring oral histories. These recollections highlight realities such as post-traumatic stress disorder and its effects on veterans’ families, as well as Mexican American women of this era, whose fighting spirit inspired their daughters to participate in Chicana/o activism of the 1960s and 1970s. Other topics include the importance of radio as a powerful medium during the war and postwar periods, the participation of Mexican nationals in World War II, and intergovernmental negotiations involving Mexico and Puerto Rico. Addressing the complexity of the Latino war experience, such as the tandem between the frontline and the disruption of the agricultural migrant stream on the home front, the authors and contributors unite diverse perspectives to harness the rich resources of an invaluable oral history.
Download or read book Mexican American Baseball in Houston and Southeast Texas written by Richard A. Santillán, Joseph Thompson, Mikaela Selley, William Lange, Gregory Garrett and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2017 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mexican American Baseball in Houston and Southeast Texas pays tribute to the baseball and softball players and teams from Houston, Sugar Land, Texas City, Richmond, and other surrounding communities in the region. Since the early 1900s, this game has had an important role in the lives of area Mexican Americans. In the Houston barrios, when entrenched discriminatory practices obstructed city unity, the diamond brought people together. In the Sugar Land region, Mexican Americans, African Americans, and Anglos worked and played together, blurring racial lines. Baseball and softball built community pride and connected generations of Mexican American families. The wonderful stories and breathtaking images in this book help resurrect the rich and little-known history of Mexican American baseball and softball in this key part of Texas.
Download or read book Design Displacement Migration written by Sarah A. Lichtman and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-11-30 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Design, Displacement, Migration: Spatial and Material Histories gathers a collection of scholarly and creative voices—spanning design, art, and architectural history; design studies; curation; poetry; activism; and social sciences––to interrogate the intersections of design and displacement. The contributors foreground objects, spaces, visual, and material practices and consider design’s role in the empire, the state, and various colonizing regimes in controlling the mass movement of people, things, and ideas across borders, as well as in social acts that resist forced mobility and immobility, or enact new possibilities. By consciously surfacing echoes, rhymes, and dissonances among varied histories, this volume highlights local specificity while also accounting for the vectors of displacement and design across borders and histories. Design, Displacement, Migration: Spatial and Material Histories shows displacement to be a lens for understanding space and materiality and vice versa, particularly within the context of modernity and colonialism. This book will be of interest to scholars working in design history, design studies, architectural history, art history, urban studies, and migration studies.
Download or read book Adventures of a Postmodern Historian written by Robert A. Rosenstone and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-09-22 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Rosenstone was among the first 'postmodern' historians, and remains one of the most renowned. In this honest, revealing and often funny memoir, he shows us how he got there and why. Adventures of a Postmodern Historian chronicles Rosenstone's research journeys over half a century. Beginning in the 1960s, his offbeat trajectory took him on adventures through the police states of Franco Spain and the Soviet Union, to the Shinto shrines and Zen temples of Japan and ultimately to Hollywood. Alongside his own memoirs, Rosenstone reflects upon developments and changes within the realm of professional history, which in turn reflect the social, cultural, and intellectual shifts of the late 20th century. A pioneer of experimental and creative history, he suggests how the experience of the historian can inflect the written history, and provides a defence of innovation in historical writing that is both intellectually rigorous and entertaining. In doing so he offers a window into the state of history today – and points to exciting new ways of writing the past. This is a book about the craft of history, about both doing research and writing it. It should be required reading for all historians.
Download or read book War Along the Border written by Arnoldo De Len̤ and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars contributing to this volume consider topics ranging from the effects of the Mexican Revolution on Tejano and African American communities to its impact on Texas' economy and agriculture. Other essays consider the ways that Mexican Americans north of the border affected the course of the revolution itself. .
Download or read book Symposium Latinos and Latinas at the Epicenter of Contemporary Legal Discourses written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Breaking New Ground written by W. Michael Mudrovic and published by Lehigh University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Each of these works is meticulously structured around a two-poem section that gives each its unique configuration and character. Yet, at the same time, each poem maintains its individual independence and singular integrity."--BOOK JACKET. "In Breaking New Ground, W. Michael Mudrovic presents a comprehensive reading and detailed analysis of Rodriguez's work to date, including Casi una leyenda."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Displaying Death and Animating Life written by Jane C. Desmond and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-08-18 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The number of ways in which humans interact with animals is almost incalculable. From beloved household pets to the steak on our dinner tables, the fur in our closets to the Babar books on our shelves, taxidermy exhibits to local zoos, humans have complex, deep, and dependent relationships with the animals in our ecosystems. In Displaying Death and Animating Life, Jane C. Desmond puts those human-animal relationships under a multidisciplinary lens, focusing on the less obvious, and revealing the individualities and subjectivities of the real animals in our everyday lives. Desmond, a pioneer in the field of animal studies, builds the book on a number of case studies. She conducts research on-site at major museums, taxidermy conventions, pet cemeteries, and even at a professional conference for writers of obituaries. She goes behind the scenes at zoos, wildlife clinics, and meetings of pet cemetery professionals. We journey with her as she meets Kanzi, the bonobo artist, and a host of other animal-artists—all of whom are preparing their artwork for auction. Throughout, Desmond moves from a consideration of the visual display of unindividuated animals, to mourning for known animals, and finally to the marketing of artwork by individual animals. The first book in the new Animal Lives series, Displaying Death and Animating Life is a landmark study, bridging disciplines and reaching across divisions from the humanities and social sciences to chart new territories of investigation.
Download or read book Voracious Children written by Carolyn Daniel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-02-22 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Voracious Children explores food and the way it is used to seduce, to pleasure, and coerce not only the characters within children's literature but also its readers. There are a number of gripping questions concerning the quantity and quality of the food featured in children's fiction that immediately arise: why are feasting fantasies so prevalent, especially in the British classics? What exactly is their appeal to historical and contemporary readers? What do literary food events do to readers? Is food the sex of children's literature? The subject of children eating is compelling but, why is it that stories about children being eaten are not only horrifying but also so incredibly alluring? This book reveals that food in fiction does far, far more that just create verisimilitude or merely address greedy readers' desires. The author argues that the food trope in children's literature actually teaches children how to be human through the imperative to eat good food in a proper controlled manner. Examining timely topics such as childhood obesity and anorexia, the author demonstrates how children's literature routinely attempts to regulate childhood eating practices and only award subjectivity and agency to those characters who demonstrate normal appetites. Examining a wide range of children's literature classics from Little Red Riding Hood to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe , this book is an outstanding and unique enquiry into the function of food in children's literature, and it will make a significant contribution to the fields of both children's literature and the growing interdisciplinary domain of food, culture and society.
Download or read book Unsettled Heritage written by Yechiel Weizman and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Unsettled Heritage, Yechiel Weizman explores what happened to the thousands of abandoned Jewish cemeteries and places of worship that remained in Poland after the Holocaust, asking how postwar society in small, provincial towns perceived, experienced, and interacted with the physical traces of former Jewish neighbors. After the war, with few if any Jews remaining, numerous deserted graveyards and dilapidated synagogues became mute witnesses to the Jewish tragedy, leaving Poles with the complicated task of contending with these ruins and deciding on their future upkeep. Combining archival research into hitherto unexamined sources, anthropological field work, and cultural and linguistic analysis, Weizman uncovers the concrete and symbolic fate of sacral Jewish sites in Poland's provincial towns, from the end of the Second World War until the fall of the communist regime. His book weaves a complex tale whose main protagonists are the municipal officials, local activists, and ordinary Polish citizens who lived alongside the material reminders of their murdered fellow nationals. Unsettled Heritage shows the extent to which debating the status and future of the material Jewish remains was never a neutral undertaking for Poles—nor was interacting with their disturbing and haunting presence. Indeed, it became one of the most urgent municipal concerns of the communist era, and the main vehicle through which Polish society was confronted with the memory of the Jews and their annihilation.
