Download or read book Mexican Americans and the Environment written by Devon G. Peña and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2022-09-13 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mexican Americans have traditionally had a strong land ethic, believing that humans must respect la tierra because it is the source of la vida. As modern market forces exploit the earth, communities struggle to control their own ecological futures, and several studies have recorded that Mexican Americans are more impacted by environmental injustices than are other national-origin groups. In our countryside, agricultural workers are poisoned by pesticides, while farmers have lost ancestral lands to expropriation. And in our polluted inner cities, toxic wastes sicken children in their very playgrounds and homes. This book addresses the struggle for environmental justice, grassroots democracy, and a sustainable society from a variety of Mexican American perspectives. It draws on the ideas and experiences of people from all walks of life—activists, farmworkers, union organizers, land managers, educators, and many others—who provide a clear overview of the most critical ecological issues facing Mexican-origin people today. The text is organized to first provide a general introduction to ecology, from both scientific and political perspectives. It then presents an environmental history for Mexican-origin people on both sides of the border, showing that the ecologically sustainable Norteño land use practices were eroded by the conquest of El Norte by the United States. It finally offers a critique of the principal schools of American environmentalism and introduces the organizations and struggles of Mexican Americans in contemporary ecological politics. Devon Peña contrasts tenets of radical environmentalism with the ecological beliefs and grassroots struggles of Mexican-origin people, then shows how contemporary environmental justice struggles in Mexican American communities have challenged dominant concepts of environmentalism. Mexican Americans and the Environment is a didactically sound text that introduces students to the conceptual vocabularies of ecology, culture, history, and politics as it tells how competing ideas about nature have helped shape land use and environmental policies. By demonstrating that any consideration of environmental ethics is incomplete without taking into account the experiences of Mexican Americans, it clearly shows students that ecology is more than nature study but embraces social issues of critical importance to their own lives.

Download or read book Two Nations Indivisible written by Shannon K. O'Neil and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-18 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Five freshly decapitated human heads are thrown onto a crowded dance floor in western Mexico. A Mexican drug cartel dismembers the body of a rival and then stitches his face onto a soccer ball. These are the sorts of grisly tales that dominate the media, infiltrate movies and TV shows, and ultimately shape Americans' perception of Mexico as a dangerous and scary place, overrun by brutal drug lords. Without a doubt, the drug war is real. In the last six years, over 60,000 people have been murdered in narco-related crimes. But, there is far more to Mexico's story than this gruesome narrative would suggest. While thugs have been grabbing the headlines, Mexico has undergone an unprecedented and under-publicized political, economic, and social transformation. In her groundbreaking book, Two Nations Indivisible, Shannon K. O'Neil argues that the United States is making a grave mistake by focusing on the politics of antagonism toward Mexico. Rather, we should wake up to the revolution of prosperity now unfolding there. The news that isn't being reported is that, over the last decade, Mexico has become a real democracy, providing its citizens a greater voice and opportunities to succeed on their own side of the border. Armed with higher levels of education, upwardly-mobile men and women have been working their way out of poverty, building the largest, most stable middle class in Mexico's history. This is the Mexico Americans need to get to know. Now more than ever, the two countries are indivisible. It is past time for the U.S. to forge a new relationship with its southern neighbor. Because in no uncertain terms, our future depends on it.

Download or read book Immigration Law and the U S Mexico Border written by Kevin R. Johnson and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans from radically different political persuasions agree on the need to “fix” the “broken” US immigration laws to address serious deficiencies and improve border enforcement. In Immigration Law and the US–Mexico Border, Kevin Johnson and Bernard Trujillo focus on what for many is at the core of the entire immigration debate in modern America: immigration from Mexico. In clear, reasonable prose, Johnson and Trujillo explore the long history of discrimination against US citizens of Mexican ancestry in the United States and the current movement against “illegal aliens”—persons depicted as not deserving fair treatment by US law. The authors argue that the United States has a special relationship with Mexico by virtue of sharing a 2,000-mile border and a “land-grab of epic proportions” when the United States “acquired” nearly two-thirds of Mexican territory between 1836 and 1853. The authors explain US immigration law and policy in its many aspects—including the migration of labor, the place of state and local regulation over immigration, and the contributions of Mexican immigrants to the US economy. Their objective is to help thinking citizens on both sides of the border to sort through an issue with a long, emotional history that will undoubtedly continue to inflame politics until cooler, and better-informed, heads can prevail. The authors conclude by outlining possibilities for the future, sketching a possible movement to promote social justice. Great for use by students of immigration law, border studies, and Latino studies, this book will also be of interest to anyone wondering about the general state of immigration law as it pertains to our most troublesome border.

Download or read book Deported Americans written by Beth C. Caldwell and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-28 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Gina was deported to Tijuana, Mexico, in 2011, she left behind her parents, siblings, and children, all of whom are U.S. citizens. Despite having once had a green card, Gina was removed from the only country she had ever known. In Deported Americans legal scholar and former public defender Beth C. Caldwell tells Gina's story alongside those of dozens of other Dreamers, who are among the hundreds of thousands who have been deported to Mexico in recent years. Many of them had lawful status, held green cards, or served in the U.S. military. Now, they have been banished, many with no hope of lawfully returning. Having interviewed over one hundred deportees and their families, Caldwell traces deportation's long-term consequences—such as depression, drug use, and homelessness—on both sides of the border. Showing how U.S. deportation law systematically fails to protect the rights of immigrants and their families, Caldwell challenges traditional notions of what it means to be an American and recommends legislative and judicial reforms to mitigate the injustices suffered by the millions of U.S. citizens affected by deportation.

Download or read book Empire and Revolution written by John Mason Hart and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006-01-10 with total page 722 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is an extraordinarily important history of both U.S.-Mexico relations and of the political, economic, social, and cultural activities of Americans in Mexico."—Friedrich Katz, author of The Life and Times of Pancho Villa "Empire and Revolution is empowering as well as informative, providing a detailed record and judicious interpretation of the protean relations between the United States and Mexico. As John Mason Hart convincingly narrates, the association is of dynamic importance for people of both countries. While there have been studies on discrete parts and periods of the U.S.-Mexico relation, this book charts and anchors the relation globally. Hart allows the reader intellectual as well as imaginative insight into the multifaceted social, cultural, and political reality of the sharing of North America—then, now, and in the future."—Juan Gomez-Quinones, author of Mexican-American Labor, 1790-1990

Download or read book Mexico and Mexicans in the Making of the United States written by John Tutino and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2012-05-15 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mexico and Mexicans have been involved in every aspect of making the United States from colonial times until the present. Yet our shared history is a largely untold story, eclipsed by headlines about illegal immigration and the drug war. Placing Mexicans and Mexico in the center of American history, this volume elucidates how economic, social, and cultural legacies grounded in colonial New Spain shaped both Mexico and the United States, as well as how Mexican Americans have constructively participated in North American ways of production, politics, social relations, and cultural understandings. Combining historical, sociological, and cultural perspectives, the contributors to this volume explore the following topics: the Hispanic foundations of North American capitalism; indigenous peoples’ actions and adaptations to living between Mexico and the United States; U.S. literary constructions of a Mexican “other” during the U.S.-Mexican War and the Civil War; the Mexican cotton trade, which helped sustain the Confederacy during the Civil War; the transformation of the Arizona borderlands from a multiethnic Mexican frontier into an industrializing place of “whites” and “Mexicans”; the early-twentieth-century roles of indigenous Mexicans in organizing to demand rights for all workers; the rise of Mexican Americans to claim middle-class lives during and after World War II; and the persistence of a Mexican tradition of racial/ethnic mixing—mestizaje—as an alternative to the racial polarities so long at the center of American life.

Download or read book Vanishing Frontiers written by Andrew Selee and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There may be no story today with a wider gap between fact and fiction than the relationship between the United States and Mexico. Wall or no wall, deeply intertwined social, economic, business, cultural, and personal relationships mean the US-Mexico border is more like a seam than a barrier, weaving together two economies and cultures. Mexico faces huge crime and corruption problems, but its remarkable transformation over the past two decades has made it a more educated, prosperous, and innovative nation than most Americans realize. Through portraits of business leaders, migrants, chefs, movie directors, police officers, and media and sports executives, Andrew Selee looks at this emerging Mexico, showing how it increasingly influences our daily lives in the United States in surprising ways -- the jobs we do, the goods we consume, and even the new technology and entertainment we enjoy. From the Mexican entrepreneur in Missouri who saved the US nail industry, to the city leaders who were visionary enough to build a bridge over the border fence so the people of San Diego and Tijuana could share a single international airport, to the connections between innovators in Mexico's emerging tech hub in Guadalajara and those in Silicon Valley, Mexicans and Americans together have been creating productive connections that now blur the boundaries that once separated us from each other.

Download or read book Invading Mexico written by Joseph Wheelan and published by Carroll & Graf Publishers. This book was released on 2007-03-07 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents an account of the Mexican War, providing an analysis of its cause, battles, weapons, and outcome.

Download or read book Mexico s Relations with Latin America during the C rdenas Era written by Amelia M. Kiddle and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2016-10-15 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines culture and diplomacy in Mexico’s relations with the rest of Latin America during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940). Drawing on archival research throughout Latin America, the author demonstrates that Cárdenas’s representation of Mexico as a revolutionary nation contributed to the formation of Mexican national identity and spread the legacy of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 beyond Mexico’s borders. Cárdenas did more than any other president to fulfill the goals of the revolution, incorporating the masses into the political life of the nation and implementing land reform, resource nationalization, and secular public education, and his government promoted the idea that these reforms represented a path to social, political, and economic development for the entire region. Kiddle offers a colorful and detailed account of the way Cardenista diplomacy was received in the rest of Latin America and the influence his policies had throughout the continent.

Download or read book The Mexican Frontier 1821 1846 written by David J. Weber and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reinterprets borderlands history from the Mexican perspective.

Download or read book Line in the Sand written by Rachel St. John and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-25 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Line in the Sand details the dramatic transformation of the western U.S.-Mexico border from its creation at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848 to the emergence of the modern boundary line in the first decades of the twentieth century. In this sweeping narrative, Rachel St. John explores how this boundary changed from a mere line on a map to a clearly marked and heavily regulated divide between the United States and Mexico. Focusing on the desert border to the west of the Rio Grande, this book explains the origins of the modern border and places the line at the center of a transnational history of expanding capitalism and state power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Moving across local, regional, and national scales, St. John shows how government officials, Native American raiders, ranchers, railroad builders, miners, investors, immigrants, and smugglers contributed to the rise of state power on the border and developed strategies to navigate the increasingly regulated landscape. Over the border's history, the U.S. and Mexican states gradually developed an expanding array of official laws, ad hoc arrangements, government agents, and physical barriers that did not close the line, but made it a flexible barrier that restricted the movement of some people, goods, and animals without impeding others. By the 1930s, their efforts had created the foundations of the modern border control apparatus. Drawing on extensive research in U.S. and Mexican archives, Line in the Sand weaves together a transnational history of how an undistinguished strip of land became the significant and symbolic space of state power and national definition that we know today.

Download or read book Decade of Betrayal written by Francisco E. Balderrama and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 2006-05-31 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Great Depression, a sense of total despair plagued the United States. Americans sought a convenient scapegoat and found it in the Mexican community. Laws forbidding employment of Mexicans were accompanied by the hue and cry to "get rid of the Mexicans!" The hysteria led pandemic repatriation drives and one million Mexicans and their children were illegally shipped to Mexico. Despite their horrific treatment and traumatic experiences, the American born children never gave up hope of returning to the United States. Upon attaining legal age, they badgered their parents to let them return home. Repatriation survivors who came back worked diligently to get their lives back together. Due to their sense of shame, few of them ever told their children about their tragic ordeal. Decade of Betrayal recounts the injustice and suffering endured by the Mexican community during the 1930s. It focuses on the experiences of individuals forced to undergo the tragic ordeal of betrayal, deprivation, and adjustment. This revised edition also addresses the inclusion of the event in the educational curriculum, the issuance of a formal apology, and the question of fiscal remuneration. "Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, the authors of Decade of Betrayal, the first expansive study of Mexican repatriation with perspectives from both sides of the border, claim that 1 million people of Mexican descent were driven from the United States during the 1930s due to raids, scare tactics, deportation, repatriation and public pressure. Of that conservative estimate, approximately 60 percent of those leaving were legal American citizens. Mexicans comprised nearly half of all those deported during the decade, although they made up less than 1 percent of the country's population. 'Americans, reeling from the economic disorientation of the depression, sought a convenient scapegoat' Balderrama and Rodríguez wrote. 'They found it in the Mexican community.'"--American History

Download or read book Integral Outsiders written by William Schell and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2001 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marriages between Americans and Mexican society women and membership in such organizations as Masonic brotherhoods brought the foreigners into the most important social circles.".

Download or read book Mexican American Colonization during the Nineteenth Century written by José Angel Hernández and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-30 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study is a reinterpretation of nineteenth-century Mexican American history, examining Mexico's struggle to secure its northern border with repatriates from the United States, following a war that resulted in the loss of half Mexico's territory. Responding to past interpretations, Jose Angel Hernández suggests that these resettlement schemes centred on developments within the frontier region, the modernisation of the country with loyal Mexican American settlers, and blocking the tide of migrations to the United States to prevent the depopulation of its fractured northern border. Through an examination of Mexico's immigration and colonisation policies as they developed in the nineteenth century, this book focuses primarily on the population of Mexican citizens who were 'lost' after the end of the Mexican American War of 1846–8 until the end of the century.

Download or read book On the Move written by Filiz Garip and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do Mexicans migrate to the United States? Is there a typical Mexican migrant? Beginning in the 1970s, survey data indicated that the average migrant was a young, unmarried man who was poor, undereducated, and in search of better employment opportunities. This is the general view that most Americans still hold of immigrants from Mexico. On the Move argues that not only does this view of Mexican migrants reinforce the stereotype of their undesirability, but it also fails to capture the true diversity of migrants from Mexico and their evolving migration patterns over time. Using survey data from over 145,000 Mexicans and in-depth interviews with nearly 140 Mexicans, Filiz Garip reveals a more accurate picture of Mexico-U.S migration. In the last fifty years there have been four primary waves: a male-dominated migration from rural areas in the 1960s and '70s, a second migration of young men from socioeconomically more well-off families during the 1980s, a migration of women joining spouses already in the United States in the late 1980s and ’90s, and a generation of more educated, urban migrants in the late 1990s and early 2000s. For each of these four stages, Garip examines the changing variety of reasons for why people migrate and migrants’ perceptions of their opportunities in Mexico and the United States. Looking at Mexico-U.S. migration during the last half century, On the Move uncovers the vast mechanisms underlying the flow of people moving between nations.

Download or read book Mexico and American Modernism written by Ellen G. Landau and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revolutionary look at the profound impact of Mexico and its culture on the development of American modernism

Download or read book American Dirt Oprah s Book Club written by Jeanine Cummins and published by Holt Paperbacks. This book was released on 2022-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "También de este lado hay sueños. On this side, too, there are dreams. Lydia Quixano Perez lives in the Mexican city of Acapulco. She runs a bookstore. She has a son, Luca, the love of her life, and a wonderful husband who is a journalist. And while there are cracks beginning to show in Acapulco because of the drug cartels, her life is, by and large, fairly comfortable. Even though she knows they'll never sell, Lydia stocks some of her all-time favorite books in her store. And then one day a man enters the shop to browse and comes up to the register with four books he would like to buy--two of them her favorites. Javier is erudite. He is charming. And, unbeknownst to Lydia, he is the jefe of the newest drug cartel that has gruesomely taken over the city. When Lydia's husband's tell-all profile of Javier is published, none of their lives will ever be the same. Forced to flee, Lydia and eight-year-old Luca soon find themselves miles and worlds away from their comfortable middle-class existence. Instantly transformed into migrants, Lydia and Luca ride la bestia--trains that make their way north toward the United States, which is the only place Javier's reach doesn't extend. As they join the countless people trying to reach el norte, Lydia soon sees that everyone is running from something. But what exactly are they running to? American Dirt will leave readers utterly changed when they finish reading it. A page-turner filled with poignancy, drama, and humanity on every page, it is a literary achievement."--