Download or read book If Men Were Angels written by Reed Karaim and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1999-05-17 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A searching and powerfully written novel about a dark-horse presidential candidate who seems to be the answer to the hopes of the American voters. Is he, perhaps, too good to be true? The tumultuous presidential bandwagon of Thomas Crane, a charismatic but elusive senator from the midwest, presents reporter Cliff O'Connell with a career-making opportunity that dissolves into a nightmare. In combing the past for the real Thomas Crane, O'Connell becomes the keeper of a chilling secret that he knows should remain buried forever. O'Connell's former lover, Robin Winters, now works for the Crane campaign, and that relationship reignites at the same time the campaign, against all odds, takes off. O'Connell also discovers an unexpected rapport with Crane himself, who shares his love of history and a humble, small-town background. Digging into the part of Thomas Crane's past that refuses to make sense, uncovering layers of truth with a growing sense of unease, O'Connell is caught in a brutal triangle, torn between personal and political passions and his commitment to the truth. His discovery and what he does about it have cataclysmic and unexpected results for himself, Robin, Crane, and a nation. If Men Were Angels is an urgent, resonant novel about love, hope, and loss. Rooted in the realities of a brawling campaign, but proceeding along the lines of an elegant and remorseless legal thriller, it is the novel about politics that Scott Turow might have written.

Download or read book Gringolandia written by Stephen D. Morris and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2005 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mexico's views of the United States have been characterized as stridently anti-American, but recent policy changes in Mexico mark a fundamental transformation in the relationship. This thoughtful and original work answers questions about the impact of these policy shifts on Mexican nationalism and perceptions of the United States. As the only developing country to have entered into a free trade agreement (NAFTA) with a developed country, Mexico offers a unique and invaluable case study of the impact of globalization on a nation and its national identity. Exploring Mexico's experience also allows us to consider how other countries perceive the United States, especially in the post-9/11 climate. Analyzing the diversity of Mexican views of the United States, Gringolandia contributes a rich and nuanced dimension to our understanding of contemporary Mexico and Mexicans' feelings about the vital cross-border relationship.

Download or read book Replenished Ethnicity written by Tomás Roberto Jiménez and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Without a doubt, Tomas Jimenez has written the single most important contemporary academic study on Mexican American assimilation. Clear-headed, crisply written, and free of ideological bias, Replenished Ethnicity is an extraordinary breakthrough in our understanding of the largest immigrant group in the history of the United States. Bravo!"--Gregory Rodriguez, author of Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America "Tomas Jimenez's Replenished Ethnicity brilliantly navigates between the two opposing perils in the study of Mexican Americans--pessimistically overracializing them or optimistically overassimilating them. This much-needed and gracefully written book illuminates the on-the-ground situations of the later generations of this key American group, insightfully identifying and analyzing the unique factor operating in its case: more or less continuous immigration for more than a century. Jimenez's work provides a landmark for all future studies of Latin American incorporation into U.S. society."--Richard Alba, author of Remaking the American Mainstream "Tomas Jimenez's study adds a much-needed but long absent element to our understanding of how immigration contributes to the construction and reproduction of Mexican American ethnicity even as it continuously evolves. His work provides useful and needed detail that are absent even from the most reliable surveys."--Rodolfo de la Garza, Columbia University "In a masterful piece of social science, Tomas Jimenez debunks allegations about slow social and cultural assimilation of Mexican Americans through a richly textured ethnographic account of Mexican Americans' lived experiences in two communities with distinct immigration experiences. Population replenishment via immigration, he claims, maintains distinctiveness of established Mexican origin generations via infusion of cultural elixir-in varying doses over time and place. Ironically, it is the vast heterogeneity of Mexican Americans-generational depth, socioeconomic, national origin and legal-that both contributes to the population's ethnic uniqueness and yet defies singular theoretical frameworks. Jimenez's page-turner uses the Mexican American ethnic prism to re-interpret the U.S. ethnic tapestry and revise the canonical view of assimilation. Replenished Ethnicity sets a high bar for second generation scholarship about Mexican Americans."--Marta Tienda, The Office of Population Research at Princeton University

Download or read book Border Brokers written by Christina Getrich and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some 16.6 million people nationwide live in mixed-status families, containing a combination of U.S. citizens, residents, and undocumented immigrants. U.S. immigration governance has become an almost daily news headline. Yet even in the absence of federal immigration reform over the last twenty years, existing policies and practices have already been profoundly impacting these family units. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in San Diego over more than a decade, Border Brokers documents the continuing deleterious effects of U.S. immigration policies and enforcement practices on a group of now young adults and their families. In the first book-length longitudinal study of mixed-status families, Christina M. Getrich provides an on-the-ground portrayal of these young adults’ lives from their own perspectives and in their own words. More importantly, Getrich identifies how these individuals have developed resiliency and agency beginning in their teens to improve circumstances for immigrant communities. Despite the significant constraints their families face, these children have emerged into adulthood as grounded and skilled brokers who effectively use their local knowledge bases, life skills honed in their families, and transborder competencies. Refuting the notion of their failure to assimilate, she highlights the mature, engaged citizenship they model as they transition to adulthood to be perhaps their most enduring contribution to creating a better U.S. society. An accessible ethnography rooted in the everyday, this book portrays the complexity of life in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. It offers important insights for anthropologists, educators, policy-makers, and activists working on immigration and social justice issues.

Download or read book Border Culture written by Ilan Stavans and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-02-09 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The border between the United States and Mexico, despite attempts at containment, remains a vast and uniquely malleable yet indefinable region. With Border Culture, Ilan Stavans has collected essays representative of the tangled experiences and issues central to life between cultures. Divided into two sections, Border Culture covers topics essential to better understanding this often misunderstood region and state-of-mind. The first section, "Considerations," culls essays covering socio-economic and political topics illustrating the hyper reality of life and living on La Frontera. Section two, "Testimonios," takes careful consideration of lives affected by the border, either as a finite place, alternate universe, or the framework of the border as a state-of-mind, through various historic and literary accounts of La Frontera. This enlightening and comprehensive collection will no doubt help readers better understand border culture.

Download or read book Border Identifications written by Pablo Vila and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2009-06-03 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From poets to sociologists, many people who write about life on the U.S.-Mexico border use terms such as "border crossing" and "hybridity" which suggest that a unified culture—neither Mexican nor American, but an amalgamation of both—has arisen in the borderlands. But talking to people who actually live on either side of the border reveals no single commonly shared sense of identity, as Pablo Vila demonstrated in his book Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders: Social Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Frontier. Instead, people living near the border, like people everywhere, base their sense of identity on a constellation of interacting factors that includes regional identity, but also nationality, ethnicity, and race. In this book, Vila continues the exploration of identities he began in Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders by looking at how religion, gender, and class also affect people's identifications of self and "others" among Mexican nationals, Mexican immigrants, Mexican Americans, Anglos, and African Americans in the Cuidad Juárez-El Paso area. Among the many fascinating issues he raises are how the perception that "all Mexicans are Catholic" affects Mexican Protestants and Pentecostals; how the discourse about proper gender roles may feed the violence against women that has made Juárez the "women's murder capital of the world"; and why class consciousness is paradoxically absent in a region with great disparities of wealth. His research underscores the complexity of the process of social identification and confirms that the idealized notion of "hybridity" is only partially adequate to define people's identity on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Download or read book Ethnography at the Border written by Pablo Vila and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For cultural theorists, "the border" has proven a fluid and hybrid space profitably explored for new ideas about identity, gender, and ethnicity. But for those who occupy this region, the border is not merely a metaphor, but a lived experience, yielding immediate, often pressing ambiguities, problems, and perils. Focusing on a particular area of the U.S.-Mexico border, Ciudad Juarez-El Paso, Ethnography at the Border brings out the complexity of the border experience through the voices of the diverse people who inhabit the region. In a series of ethnographic essays that investigate specific aspects of border existence, the contributors provide rich and detailed insights into such topics as life in illegal subdivisions, called colonias, in Texas; the experience of actually crossing the bridge between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez; the impact of Operation Blockade on illegal crossings; the controversy surrounding El Paso Border Patrol's proposal for a border wall in Sunland Park; the paradoxes of making "American products" using Mexican workers; and the relevance of grassroots efforts, environmental problems, and the multiple meanings of "Mexican." The final chapter offers a critique of the all too metaphorical border often depicted by cultural studies. Painstakingly conveying how the border looks and feels to those on both sides, Ethnography at the Border transmutes statistics on migration, labor markets, and economic trends--as well as conceptualizations of cross-cultural identities--into the experience, the observations, and the troubling lessons of border life.

Download or read book Militarizing the Border written by Miguel Antonio Levario and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As historian Miguel Antonio Levario explains in this timely book, current tensions and controversy over immigration and law enforcement issues centered on the US-Mexico border are only the latest evidence of a long-standing atmosphere of uncertainty and mistrust plaguing this region. Militarizing the Border: When Mexicans Became the Enemy, focusing on El Paso and its environs, examines the history of the relationship among law enforcement, military, civil, and political institutions, and local communities. In the years between 1895 and 1940, West Texas experienced intense militarization efforts by local, state, and federal authorities responding to both local and international circumstances. El Paso’s “Mexicanization” in the early decades of the twentieth century contributed to strong racial tensions between the region’s Anglo population and newly arrived Mexicans. Anglos and Mexicans alike turned to violence in order to deal with a racial situation rapidly spinning out of control. Highlighting a binational focus that sheds light on other US-Mexico border zones in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Militarizing the Border establishes historical precedent for current border issues such as undocumented immigration, violence, and racial antagonism on both sides of the boundary line. This important evaluation of early US border militarization and its effect on racial and social relations among Anglos, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans will afford scholars, policymakers, and community leaders a better understanding of current policy . . . and its potential failure.

Download or read book Mexicanos Second Edition written by Manuel G. Gonzales and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-20 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Newly revised and updated, Mexicanos tells the rich and vibrant story of Mexicans in the United States. Emerging from the ruins of Aztec civilization and from centuries of Spanish contact with indigenous people, Mexican culture followed the Spanish colonial frontier northward and put its distinctive mark on what became the southwestern United States. Shaped by their Indian and Spanish ancestors, deeply influenced by Catholicism, and tempered by an often difficult existence, Mexicans continue to play an important role in U.S. society, even as the dominant Anglo culture strives to assimilate them. Thorough and balanced, Mexicanos makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of the Mexican population of the United States—a growing minority who are a vital presence in 21st-century America.

Download or read book The Human Tradition in Mexico written by Jeffrey M. Pilcher and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2003 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents

Download or read book Becoming Mexican American written by George J. Sanchez and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 1995-03-23 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twentieth century Los Angeles has been the focus of one of the most profound and complex interactions between distinct cultures in U.S. history. In this pioneering study, Sanchez explores how Mexican immigrants "Americanized" themselves in order to fit in, thereby losing part of their own culture.

Download or read book The Border Reader written by Gilberto Rosas and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-18 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Border Reader brings together canonical and cutting-edge humanities and social science scholarship on the US-Mexico border region. Spotlighting the vibrancy of border studies from the field’s emergence to its enduring significance, the essays mobilize feminist, queer, and critical ethnic studies perspectives to theorize the border as a site of epistemic rupture and knowledge production. The chapters speak to how borders exist as regions where people and nation-states negotiate power, citizenship, and questions of empire. Among other topics, these essays examine the lived experiences of the diverse undocumented people who move through and live in the border region; trace the gendered and sexualized experiences of the border; show how the US-Mexico border has become a site of illegality where immigrant bodies become racialized and excluded; and imagine anti- and post-border futures. Foregrounding the interplay of scholarly inquiry and political urgency stemming from the borderlands, The Border Reader presents a unique cross section of critical interventions on the region. Contributors. Leisy J. Abrego, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Martha Balaguera, Lionel Cantú, Leo R. Chavez, Raúl Fernández, Rosa-Linda Fregoso, Roberto G. Gonzales, Gilbert G. González, Ramón Gutiérrez, Kelly Lytle Hernández, José E. Limón, Mireya Loza, Alejandro Lugo, Eithne Luibhéid, Martha Menchaca, Cecilia Menjívar, Natalia Molina, Fiamma Montezemolo, Américo Paredes, Néstor Rodríguez, Renato Rosaldo, Gilberto Rosas, María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Sayak Valencia Triana, Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez, Patricia Zavella

Download or read book The Fence and the River written by Claire F. Fox and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers an illustrated study that asks how the art produced about the U.S.-Mexico border reflects political and economic transformations occurring world-wide.

Download or read book A Companion to the American West written by William Deverell and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to the American West is a rigorous, illuminating introduction to the history of the American West. Twenty-five essays by expert scholars synthesize the best and most provocative work in the field and provide a comprehensive overview of themes and historiography. Covers the culture, politics, and environment of the American West through periods of migration, settlement, and modernization Discusses Native Americans and their conflicts and integration with American settlers

Download or read book Migra written by Kelly Lytle Hernandez and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2010-05-03 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political awareness of the tensions in U.S.-Mexico relations is rising in the twenty-first century; the American history of its treatment of illegal immigrants represents a massive failure of the promises of the American dream. This is the untold history of the United States Border Patrol from its beginnings in 1924 as a small peripheral outfit to its emergence as a large professional police force that continuously draws intense scrutiny and denunciations from political activism groups. To tell this story, MacArthur "Genius" Fellow Kelly Lytle Hernández dug through a gold mine of lost and unseen records and bits of biography stored in garages, closets, an abandoned factory, and in U.S. and Mexican archives. Focusing on the daily challenges of policing the Mexican border and bringing to light unexpected partners and forgotten dynamics, Migra! reveals how the U.S. Border Patrol translated the mandate for comprehensive migration control into a project of policing immigrants and undocumented “aliens” in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

Download or read book A Texas Mexican Cancionero written by Américo Paredes and published by Urbana : University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1976 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Songbook of the Lower Rio Grande Border country with music and its history.

Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Chicana o Studies written by Francisco A. Lomelí and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Chicana/o Studies is a unique interdisciplinary resource for students, libraries, and researchers interested in the largest and most rapidly growing racial-ethnic community in the United States and elsewhere which can either be identified as Chicano, Latino, Hispanic, or Mexican-American. Structured around seven comprehensive themes, the volume is for students of American studies, the Social Sciences, and the Humanities. The volume is organized around seven critical domains in Chicana/o Studies: Chicana/o History and Social Movements Borderlands, Global Migrations, Employment, and Citizenship Cultural Production in Global and Local Settings Chicana/o Identities Schooling, Language, and Literacy Violence, Resistance, and Empowerment International Perspectives The Handbook will stress the importance of the historical origins of the Chicana/o Studies field. Starting from myth of origins, Aztlán, alleged cradle of the Chicana/o people lately substantiated by the findings of archaeology and anthropology, over Spanish/Indigenous relations until the present time. Essays will explore cultural and linguistic hybridism and showcase artistic practices (visual arts, music, and dance) through popular (folklore) or high culture achievements (museums, installations) highlighting the growth of a critical perspective grounded on key theoretical formulations including borderlands theories, intersectionalities, critical race theory, and cultural analysis.