"Chicano writers from El Paso are the most progressive, open-minded, far-reaching, and inclusive writers of them all."

Octavio Romano

Sunday, May 22, 2011

New Books in May 2011: Topic Mexico




New Books in May 2011: Topic Mexico,
Luis Arturo Ramos, Carlos Fuentes, Jorge G. Castaneda, Elena Poniatowska, Octavio Paz, Ilan Stavans on Jose Vascocelos 
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Jose Vasconcelos: The Prophet of Race
Hardcover
Rutgers University Press (April 7, 2011) Language: English
ISBN-10: 0813550637 ISBN-13: 978-0813550633
Ilan Stavans (Author) 

Mexican educator and thinker Jose Vasconcelos is to Latinos what W.E.B. Du Bois is to African Americans -- a controversial scholar who fostered an alternative view of the future. In Josè Vasconcelos: The Prophet of Race, his influential 1925 essay, "Mestizaje" key to understanding the role he played in the shaping of multiethnic America--is for the first time showcased and properly analyzed. 

Freshly translated here by John H. R. Polt, "Mestizaje" suggested that the Brown Race from Latin America was called to dominate the world, a thesis embraced by activists and scholars north and south of the Rio Grande. Ilan Stavans insightfully and comprehensively examines the essay in biographical and historical context, and considers how many in the United States, especially Chicanos during the civil rights era, used it as a platform for their political agenda. 

The volume also includes Vasconcelos's long-forgotten 1926 Harris Foundation Lecture at the University of Chicago, "The Race Problem in Latin America," where he cautioned the United States that rejecting mestizaje in our own midst will ultimately bankrupt the nation. 

 
Luis Arturo Ramos. Mickey y sus amigos
Mickey y sus amigos (Cal y arena, 2010)
Luis Arturo Ramos

Uuna novela que nos introduce a la vida secreta de Paula Parham y Tobias S. Truman, enanos que prestaron sus servicios a la empresa Disney (de Orlando, Florida), insuflándole vida, en tiempos distintos, al ratón simpático y orejón de Ciudad en Miniatura. Corría la década del setenta, una época de contradicciones políticas e inercias absurdas. Mientras el flower power y la psicodelia mostraban otras alternativas de escape, Estados Unidos seguía insistiendo en la agitación militar a secas y ponderaba un hábitat cultural opresivo.


Leonora
(Seix Barral Premio Biblioteca Breve) (Spanish Edition) 
Paperback Planeta Publishing (April 5, 2011) Language: Spanish
ISBN-10: 6070706323 ISBN-13: 978-6070706325
Elena Poniatowska (Author)

 Premio Bibiloteca Breve 2011
 
Esta novela cuenta la historia de una mujer indomable, un espíritu rebelde. Destinada a crecer como la rica heredera de un magnate de la industria textil, desde pequeña supo que era diferente, que su capacidad de ver lo que otros no veían, de conectar con los animales, la convertía en especial. 

Desafió las convenciones sociales, a sus padres y maestros, y rompió cualquier atadura religiosa o ideológica para conquistar su derecho a ser una mujer libre, personal y artísticamente. 

Leonora Carrington es hoy una leyenda, la más importante pintora surrealista, y su fascinante vida, el material del que se nutren nuestros sueños.

Fantasiosa y excéntrica en su infancia, desafiante en su adolescencia, Leonora vivió la más turbulenta historia de amor con el pintor Max Ernst. Con él se sumergió en el torbellino del surrealismo, y se codeó en París con Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró, André Breton o Pablo Picasso; por Max enloqueció cuando fue enviado a un campo de concentración. A Leonora se la confinó en un manicomio de Santander, del que escapó para conquistar Nueva York de la mano de Peggy Guggenheim. Se instaló en México casándose con el poeta y periodista Renato Leduc; aquí culmina una de las obras artísticas y literarias más singulares y geniales.
Elena Poniatowska retrata como nadie a una mujer excepcional.

 


Octavio Paz y la poética de la historia mexicana (Spanish Edition)
Kindle Edition
Publisher: Fondo de Cultura Económica (May 11, 2011)
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
Language: Spanish
ASIN: B0050JP9UC
Lending: Enabled
David A. Brading (Author) 

En el año 2000, y con motivo del cincuentenario de la publicación de El laberinto de la soledad, la Fundación Octavio Paz y el Fondo de Cultura Económica organizaron un coloquio en el que participó David A. Brading con una ponencia titulada "Octavio Paz y la poética de la historia mexicana". Ése es precisamente el origen de este libro que ahora, en versión ampliada, publica el FCE y en el que el especialista en la obra del Nobel mexicano ratifica la vigencia de las consideraciones de Paz acerca del pasado mexicano. 



The Narrative of Carlos Fuentes: Family, Text, Nation
(Durham Modern Languages) Paperback
Manchester University Press (May 10, 2011)
ISBN-10: 0719085918 ISBN-13: 978-0719085918
Steven Boldy (Author) 

This study examines the full range of Carlos Fuentes’ art, from the critical realism of his early novels to his highly experimental novels of the late sixties, and to his novels from the eighties where national identities are playfully evoked and largely dismantled through intertextual games, migrations of people and ide



Manana Forever?: Mexico and the Mexicans
Hardcover Publisher: Knopf (May 17, 2011)
ISBN-10: 0375404244 ISBN-13: 978-0375404245
Jorge G. Castaneda

Why are Mexicans so successful in individual sports, but deficient in team play? Why do Mexicans dislike living in skyscrapers? Why do Mexicans love to see themselves as victims, but also love victims? And why, though the Mexican people traditionally avoid conflict, is there so much violence in a country where many leaders have died by assassination?

In this shrewd and fascinating book, the renowned scholar and former foreign minister Jorge Castañeda sheds much light on the puzzling paradoxes of his native country. Here’s a nation of 110 million that has an ambivalent and complicated relationship with the United States yet is host to more American expatriates than any country in the world. Its people tend to resent foreigners yet have made the nation a hugely popular tourist destination. Mexican individualism and individual ties to the land reflect a desire to conserve the past and slow the route to uncertain modernity.

Castañeda examines the future possibilities for Mexico as it becomes more diverse in its regional identities, socially more homogenous, its character and culture the instruments of change rather than sources of stagnation, its political system more open and democratic. Mañana Forever? is a compelling portrait of a nation at a crossroads. 



MALALIENTO (Spanish Edition)
Format: Kindle Edition File Size: 628 KB
Publisher: Sergio Andrade / Editorial Alaminos (May 18, 2011)
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services Language: Spanish
ASIN: B0051OT1TG Lending: Enabled
SERGIO ANDRADE (Author)

A fantastic novel about the "new" México, written on the roads of a deconstructed nation. Sergio Andrade, in his very amazing and personal style, writes about how an ancient magical country succeed in becoming a worldwide leader in corruption, violence and drugs traffic.The origins of this complex process one can find them at the National Students Movement of 1968, the Olympic Games of that year, and the growth of a generation of "nobodies" wich "studied" medium high-school by that time and surprisingly became the chief organizers of the "new" mexican order.

In the allucinate narration based in the crazy monologues of the main character of the novel, you will find the adult man discovery of sex, the bounds between El Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional and the ETA, the rarities inside the team of Sub-comandante Marcos followers, the way of doing business of the new Cárteles de la Droga, and much more. Also, the most accurate fictional painting of the tortured beauty of a falling apart country




Diseased Relations: Epidemics, Public Health, and State-Building in Yucatan, Mexico, 1847-1924
Paperback University of New Mexico Press (May 15, 2011)
ISBN-10: 082634898X ISBN-13: 978-0826348982
Heather McCrea

Throughout recorded history, epidemics have touched every aspect of life, including commerce, travel, agriculture, religious ritual, education, and political campaigns. In the tropical region of Yucatan, Mexico, which hosted a plethora of diseases, the violent resistance of various Mayan groups to state exploitation created one of the least understood but most significant threats to Mexican rule since the Conquest. 

As protection of one's own health -- as well as control over individual and collective bodies -- came to be ingrained in the imagined community that elites sought to construct, public health campaigns became symbols of modernization and an extension of the state's efforts to remake clean citizens out of what some perceived as the filthy, the disorderly, and the rebellious. 

Their medical plans and legislation, however, often ran counter to long-practiced rituals of burial, mourning, food preparation, and sick care in the region.

This study examines the politics of post-colonial state-building through the lens of disease and public health policy in order to trace how indigenous groups on the periphery of power and geography helped shape the political practices and institutions of modern Mexico. 

Placing Yucatan at the center of an international labor force, global economics (due to the henequen boom), and a modernizing medical establishment, Heather McCrea incorporates the region into a larger discussion about socioeconomic change and the pervasive role that health care, or lack thereof, plays in human society.


Cuauhtemoc's Bones: Forging National Identity in Modern Mexico 
(Dialogos Series)  Paperback 
University of New Mexico Press (May 15, 2011) 
ISBN-10: 0826350372 ISBN-13: 978-0826350374
Paul Gillingham

In 1949, a group of villagers and ad hoc archaeologists dug up what they believed to be the remains of the last Aztec emperor, Cuauhtemoc, in a remote village in the mountains of central Mexico. 

State and local leaders enthusiastically promoted this remarkable discovery and nationalist celebrations erupted throughout the country. The festivities ended abruptly when professional Mexican archaeologists denied that the body was that of Cuauhtemoc, igniting what became the greatest scandal in the cultural politics of twentieth-century Mexico. 

Suddenly, Cuauhtemoc's bones were at the center of debates about the politics and mechanisms of Mexican national identity.

In this engaging study, Paul Gillingham uses the revelation of the forgery of Cuauhtemoc's tomb and the responses it evoked as a means of examining the set of ideas, beliefs, and dreams that bind societies to the nation-state. 



Living with the Dead: Mortuary Ritual in Mesoamerica
Hardcover University of Arizona Press (May 1, 2011)
ISBN-10: 0816529760 ISBN-13: 978-0816529766
James L. Fitzsimmons (Editor), Izumi Shimada (Editor)

Scholars have recently achieved new insights into the many ways in which the dead and the living interacted from the Late Preclassic to the Conquest in Mesoamerica. The eight essays in this useful volume were written by well-known scholars who offer cross-disciplinary and synergistic insights into the varied articulations between the dead and those who survived them. 
From physically opening the tomb of their ancestors and carrying out ancestral heirlooms to periodic feasts, sacrifices, and other lavish ceremonies, heirs revisited death on a regular basis. The activities attributable to the dead, moreover, range from passively defining territorial boundaries to more active exploits, such as "dancing" at weddings and "witnessing" royal accessions. 

The dead were -- and continued to be -- a vital part of everyday life in Mesoamerican cultures.

This book results from a symposium organized by the editors for an annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The contributors employ historical sources, comparative art history, anthropology, and sociology, as well as archaeology and anthropology, to uncover surprising commonalities across cultures, including the manner in which the dead were politicized, the perceptions of reciprocity between the dead and the living, and the ways that the dead were used by the living to create, define, and renew social as well as family ties. 

In exploring larger issues of a "good death" and the transition from death to ancestry, the contributors demonstrate that across Mesoamerica death was almost never accompanied by the extinction of a persona; it was more often the beginning of a social process than a conclusion. 




In Search of Dominguez & Escalante: Photographing the 1776 Spanish Expedition Through the Southwest  
Hardcover Museum of New Mexico Press (May 2011)
ISBN-10: 0890135290 ISBN-13: 978-0890135297
Greg Mac Gregor (Author), Siegfried Halus (Author) 

On 29 July 1776, Franciscan friars Francisco Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestro Velez de Escalante embarked on an expedition to seek an overland route from Santa Fe, New Mexico to Monterey, California. 

Although the Spaniards did not reach their final destination, the expedition is widely regarded as one of the great explorations in western U.S. history for its documentation of the land and Native people in the Four Corners. The group - including cartographer Don Bernardo Miera y Pacheco, Ute-speaking guides and the alcade (mayor) of Zuni - circumnavigated 1800 miles of unchartered territory never before seen by Europeans, an arduous five month trip documented in Escalante's journal, a widely read historical account of the exploration. 

More than two hundred years later Greg Mac Gregor and Siegfried Halus have created a remarkable visual record of the expedition. Using Escalan-te's journal as their guide, the photographers followed the expeditionary route, circling through New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona, and documenting the frontier as first witnessed by the Spanish explorers on horseback. 

The expedition passed what today are major national parks and landforms: Zion Canyon; Dinosaur Monument; and the Grand Canyon. The photographs show many areas virtually unchanged over centuries; other images reveal the passage of time in pictures of dammed rivers, power lines, and towns where once stood virgin forests. 

Quoting widely from "Escalante's Journal", the authors present first hand accounts of the expedition alongside their photographic narrative. Essays by the photographers discuss their methodology and experiences as modern day explorers retracing the steps of the friars. In his historical essay, Joseph P Sanchez writes about the lasting legacy of the Spanish expeditions. 


The Jar of Severed Hands: The Spanish Deportation of Apache Prisoners of War, 1770-1810
Hardcover Univ of Oklahoma Pr (Trd) (May 5, 2011)
ISBN-10: 0806141778 ISBN-13: 978-0806141770
Mark Santiago (Author) 

More than two centuries after the Coronado Expedition first set foot in the region, the northern frontier of New Spain in the late 1770s was still under attack by Apache raiders. 

Mark Santiago s gripping account of Spanish efforts to subdue the Apaches illuminates larger cultural and political issues in the colonial period of the Southwest and northern Mexico. To persuade the Apaches to abandon their homelands and accept Christian "civilization," Spanish officials employed both the mailed fist of continuous war and the velvet glove of the reservation system. 

"Hostiles" captured by the Spanish would be deported, while Apaches who agreed to live in peace near the Spanish presidios would receive support. Santiago s history of the deportation policy includes vivid descriptions of colleras, the chain gangs of Apache prisoners of war bound together for the two-month journey by mule and on foot from the northern frontier to Mexico City. 

The book's arresting title, The Jar of Severed Hands, comes from a 1792 report documenting a desperate break for freedom made by a group of Apache prisoners. After subduing the prisoners and killing twelve Apache men, the Spanish soldiers verified the attempted breakout by amputating the left hands of the dead and preserving them in a jar for display to their superiors.

Santiago's nuanced analysis of deportation policy credits both the Apaches ability to exploit the Spanish government s dual approach and the growing awareness on the Spaniards part that the peoples they referred to as Apaches were a disparate and complex assortment of tribes that could not easily be subjugated. 

The Jar of Severed Hands deepens our understanding of the dynamics of the relationship between Indian tribes and colonial powers in the Southwest borderlands.



The Maya of Modernism: Art, Architecture, and Film
Hardcover University of New Mexico Press (May 15, 2011)
ISBN-10: 0826349811 ISBN-13: 978-0826349811
Jesse Lerner (Author) 

From the time when archaeologists first began to discover the civilization's spectacular ruins, Mexico's Mayan past has been a boundless source of inspiration, ideas, and iconography for the modernist imagination. 

This study examines the ways artists, architects, filmmakers, photographers, and other producers of visual culture in Mexico, the United States, Europe, and beyond have mined Mayan history and imagery. 

Beginning his study in the mid-nineteenth century, with the first mechanically reproduced and mass distributed images of the Mayan ruins, and ending with recent works that address this history of representation, Lerner argues that Maya modernism is the product of an ongoing pan-American modernism characterized by a continuing series of reinterpretations, collaborations, and exchanges in which Yucatecans, Mexicans and foreigners, mestizos, Mayas, and others all participate and are free to endorse, misunderstand, reinterpret, or reject each other's ideas. 


Origins of the Nuu: Archaeology in the Mixteca Alta, Mexico
Paperback University Press of Colorado (May 11, 2011)
ISBN-10: 1607321033 ISBN-13: 978-1607321033
Stephen A. Kowalewski (Author, Editor) 

Combining older findings with new data on 1,000 previously undescribed archaeological sites, Origins of the Ñuu presents the cultural evolution of the Mixteca Alta in an up-to-date chronological framework.

The ñuu--the kingdoms of the famous Mixtec codices--are traced back through the Postclassic and Classic periods to their beginnings in the first states of the Terminal Formative, revealing their origin, evolution, and persistence through two cycles of growth and collapse. Challenging assumptions that the Mixtec were peripheral to better-known peoples such as the Aztecs and Maya, the book asserts that the ñuu were a major demographic and economic power in their own right.

Older explanations of multiregional or macroregional systems often portrayed civilizations as rising in a cradle or hearth and spreading outward. New macroregional studies show that civilizations are products of more complex interactions among regions, in which peripheries are not simply shaped by cores but by their interactions with multiple societies at varying distances from major centers. Origins of the Ñuu is a significant contribution to this emerging area of archaeological research.


Reinventing Practice in a Disenchanted World: Bourdieu and Urban Poverty in Oaxaca, Mexico
Paperback University of Texas Press (May 1, 2011)
ISBN-10: 0292728891 ISBN-13: 978-0292728899
Cheleen Ann-Catherine Mahar (Author) 

Colonia Hermosa, now considered a suburb of Oaxaca, began as a squatter settlement in the 1950s. 

The original residents came in search of transformation from migrants to urban citizens, struggling from rural poverty for the chance to be part of the global economy in Oaxaca.

Cheleen Ann-Catherine Mahar charts the lives of a group of residents in Colonia Hermosa over a period of thirty years, as Mexico became more closely tied into the structures of global capital, and the residents of Colonia Hermosa struggled to survive. 

Residents shape their discussions within a larger narrative, and their talk is the language of the heroic individual, so necessary to the ideology and the functioning of capital. However, this logic only tenuously connects to the actual material circumstances of their lives.

Mahar applies the theories of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to her data from Mexico in order to examine the class trajectories of migrant families over more than three decades. Through this investigation, Mahar adds an important intergenerational study to the existing body of literature on Oaxaca, particularly concerning the factors that have reshaped the lives of urban working poor families and have created a working-class fraction of globalized citizenship.




Traveling from New Spain to Mexico: Mapping Practices of Nineteenth-Century Mexico
Duke University Press Books (May 6, 2011)
ISBN-10: 0822349914 ISBN-13: 978-0822349914 [Paperback]
Magali M. Carrera

Antonio García Cubas’s Carta general of 1857, the first published map of the independent Mexican nation-state, represented the country’s geographic coordinates in precise detail. 

The respected geographer and cartographer made mapping Mexico his life’s work. Combining insights from the history of cartography and visual culture studies, Magali M. Carrera explains how García Cubas fabricated credible and inspiring nationalist visual narratives for a rising sovereign nation by linking old and new visual strategies.

From the sixteenth century until the early nineteenth, Europeans had envisioned New Spain (colonial Mexico) in texts, maps, and other images. In the first decades of the 1800s, ideas about Mexican, rather than Spanish, national character and identity began to cohere in written and illustrated narratives produced by foreign travelers. 

During the nineteenth century, technologies and processes of visual reproduction expanded to include lithography, daguerreotype, and photography. New methods of display — such as albums, museums, exhibitions, and world fairs — signaled new ideas about spectatorship. 

García Cubas participated in this emerging visual culture as he reconfigured geographic and cultural imagery culled from previous mapping practices and travel writing. In works such as the Atlas geográfico (1858) and the Atlas pintoresco é historico (1885), he presented independent Mexico to Mexican citizens and the world.



Marvels and Miracles in Late Colonial Mexico: Three Texts in Context 
(Religions of the Americas Series)
Hardcover Publisher: University of New Mexico Press (May 15, 2011)
ISBN-10: 0826349757 ISBN-13: 978-0826349750
William B. Taylor (Author)

Miracles, signs of divine presence and intervention, have been esteemed by Christians, especially Catholic Christians, as central to religious belief. 

During the second half of the eighteenth century Spain's Bourbon dynasty sought to tighten its control over New World colonies, reform imperial institutions, and change the role of the church and religion in colonial life. 

As a result, miracles were recognized and publicized sparingly by the church hierarchy and colonial courts were increasingly reluctant to recognize the events. Despite this lack of official encouragement, stories of amazing healings, rescues, and acts of divine retribution abounded throughout Mexico.

Consisting of three rare documents about miracles from this period, each accompanied by an introductory essay, this study serves as a source book and complement to the author's Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico Before the Reforma. 




Forty Miles from the Sea: Xalapa, the Public Sphere, and the Atlantic World in Nineteenth-Century Mexico
Hardcover University of Arizona Press (May 1, 2011)
ISBN-10: 0816529337 ISBN-13: 978-0816529339
Rachel M. Moore 

While the literature on Atlantic history is vast and flourishing, few studies have examined the importance of inland settlements to the survival of Atlantic ports. 

This book explores the symbiotic yet conflicted relationships that bound the Mexican cities of Xalapa and Veracruz to the larger Atlantic world and considers the impact these affiliations had on communication and, ultimately, the formation of national identity.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, despite its inland location, Xalapa became an important Atlantic community as it came to represent both a haven and a place of fortification for residents of Veracruz. 

Yellow fever, foreign invasion, and domestic discord drove thousands of residents of Veracruz, as well as foreign travelers, to seek refuge in Xalapa. At the same time, these adverse circumstances prompted the Mexican government to use Xalapa as a bulwark against threats originating in the Atlantic.

The influence of the Atlantic world thus stretched far into central Mexico, thanks to both the instability of the coastal region and the desire of government officials to "protect" central Mexico from volatile Atlantic imports. 

The boundaries established at Xalapa, however, encouraged goods, information, and people to collect in the city and thereby immerse the population in the developments of the Atlantic sphere. Thus, in seeking to protect the center of the country, government authorities more firmly situated Xalapa in the Atlantic world. 

This connection would be trumped by national affiliation only when native residents of Xalapa became more comfortable with their participation in the Mexican public sphere later in the nineteenth century.

The interdisciplinary and comparative nature of this study will make it appeal to those studying Atlantic history, including historians of Britain, the United States, Latin America, and Africa, as well as those studying communication, print culture, and postal history more broadly. 


100 mitos de la historia de Mexico (Spanish Edition)
Paperback Aguilar (May 30, 2011)
ISBN-10: 6071105293 ISBN-13: 978-6071105295
Francisco Martin Moreno (Author) 



Primitive Revolution: Restorationist Religion and the Idea of the Mexican Revolution, 1940-1968
Paperback University of New Mexico Press (May 15, 2011)
ISBN-10: 082634951X ISBN-13: 978-0826349514
Jason H. Dormady (Author) 

In this intriguing study, Jason Dormady examines the ways members of Mexico's urban and rural poor used religious community to mediate between themselves and the state through the practice of religious primitivism, the belief that they were restoring Christianity -- and the practice of Mexican citizenship -- to a more pure and essential state. 

Focusing on three community formation projects -- the Iglesia del Reino de Dios en su Plenitud, a Mormon-based polygamist organization; the Iglesia Luz del Mundo, an evangelical Protestant organization; and the Union Nacional Sinarquista, a semi-fascist Mexican Catholic group -- Dormady argues that their attempts to establish religious authenticity mirror the efforts of officials to define the meaning of the Mexican Revolution in the era following its military phase. 

Despite the fact that these communities engaged in counterrevolutionary behavior, the state remained pragmatic and willing to be flexible depending on convergence of the group's interests with those of the official revolution

 

La Fuerza Aérea de Pancho Villa - Los Halcones Dorados (Spanish Version for Kindle) 
Format: Kindle Edition
File Size: 618 KB
Publisher: Mystic-Buddha Publishing House; e-001 edition (May 5, 2011)
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
Language: Spanish ASIN: B001P80QOG
Lending: Enabled
Carlos H Cantu (Author) 

Valentía, heroicidad y audacia, convierten esta narración en una novela capaz de satisfacer plenamente a los amantes de la acción y aventura. 

Estas cualidades conducen a Los Demonios Voladores a la Primera Guerra Mundial, los unen para integrar un Circo Aéreo y, finalmente, a volar como mercenarios para Pancho Villa. Encontrando su causa noble, convierten cinco aviones obsoletos en aeronaves capaces de realizar memorables hazañas. 

Implacable, la muerte se lleva a cinco de ellos, y sólo sobrevive Frank, para disputarle honor y gloria a Antonio, un aviador mexicano, y el amor de la hermosa Florentina. La pugna romántica no se resuelve hasta la última página del libro que, además, traza un vigoroso y veraz retrato del legendario Pancho Villa.




Suffering and Salvation in Ciudad Juarez
Paperback Fortress Press (May 20, 2011)
ISBN-10: 0800698479 ISBN-13: 978-0800698478
Nancy Pineda-madrid (Author)

Since 1993 more than six hundred girls and women have been brutally slain in Ciudad Juarez in internationally condemned violence. No one has been arrested. This volume seeks meaning in that tragedy.

Nancy Pineda-Madrid's powerful reflection on this destructive and dehumanizing violence, based on first-hand knowledge of the traumatic situation in Cd. Juarez, attempts to understand the cultural, economic, and even religious factors that feed the violence. 

She detects in the social suffering of the women there a yearning for release, justice, and healing in their quest for salvation through solidarity and community practices that resist rather than acquiesce to the violence.



El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin 
Paperback Nation Books; First Edition edition (May 10, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1568586582 ISBN-13: 978-1568586588
Molly Molloy (Editor), Charles Bowden (Editor) 

In this unprecedented and chilling monologue, a repentant Mexican hitman tells the unvarnished truth about the war on drugs on the American. 

El Sicario is the hidden face of America's war on drugs. He is a contract killer who functioned as a commandante in the Chihuahuan State police, who was trained in the US by the FBI, and who for twenty years kidnapped, tortured and murdered people for the drug industry at the behest of Mexican drug cartels. 

He is a hit man who came off the killing fields alive. He left the business and turned to Christ. And then he decided to tell the story of his life and work. 

Charles Bowden first encountered El Sicario while reporting for the book Murder City. As trust between the two men developed, Bowden bore witness to the Sicario's unfolding confession, and decided to tell his story. 

The well-spoken man that emerges from the pages of El Sicario is one who has been groomed by poverty and driven by a refusal to be one more statistic in the failure of Mexico. He is not boastful, he claims no major standing in organized crime. 

But he can explain in detail not only torture and murder, but how power is distributed and used in the arrangement between the public Mexican state and law enforcement on the ground - where terror and slaughter are simply tools in implementing policy for both the police and the cartels. 

And he is not an outlaw or a rebel. He is the state. When he headed the state police anti-kidnapping squad in Cd. Juarez, he was also running a kidnapping ring in Juarez. 

When he was killing people for money in Cd. Juarez, he was sharpening his marksmanship at the Federal Police range. Now he lives in the United States as a fugitive. 

One cartel has a quarter million dollar contract on his head. Another cartel is trying to recruit him. He speaks as a free man and of his own free will - there are no charges against him. He is a lonely voice - no one with his background has ever come forward and talked. He is the future - there are thousands of men like him in Mexico and there will be more in other places. He is the truth no one wants to hear. 



Los morros del narco: Ninos y jovenes en el narcotrafico mexicano (Narco Youth) 
(Spanish Edition)
Paperback Aguilar (May 30, 2011)
Language: Spanish ISBN-10: 6071109396 ISBN-13: 978-6071109392
Javier Valdez (Author) 

After the success of Miss Narco, Javier Valdez presents a new work on Mexico s drug crisis. 
This time, the leading characters are young men and women at that crucial age in their personal development who, in one way or another, come across the world of drug trafficking. 

Some escape its clutches while others fall in its trap, but their lives are irrevocably changed. The author collects the most intense, moving and surprising accounts that mark Mexicos social and political reality today. 

Spanish Description: Tras el exito de Miss Narco, Javier Valdez entrega una nueva obra acerca del narcotrafico en Mexico; esta vez, los protagonistas son ninos y jovenes, hombres y mujeres, en edades cruciales para su desarrollo personal que, de una u otra forma, se topan con el narco. Ya sea que escapen de el o caigan en sus redes, el narcotrafico cambia la trayectoria de su vida. Javier Valdez recoge los relatos mas intensos, conmovedores y sorprendentes que tinen la realidad social y politica de Mexico a diario.


 

Mexico's Indigenous Communities: Their Lands and Histories [Kindle Edition]
Format: Kindle Edition File Size: 2419 KB
Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
Publisher: OReilly Media - A (May 25, 2011)
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services Language: English ASIN: B0051X6F8M
Ethelia Ruiz Medrano (Author), Russ Davidson (Author) 

A rich and detailed account of indigenous history in central and southern Mexico from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, Mexico's Indigenous Communities is an expansive work that destroys the notion that Indians were victims of forces beyond their control and today have little connection with their ancient past. 

Indian communities continue to remember and tell their own local histories, recovering and rewriting versions of their past in light of their lived present. 

Ethelia Ruiz Medrano focuses on a series of individual cases, falling within successive historical epochs, that illustrate how the practice of drawing up and preserving historical documents-in particular, maps, oral accounts, and painted manuscripts-has been a determining factor in the history of Mexico's Indian communities for a variety of purposes, including the significant issue of land and its rightful ownership. 

Since the sixteenth century, numerous Indian pueblos have presented colonial and national courts with historical evidence that defends their landholdings. Because of its sweeping scope, groundbreaking research, and the author's intimate knowledge of specific communities, Mexico's Indigenous Communities is a unique and exceptional contribution to Mexican history. It will appeal to students and specialists of history, indigenous studies, ethnohistory, and anthropology of Latin America and Mexico


Rural Protest and the Making of Democracy in Mexico, 1968-2000 
Hardcover Publisher: Penn State Press (May 23, 2011)
Language: English ISBN-10: 0271037873 ISBN-13: 978-027103787
Dolores Trevizo (Author) 

Traditional accounts of democratization tend to credit elites with most of the 'heavy lifting' via the fashioning of democratic 'pacts.' 

More recently, a newer generation of scholars has focused attention on the role of grassroots movements in democratizing episodes. In her exemplary account of the fall of the PRI from power in Mexico, Trevizo does both, arguing that it was the complex interaction between grassroots and elite groups that ultimately undermined the party's hold on power. 

In doing so, she also extends her analysis over a much longer period of time than most studies of democratization. The result is one of the richest, most detailed accounts of democratization produced to date. --Doug McAdam, Stanford University

Rural Protest and the Making of Democracy in Mexico provides a unique, in-depth exploration of the underlying causes of Mexico s democratic electoral transition from 1968 to 2000. 

Dolores Trevizo, relying on years of field research, analyzes the importance of the 1968 student massacre on distributing student leaders among nonviolent peasant movements in the 1970s and 1980s. The author pursues an original strategy, providing case studies of prodemocratic agrarian movements on one hand, as well as businessmen on the other, in strengthening the abilities of the PRD and the PAN respectively in their opposition to the PRI. She enhances our understanding of how the PRI combined a complex repressive and pluralistic approach to different groups in its ultimately failed attempt to put a lid on the legitimacy crisis created in 1968. --Roderick Ai Camp, Claremont McKenna College 




Enseñando rebeldía
Format: Kindle Edition File Size: 3927 KB
Print Length: 382 pages Publisher: PM Press (May 10, 2011)
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services Language: English
ASIN: B005069PSW Lending: Enabled
Diana Denham (Author), Colectivo C.A.S.A. (Author) 

Accompanied by photography and political art, this powerful compilation of testimonies from longtime organizers, artists, housewives, journalists, students, teachers, and others who participated in the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca provides a raw, honest look at the 2006 Oaxaca protests to the political situation in the Mexican state — protests that would become one of the most important social uprisings of the 21st century. 

Acompañada de fotografías y arte político, esta compilación poderosa de testimonios de organizadores, artistas, amas de casa, periodistas, estudiantes, maestros y otros que participaron en la Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca provee un vistazo abierto y honesto de las protestas oaxaqueñas del 2006 contra la situación política en el estado mexicano — protestas que se convertirían en una de las revueltas sociales más importantes del siglo XX1.



Mexican Movies in the United States: A History of the Films, Theaters and Audiences, 1920-1960
Paperback Mcfarland & Co Inc Pub (May 15, 2011)
ISBN-10: 0786464100 ISBN-13: 978-0786464104
Rogelio, Jr. Agrasanchez (Author) 

A surge of immigration in the United States in the 1920s coincided with burgeoning developments in entertainment—including cinema. As people from Latin America settled in the U.S. in growing numbers, movie houses sprang up in areas where these populations were concentrated. 

The advent of talkies in the 1930s propelled the Spanish-speaking movie industry into high gear. As the U.S. entered World War II, films from Mexico dominated the market, creating a culture of Mexican cinema that offered entertainment, a reflection of native values and customs, and a link to the homeland. 

A study of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema reveals much about the development of Latin American popular culture in the U.S.

This book is a richly detailed look at Mexican cinema’s boom years in the United States, 1920 to 1960. It draws upon a treasure trove of files from Clasa-Mohme, Inc., a major distributor of Mexican films in the United States, that the author stumbled across while browsing for old movie posters. 

Chapters focus on the appeal of Mexican cinema and the venues that evolved where Hispanic populations were centered: Los Angeles and Pomona Valley, California; New York City; El Paso, Texas; San Antonio, Texas; and the Rio Grande Valley. The theaters, distributors, audience demographics, popular and critical reception of the films, and the stars all receive attention. Included are lists of theaters in California, Texas and cities in other states that exhibited Mexican films between 1920 and 1960. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. 



Crossing Borders: Migration and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century United States
Hardcover Harvard University Press (May 2, 2011)
ISBN-10: 0674047567 ISBN-13: 978-0674047563
Dorothee Schneider (Author) 

Aspiring immigrants to the United States make many separate border crossings in their quest to become Americans — in their home towns, ports of departure, U.S. border stations, and in American neighborhoods, courthouses, and schools. 

In a book of remarkable breadth, Dorothee Schneider covers both the immigrants’ experience of their passage from an old society to a new one and American policymakers’ debates over admission to the United States and citizenship. 

Bringing together the separate histories of Irish, English, German, Italian, Jewish, Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican immigrants, the book opens up a fresh view of immigrant aspirations and government responses.

Ingenuity and courage emerge repeatedly from these stories, as immigrants adapted their particular resources, especially social networks, to make migration and citizenship successful on their own terms. 

While officials argued over immigrants’ fitness for admission and citizenship, immigrant communities forced the government to alter the meaning of race, class, and gender as criteria for admission. Women in particular made a long transition from dependence on men to shapers of their own destinies.

Schneider aims to relate the immigrant experience as a totality across many borders. By including immigrant voices as well as U.S. policies and laws, she provides a truly transnational history that offers valuable perspectives on current debates over immigration.



En el Camino: Mexico, la ruta de los migrantes que no importan
(Spanish Edition) [Paperback]Publisher: Blume; 1st Ed. edition (May 1, 2011) Language: Spanish ISBN-10: 8498014786 ISBN-13: 978-8498014785
Edu Ponces (Author), Toni Arnau (Author), Eduardo Soteras (Author) 

Every year, more than 500,000 Central American migrants undertake a journey of more than 3,000 miles through Mexico in the hope of finding a better life in the United States. 

This astonishing photo documentary chronicles the myriad dangers inherent in the trip: murder, rape, abuse at the hands of narco-traffickers, and more. The vivid, haunting photographs portray the indignities and injustices suffered by hundreds of thousands as they chase the American dream.

Cada año, más de 500.000 migrantes centroamericanos emprenden un viaje de 5.000 kilómetros a través de México en la esperanza de conseguir una mejor vida en los Estados Unidos. 

Este ensayo fotográfico relata la multitud de riesgos inherentes al viaje: asesinatos, violaciones, abuso en las manos de narcotraficantes y más. Las fotografías vívidas e inquietantes describen las humillaciones e injusticias que sufren cientos de miles en la búsqueda del sueño americano.

A Canadian Woman Takes an Interest in Troubled Mexico: Agnes C. Laut's Journalistic Work and Philanthropic Projects Concerning Revolutionary Mexico, 1913-1921
Paperback VDM Verlag Dr. Müller (May 6, 2011)
Language: English ISBN-10: 3639351037 ISBN-13: 978-3639351033
Grisell Ortega (Author) 

This book, written for readers interested in a first approach to the very complex historical process known as the Mexican Revolution, focuses on the international dimension of this conflict. 

In particular, it tells the story of a Canadian woman who got deeply, and actively, interested in Mexico's strife. Agnes Laut (Ontario, 1871 – New York, 1936) was a journalist, novelist, financial advisor, and a farmer who became closely involved with United States-Mexico relations during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1921). 

This research analyses Agnes Laut's editorial work, travels, and publications about the Mexican situation. Furthermore, it explores her role as coordinator of US civic and religious associations aiming to relieve Mexico's social troubles through humanitarian aide.


Internet y culturas juveniles: Caso: Guanajuato México (Spanish Edition) 
Paperback Editorial Académica Española (May 6, 2011)
Language: Spanish ISBN-10: 384433680X ISBN-13: 978-3844336801
Jorge Alfredo Blanco Sánchez (Author) 

Los usos y consumos que los jóvenes realizan al entrar en contacto con el medio tecnológico, es también un acercamiento a las culturas juveniles, es un estudio que trata de agregar conocimiento al impacto tecnológico que se produce en estados de tamaño mediano de la República Mexicana como es el caso de Guanajuato. 

El estudio reporta que cada vez más, los jóvenes están interesados en participar de un mundo globalizado, planetario y se manifiestan de manera activa con las herramientas tecnológicas que se encuentra a su alcance. La computadora es una de ellas y por tal motivo interesa la forma de su uso y consumo.


Economía y Política de la Vivienda en México: Análisis Económico Urbano (Spanish Edition)
Paperback Editorial Académica Española (May 11, 2011)
Language: Spanish ISBN-10: 3844336958 ISBN-13: 978-3844336955
Leonardo González Tejeda (Author) 

Este texto analiza en mercado de vivienda en México desde distintos enfoques. El primero de estos estima la demanda de vivienda utilizando técnicas microeconométricas para el mercado metropolitano en México. 

El segundo, desarrolla un mercado de acumulación de capital con expectativas racionales para evaluar la implementación de política fiscal e impositiva que incentive el uso de la vivienda habitual, también desarrolla este enfoque con el uso del suelo como un factor estratégico en la determinación de la cantidad óptima de stock residencial y trayectoria de convergencia al estado de equilibrio del modelo. 

Por último, analiza el fenómeno de control de rentas bajo un contexto de incertidumbre en la toma de decisiones de los agentes urbanos que interactuan en el mercado de vivienda en México.

Conservadurismo y Democracia Cristiana en México: El Partido Acción Nacional (Spanish Edition)
Paperback Editorial Académica Española (May 11, 2011)
Language: Spanish ISBN-10: 3844337237 ISBN-13: 978-3844337235
Héctor Gómez Peralta (Author) 

Después de más de 70 años de contar con un sistema de partido hegemónico, México goza en la actualidad de una competencia partidista relativamente plural. Durante las décadas que duró ese sistema político autoritario era un tabú investigar o publicar trabajos sobre el conservadurismo o el pensamiento de derecha. 

Aquellos que se atrevieran a trabajar esos temas corrían el riesgo de ser catalogados de reaccionarios. El presente trabajo muestra las entrañas de la ideología del Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), que fue el partido de oposición más importante en México durante el dominio aplastante del Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). Representa una obra desapasionada y académica que trata de analizar y explicar el pensamiento político de los principales militantes del PAN, desde sus orígenes hasta que lograron conquistar la Presidencia de la República. 

Al autor no le interesa condenar o alabar al conservadurismo, sino entenderlo. A la par de que se van desmenuzando las entrañas de las diversas doctrinas del PAN, el lector va conociendo una parte notable del México excluido por la patria liberal y revolucionaria: el conservadurismo católico.

Estrategias de Grupo Televisa: del monopolio a la competencia: Análisis económico, político y social de la industria audiovisual en México (Spanish Edition)
Paperback Paperback Editorial Académica Española (May 17, 2011
Language: Spanish
ISBN-10: 384433792X ISBN-13: 978-3844337921
María Elena Gutiérrez-Rentería (Author)


The Boy Scouts Under Fire in Mexico [Kindle Edition]
File Size: 211 KB Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
Language: EnglishASIN: B004Z0LAM8
Lending: Enabled 
Lieut. Howard Payton (Author) 

This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.


Rambles By Land And Water, Or, Notes Of Travel In Cuba And Mexico, Including A Canoe Voyage Up The River Panuco, And Researches Among The Runins Of Tamulipas, Etc.
Paperback Thackeray Press (May 16, 2011)
ISBN-10: 1446062678 ISBN-13: 978-1446062678
B. M. Norman (Author)
 

El sueño mexicano o el pensamiento interrumpido (Spanish Edition) 
Kindle Edition
File Size: 419 KB Publisher: Fondo de Cultura Económica (May 16, 2011) Sold by: Amazon Digital Services Language: Spanish
ASIN: B0051AN074 Lending: Enabled
J. M. G. Le Clezio (Author), Mercedes Córdova y Magro (Translator), Tomás Segovia (Translator) 

Le Clézio explora los valores culturales indígenas de México a través de un recorrido por la dimensión mágica de la cosmogonía de los pueblos prehispánicos mediante el reconocimiento de bailes, ritos, ceremonias tribales y conmemoraciones, además de extensas citas de códices prehispánicos.



Mexican Takeaway
Paperback Matador (May 1, 2011)
ISBN-10: 1848766270 ISBN-13: 978-1848766273
Francesca Polini (Author)

A road trip that will test every bit of one couple's courage and resolve to the limit...Francesca and Rick don't give up easily - which is just as well when they decide to adopt a child internationally after being turned down in the UK. 

They can have children naturally but believe passionately in adoption and their desire to do some good in the world sees them go to Mexico. With no idea where to start, they plunge straight in and find themselves in a country that seems stuck in the 1970s. Faced with a series of nail-biting unexpected twists and turns, this is a personal touching human drama and a heartbreaking account of one couple's trials and tribulations. 

The story will hook you in and keep you reading as their journey brings them into contact with a cast of characters straight out of Hollywood casting, from a demented but loving mother to a lawyer offering babies for sale in Starbucks. Francesca's writing is inspired by authors Chris Cleave, Niccolo Ammaniti and Isabel Allende. 

Mexican Takeaway will appeal to women, mothers and especially those who are interested in adoption. It will also reach readers who enjoy true stories of impossible adventures in exotic destinations. Francesca and Rick's story has already had high press visibility with an article in the Daily Mail and The Sun, and Francesca appeared on BBC and ITV during National Adoption Week.

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