The land reform in Mexico that followed the Revolution of 1910-17 helped to reconstitute peasant communities in the lowland areas of Oaxaca as a complement to the peasantries that had persisted from early colonial times at the higher altitudes. This book examines the history, production systems, and life styles of these communities, focussing in particular on their structure, ethnic movements, and political participation.
This single volume reference resource offers students, scholars, and general readers alike an in-depth background on Mexico, from the complexity of its pre-Columbian civilizations to its social and political development in the context of Western civilization. How did modern Mexico become a nation of multicultural diversity and rich indigenous traditions? What key roles do Mexico's non-Western, pre-Columbian indigenous heritage and subsequent development as a major center in the Spanish colonial empire play the country's identity today? How is Mexico today both Western and non-Western, part Native American and part European, simultaneously traditional and modern? Modern Mexico is a thematic encyclopedia that broadly covers the nation's history, both ancient and modern; its government, politics, and economics; as well as its culture, religion traditions, philosophy, arts, and social structures. Additional topics include industry, labor, social classes and ethnicity, women, education, language, food, leisure and sport, and popular culture. Sidebars, images, and a Day in the Life feature round out the coverage in this accessible, engaging volume. Readers will come to understand how Mexico and the Mexican people today are the result of the processes of transculturation, globalization, and civilizational contact.
This book offers a detailed picture of Jamaica before and after independence. A 1961 journal sheds light on the political and social context before independence, while a 1968 journal shows how independence dissolved dissident forces and identifies the origins of Jamaica's current two party politics.
From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca aims at finally setting Mexican history free of stereotypes about the southern state of Oaxaca, long portrayed as a traditional and backward society resistant to the forces of modernization and marginal to the Revolution. Chassen-López challenges this view of Oaxaca as a negative mirror image of modern Mexico, presenting in its place a much more complex reality. Her analysis of the confrontations between Mexican liberals’ modernizing projects and Oaxacan society, especially indigenous communal villages, reveals not only conflicts but also growing linkages and dependencies. She portrays them as engaging with and transforming each other in an ongoing process of contestation, negotiation, and compromise.
Connecting the massive landscapes of North and South America is Mexico and Central America. An area of fascination and study for geographers and other scholars from around the world, these lands and peoples have played important roles in the discoveries and distributions of civilizations, resources, and nations for millennia. These regions have stimulated a large mass of research and publications across the many sub-disciplines of geography. The Geography of Central America and Mexico: A Scholarly Guide and Bibliography by Thomas A. Rumneycollects, organizes, and presents as many of these scholarly publications as possible to help and encourage efforts in the teaching, study, and continuing scholarship of the geography of this area, which covers Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, as well as the region as a whole. Beginning with the region as a whole, each chapter that follows, one per nation, is divided by specific sub-disciplines of geography: cultural geography, social geography, economic geography, historical geography, physical and environmental geography, political geography, and urban geography. Each section is then further divided into by document type: atlases, books, book chapters, articles from scholarly journals, master’s theses, and doctoral dissertations. Although the majority of entries recorded focus on English-language works, selected entries written in Spanish, as well as French, German, and other languages are also included (with these entries’ titles then translated into English and noted accordingly).
Too frequently, the media and politicians cast Mexican immigrants as a threat to American society. Given America's increasing ethnic diversity and the large size of the Mexican-origin population, an investigation of how Mexican immigrants and their descendants achieve upward mobility and enter the middle class is long overdue. Barrios to Burbs offers a new understanding of the Mexican American experience. Vallejo explores the challenges that accompany rapid social mobility and examines a new indicator of incorporation, a familial obligation to "give back" in social and financial support. She investigates the salience of middle-class Mexican Americans' ethnic identification and details how relationships with poorer coethnics and affluent whites evolve as immigrants and their descendants move into traditionally white middle-class occupations. Disputing the argument that Mexican communities lack high quality resources and social capital that can help Mexican Americans incorporate into the middle class, Vallejo also examines civic participation in ethnic professional associations embedded in ethnic communities.
What role does ‘place’ have in a world marked by increased mobility on a global scale? What strategies are there for representing ‘place’ in the age of globalization? What is the relationship between ‘place’ and the varied mobilities of migrancy, tourism, travel and nomadism? These are some of the questions that run through the ten essays in this collection. The combined effect of these essays is to participate in the contemporary project of subjecting the links between place, mobility, identity, representation and practice to critical interdisciplinary scrutiny. Such notions are not the property of particular disciplines. In the era of globalization, transnationalism and readily acknowledged cultural hybridity these links are more important than ever. They are important because of the taken-for-grantedness of: the universal impact of globalization; the receding importance of place and the centrality of mobile identities. This taken-for-grantedness masks the ways place continues to be important and ways in which mobility is differentiated by race, gender, ethnicity, nationality and many other social markers. This book is a concerted attempt to stop taking for granted these themes of the age. Material discussed in the essays include the creation of cultural routes in Europe, the video’s of Fiona Tan, artistic and literary representations of the North African desert, the production of indigenous videos in Mexico, mobile forms of ethnography, the film Existenz, Jamaica Kincaid’s writing on gardens, the video representation of sex tourism and ways of imagining the global. Authors include: Tim Cresswell, Ginette Verstraete, Ernst van Alphen, Ursula Biemann, Laurel C. Smith, Nick Couldry, Isabel Hoving, Renée van de Vall, Inge E. Boer and Kevin Hetherington.
Globalization, the shape of cities, the future of cities, the increasing gap between rich and poor inhabitants, and ethnic and racial segregation, are the key themes of this book. Taking examples from cities from Sao Paulo to Istanbul, from New York to Edinburgh, and adding their own ideas, the authors examine what might be done to improve things for all those who live in cities.
In this case study of a recent peasant uprising in an ethnically diverse region of Mexico, Frans Schryer addresses an important issue in the cultural history of Latin America: what is the relationship of class to ethnicity, and how do these two elements of cultural perception and social hierarchy reinforce or contradict each other? Examining the interaction between commercial cattle raisers and subsistence agricultural workers in both Nahua and Mestizo villages, Schryer focuses on how ethnic identities and administrative structures affect the form and outcome of agrarian struggles. He shows that class, culture, and social organization are interconnected but vary independently and demonstrates that communal land tenure and corporate structures are compatible with class differentiation and even overt class conflict within peasant communities. Schryer's data is based on archival research, direct observation, and extensive interviews with key actors involved in the conflict. His book traces the origins of local variations in legal status and ethnic relations back to the development of Indian republics, haciendas, and ranchos. By considering competing interpretations of more recent history, especially the CNBrdenas era, the author also provides insights into the mentality of protagonists involved in both ideological confrontations and armed encounters. What emerges is a detailed, comprehensive study that places as much emphasis on culture and discourse as on economic structures and political forces. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
The postrevolutionary reconstruction of the Mexican government did not easily or immediately reach all corners of the country. At every level, political intermediaries negotiated, resisted, appropriated, or ignored the dictates of the central government. National policy reverberated through Mexico s local and political networks in countless different ways and resulted in a myriad of regional arrangements. It is this process of diffusion, politicking, and conflict that Benjamin T. Smith examines in Pistoleros and Popular Movements. Oaxaca s urban social movements and the tension between federal, state, and local governments illuminate the multivalent contradictions, fragmentations, and crises of the state-building effort at the regional level. A better understanding of these local transformations yields a more realistic overall view of the national project of state building. Smith places Oaxaca within this larger framework of postrevolutionary Mexico by comparing the region to other states and linking local politics to state and national developments. Drawing on an impressive range of regional case studies, this volume is a comprehensive and engaging study of postrevolutionary Oaxaca s role in the formation of modern Mexico.
