Essays in Mexican Kinship offers new and important data on the social structure of Indian and rural Mestizo communities of Mexico, particularly those of the highlands, and provides models and suggestions for future research.
National Book Award Finalist! Instant New York Times Bestseller! The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian meets Jane the Virgin in this poignant but often laugh-out-loud funny contemporary YA about losing a sister and finding yourself amid the pressures, expectations, and stereotypes of growing up in a Mexican-American home. Perfect Mexican daughters do not go away to college. And they do not move out of their parents’ house after high school graduation. Perfect Mexican daughters never abandon their family. But Julia is not your perfect Mexican daughter. That was Olga’s role. Then a tragic accident on the busiest street in Chicago leaves Olga dead and Julia left behind to reassemble the shattered pieces of her family. And no one seems to acknowledge that Julia is broken, too. Instead, her mother seems to channel her grief into pointing out every possible way Julia has failed. But it’s not long before Julia discovers that Olga might not have been as perfect as everyone thought. With the help of her best friend Lorena, and her first love, first everything boyfriend Connor, Julia is determined to find out. Was Olga really what she seemed? Or was there more to her sister’s story? And either way, how can Julia even attempt to live up to a seemingly impossible ideal? “Alive and crackling—a gritty tale wrapped in a page-turner. ”—The New York Times “Unique and fresh.” —Entertainment Weekly “A standout.” —NPR
This book presents the history of the Gomez, an elite family of Mexico that today includes several hundred individuals, plus their spouses and the families of their spouses, all living in Mexico City. Tracing the family from its origins in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico through its rise under the Porfirio Diaz regime and focusing especially on the last three generations, the work shows how the Gomez have evolved a distinctive subculture and an ability to advance their economic interests under changing political and economic conditions. One of the authors' major findings is the importance of the kinship system, particularly the three-generation "grandfamily" as a basic unit binding together people of different generations and different classes. The authors show that the top entrepreneurs in the family, the direct descendants of its founder, remain the acknowledged leaders of the kin, each one ruling his business as a patron-owner through a network of clienty2Drelatives. Other family members, though belonging to the middle class, identify ideologically with the family leadership and the bourgeoisie, and family values tend to overrule considerations of strictly business interest even among entrepreneurs.
In this volume an international group of anthropologists and historians examines the complex relationships between family life, culture, and economic change in Latin America and the Caribbean. Dissatisfied with interpretations based on European experience
A monumental achievement of scholarship, this volume on the Nahua Indians of Central Mexico (often called Aztecs) constitutes our best understanding of any New World indigenous society in the period following European contact. Simply put, the purpose of this book is to throw light on the history of Nahua society and culture through the use of records in Nahuatl, concentrating on the time when the bulk of the extant documents were written, between about 1540-50 and the late eighteenth century. At the same time, the earliest records are full of implications for the very first years after contact, and ultimately for the preconquest epoch as well, both of which are touched on here in ways that are more than introductory or ancillary.
Marxist theory has been an undercurrent in western social science since the late nineteenth century. It came into prominence in the social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s and has had a profound effect on history, sociology and anthropology. This book represents an attempt to gather together Marxist perspectives in archaeology and to examine whether indeed they represent advances in archaeological theory. The papers in this volume look forward to the growing use of Marxist theory by archaeologists; as well as enriching archaeology as a discipline they have important implications for sociology and anthropology through the addition of a long-term, historical perspective. This is a book primarily for undergraduates and research students and their teachers in departments of archaeology and anthropology but it should also be of interest to historians, sociologists and geographers.
This book uses political, religious, and cultural history to examine catechesis. Sister de Luna establishes that religiosidad popular, the core theme for Hispanic theology, is Christian and Catholic and traces its elements in Church catechisms of the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. She goes on to examine the relationship between theology of beauty, catechesis, and spirituality establishing that the three disciplines were integral to faith formation in the early church, but were separated through the centuries. An in-depth analysis of six selected catechisms reveals that popular religion as a combination of faith and culture was evident at the beginning of Hispanic Catholicism in the sixteenth century. The investigation notes the gradual elimination and eventual replacement of the cultural aspects in the catechetical texts in the nineteenth century. The author concludes that the reunification of the cultural spiritual symbols with the presentation of doctrine could revitalize catechesis and bring Christian evangelization to a renewed effectiveness.
First published in 1983, Nahuat Myth and Social Structure brings together an important collection of modern-day Aztec Indian folktales and vividly demonstrates how these tales have been shaped by the social structure of the communities in which they are told.