The purpose of this book is to serve as a guide to understanding the Latino family in the United States and to describe the personal, political, historical, and sacred choices available in creating a freer and more fruitful family life. By linking theory to practice, the book provides a reenvisioning of the Latino family. Before any family can look at itself in a new way, it has to have a theoretical perspective. The book's theory of transformation provides a perspective that allows us to understand Latino families and the family in general. Furthermore, the politics of transformation shows us how to create fundamentally new and better relationships within the family.
"Thoughtful, fair-minded, and learned, Cadava's eye-opening book will teach experts on American politics things they didn't even know they didn't know." — Rick Perlstein, bestselling author of Nixonland and The Invisible Bridge “Geraldo Cadava’s history...provides a unique vantage point on US politics; on the shifting terrains of foreign policy, labor, and religion; and on the changing nature of specific states, as well as on deeper ideological fights over the soul of the country: is it to be an inclusive nation of immigrants, or, as the nativists today say, a country founded on white supremacy? An excellent, insightful study.” — Greg Grandin, professor of history at Yale University and author of The End of the Myth “Geraldo Cadava offers a fascinating examination of the socioeconomic interests and foreign policy concerns that have drawn Hispanics/Latinos into a rapidly changing Republican Party. If readers harbor the mistaken idea that Hispanics are a monolithic voting bloc, this book should dispel this idea once and for all. Though the work is written for a general audience, even experts on Hispanic politics and voting behavior will find much that is new and surprising in these chapters.” — María Cristina García, author of The Refugee Challenge in Post–Cold War America
This book is a pioneering application of the transformation theory to key aspects of Latino politics, family heritage, community, history, and culture, and religious symbols.
A new history reveals how the rise of the Latino vote has redrawn the political map and what it portends for the future of American politics. The impact of the Latino vote is a constant subject of debate among pundits and scholars. Will it sway elections? And how will the political parties respond to the growing number of voters who identify as Latino? A more basic and revealing question, though, is how the Latino vote was forged—how U.S. voters with roots in Latin America came to be understood as a bloc with shared interests. In The Rise of the Latino Vote, Benjamin Francis-Fallon shows how this diverse group of voters devised a common political identity and how the rise of the Latino voter has transformed the electoral landscape. Latino political power is a recent phenomenon. It emerged on the national scene during the turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s, when Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American activists, alongside leaders in both the Democratic and the Republican parties, began to conceive and popularize a pan-ethnic Hispanic identity. Despite the increasing political potential of a unified Latino vote, many individual voters continued to affiliate more with their particular ethnic communities than with a broader Latino constituency. The search to resolve this contradiction continues to animate efforts to mobilize Hispanic voters and define their influence on the American political system. The “Spanish-speaking vote” was constructed through deliberate action; it was not simply demographic growth that led the government to recognize Hispanics as a national minority group, ushering in a new era of multicultural politics. As we ponder how a new generation of Latino voters will shape America’s future, Francis-Fallon uncovers the historical forces behind the changing face of America.
American history told from the vantage of immigration politics It is often said that with the election of Donald Trump nativism was raised from the dead. After all, here was a president who organized his campaign around a rhetoric of unvarnished racism and xenophobia. Among his first acts on taking office was to block foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States. But although his actions may often seem unprecedented, they are not as unusual as many people believe. This story doesn’t begin with Trump. For decades, Republicans and Democrats alike have employed xenophobic ideas and policies, declaring time and again that “illegal immigration” is a threat to the nation’s security, wellbeing, and future. The profound forces of all-American nativism have, in fact, been pushing politics so far to the right over the last forty years that, for many people, Trump began to look reasonable. As Daniel Denvir argues, issues as diverse as austerity economics, free trade, mass incarceration, the drug war, the contours of the post 9/11 security state, and, yes, Donald Trump and the Alt-Right movement are united by the ideology of nativism, which binds together assorted anxieties and concerns into a ruthless political project. All-American Nativism provides a powerful and impressively researched account of the long but often forgotten history that gave us Donald Trump.
Hispanics and the Future of America presents details of the complex story of a population that varies in many dimensions, including national origin, immigration status, and generation. The papers in this volume draw on a wide variety of data sources to describe the contours of this population, from the perspectives of history, demography, geography, education, family, employment, economic well-being, health, and political engagement. They provide a rich source of information for researchers, policy makers, and others who want to better understand the fast-growing and diverse population that we call "Hispanic." The current period is a critical one for getting a better understanding of how Hispanics are being shaped by the U.S. experience. This will, in turn, affect the United States and the contours of the Hispanic future remain uncertain. The uncertainties include such issues as whether Hispanics, especially immigrants, improve their educational attainment and fluency in English and thereby improve their economic position; whether growing numbers of foreign-born Hispanics become citizens and achieve empowerment at the ballot box and through elected office; whether impending health problems are successfully averted; and whether Hispanics' geographic dispersal accelerates their spatial and social integration. The papers in this volume provide invaluable information to explore these issues.
"Until recently, most research on Latina/os in the U.S. has ignored historical and contemporary dynamics in Latin America, just as scholars of Latin America have generally stopped their studies at the border. This volume roots Los Angeles in the larger arena of globalization, exploring the demographic changes that have transformed the Latino presence in LA from primarily Mexican-origin to one that now includes peoples from throughout the hemisphere. Bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines, it combines historical perspectives with analyses of power and inequality to consider how Latina/os are responding to exclusionary immigration, labor, and schooling practices and actively creating communities. Book jacket."--BOOK JACKET.
Abalos (religious studies and sociology, Seton Hall U.) presents a critique of archetypal roles of Latino males including the womanizer, the macho, and the patriarch. As an alternative to these outdated and restrictive ways of living, Abalos describes how Latino males are able to radically redefine themselves and create new transformational archetypes. He goes on to discuss how Latino men can become agents of transformation in the family and the larger world. c. Book News Inc.
La comunidad Latina, the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States, has long been told that assimilation is the only way to succeed in American society. This book challenges that generally accepted view and concludes instead that transformation as a way of life is the only viable option for the Latino community as a whole, regardless of racial, class, regional, or religious differences. It highlights how in the everyday life of la comunidad Latina the members of the community can recognize the underlying ways of life, the stories, and the patterns of relationships that cripple them, and how to break with these ways of life, stories, and relationships to create fundamentally more loving and compassionate alternatives. Along with all men and women, Latinos and Latinas face four choices: retaining a blind loyalty to a romanticized past, assimilating, violating each other, or transforming their ethnic and racial group for the better. This examination of the underlying sacred meaning of the stories of the Latino culture attempts to determine whether these stories are destructive or creative. Now coming of age, la comunidad Latina, previously wounded by assimilation, continues to tell its story in art, literature, history, and religion so that the world may, perhaps for the first time, see its personal, political, historical, and sacred faces. The most important story now being lived is that of Latina women and Latino men who are making choices that will determine the ultimate meaning of a new Latino culture in this nation.
Argues that traditional political science is failing to identify and address fundamental political phenomena of our time and proposes an alternative value-based political science.
