Explicitly focusing on the malaise of underdevelopment that has shaped the country since the Spanish conquest, Ramón Eduardo Ruiz offers a panoramic interpretation of Mexican history and culture from the pre-Hispanic and colonial eras through the twentieth century. Drawing on economics, psychology, literature, film, and history, he reveals how development processes have fostered glaring inequalities, uncovers the fundamental role of race and class in perpetuating poverty, and sheds new light on the contemporary Mexican reality. Throughout, Ruiz traces a legacy of dependency on outsiders, and considers the weighty role the United States has played, starting with an unjust war that cost Mexico half its territory. Based on Ruiz’s decades of research and travel in Mexico, this penetrating work helps us better understand where the country has come, why it is where it is today, and where it might go in the future.
The vast stretch of mostly arid lands and deserts that makes up the border between Mexico and the United States is not only one of the longest international boundaries in the world, setting apart two entirely different countries for more than two thousand miles, it is the backdrop for a seemingly endless series of major binational news stories. Witness the headline-grabbing attention garnered by NAFTA and the global economy; the assembly plants labeled saviors of the Mexican poor; the accounts applauding the capture of Mexican drug lords; and the columns upon columns devoted to stories about illegal immigration. Nowhere else does a poor, Third World country, like Mexico, share a common border with a wealthy, powerful neighbor del otro lado (on the other side). Here, as one goes, so goes the other.On the Rim of Mexico: Encounters of the Rich and Poor addresses the ties and asymmetries across the Mexico-U.S. border, from Tijuana/San Diego to Matamoros/Brownsville. Based on author Ram-duardo Ruiz's extensive research, travels, remembrances, and first-hand interviews with the people on the Mexican side, the book probes the history, economics, and customs which have shaped this region today. While the author considers many timely issues (the impact of drug trafficking, legal and illegal immigration, assembly plants and the global economy, and the ecological disaster in the making), the book is also an examination of the borderlands themselves: what they are, how they came to be, and salient aspects of life in this region of the world. Moreover, it is an exploration of binational themes. For Mexicans who live and die next door to the almighty Uncle Sam, nearly everything has a binational ring?even personal identity. On the Rim of Mexico is a moving portrait of the people, places, and issues which make-up border life today.
Explicitly focusing on the malaise of underdevelopment that has shaped the country since the Spanish conquest, Ramón Eduardo Ruiz offers a panoramic interpretation of Mexican history and culture from the pre-Hispanic and colonial eras through the twentieth century. Drawing on economics, psychology, literature, film, and history, he reveals how development processes have fostered glaring inequalities, uncovers the fundamental role of race and class in perpetuating poverty, and sheds new light on the contemporary Mexican reality. Throughout, Ruiz traces a legacy of dependency on outsiders, and considers the weighty role the United States has played, starting with an unjust war that cost Mexico half its territory. Based on Ruiz’s decades of research and travel in Mexico, this penetrating work helps us better understand where the country has come, why it is where it is today, and where it might go in the future.
The New Latino Studies Reader is designed as a contemporary, updated, multifaceted collection of writings that bring to force the exciting, necessary scholarship of the last decades. Its aim is to introduce a new generation of students to a wide-ranging set of essays that helps them gain a truer understanding of what itÕs like to be a Latino in the United States. Ê With the reader, students explore the sociohistorical formation of Latinos as a distinct panethnic group in the United States, delving into issues of class formation; social stratification; racial, gender, and sexual identities; and politics and cultural production. And while other readers now in print may discuss Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans and Central Americans as distinct groups with unique experiences, this text explores both the commonalities and the differences that structure the experiences of Latino Americans. Timely, thorough, and thought-provoking, The New Latino Studies Reader provides a genuine view of the Latino experience as a whole. Ê
The Cuban Insurrection is an in-depth study of the first stage of the Cuban Revolution, the years from 1952 to 1959. The volume depicts the origins of the conflict, details the middle years, and ends with Fidel Castro's victorious arrival In Havana on January 8, 1959. Based on a wealth of hitherto unpublished original material, including confidential military reports, letters from various leaders of the insurrection and data gathered from interviews held In Cuba and abroad, the book Is a descriptive historical analysis of the struggle against military dictator Fulgencio Batista. The authors challenge the traditional premise that Cuba's insurrection began in the rural areas and only later expanded into urban areas. Instead they argue that the insurrectionary struggle was based upon combined urban-rural guerrilla warfare against the regular army. Basically, The Cuban Insurrection treats two major movements involved in the struggle—The Directorio Revolucionario and the M-26-7—and examines the growth, ideology, conflicts, and military strategies of their respective rural and urban organizations. The book includes a detailed analysis of combat, strikes, uprisings, and expeditions. Original maps and charts illustrate battles, maneuvers, and guerrilla political structures.
Since the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Barcelona has striven to sustain an image of modernity that distinguishes itself within Spain. Barcelona's Vocation of Modernity traces the development of that image through texts that foreground key social and historical issues. It begins with Barcelona's "coming of age" in the 1888 Universal Exposition and focuses on the first major narrative work of modern Catalan literature, La febre d'or. Positing an inextricable link between literature and modernity, Resina establishes a literary framework for the evolution of the image of Barcelona's modernity through the 1980s, when the consciousness of modernity took on an ironic circularity. Because the city is an aggregation of knowledge, Resina draws from sociology, urban studies, sociolinguistics, history, psychoanalysis, and literary history to produce a complex account of Barcelona's self-reflection through culture. The last chapter offers a glimpse into the "post-historical" city, where temporality has been sacrificed to the spatialization associated with the seductions of the spectacle.
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