Inside Mexico


Book Description

The key to successful business and travel in today’s Mexico In Mexico, as everywhere, details of etiquette, culture, and protocol can make or break any business or social interaction. This fascinating and informative guide provides everything you need to develop a solid working knowledge of the Mexican people, their unique customs and values, and their distinct world view. You’ll learn: How to talk to superiors and subordinates in the work-place, work with bureaucrats and officials, and schedule meetings Crucial information on family, gender roles, bureaucracy, religion, time, manners, dress and appearance, meals, work, and leisure Distinctions between rural and city life The fine points of body language, socializing, conversing, making friends, dining out, romance, and Mexican humor Insights into traditional Mexican mores and how they are changing in response to rapid modernization If you are planning to live, visit, or do business in Mexico, here is a reference you cannot afford to be without.




Self-Defense in Mexico


Book Description

In Mexico and across other parts of Latin America local Indigenous peoples have built community policing groups as a means of protection where the state has limited control over, and even complicity in, crime and violence. Luis Hernandez Navarro, a leading Mexican journalist, offers a riveting investigation of these armed self-defense groups that sprang up around the time of the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. Available in English for the first time, the book spotlights the intense precarity of everyday life in parts of Mexico. Hernandez Navarro shows how the self-defense response, which now includes wealthier rancher and farmer groups, is being transformed by Mexico's expanding role in the multibillion dollar global drug trade, by foreign corporations' extraction of raw minerals in traditionally Indigenous lands, and by the resulting social changes in local communities. But as Hernandez Navarro acknowledges, self-defense is highly controversial. Community policing may provide citizens with increased agency, but for government officials it can be a dangerous threat to the status quo. Leftists and liberals are wary of how the groups may be linked to paramilitary forces and vulnerable to manipulation by drug traffickers and the government alike. This book answers the urgent call to understand the dangerous complexities of government failures and popular solutions.




Mexico in Revolution, 1912-1920


Book Description

Part of the Reacting to the Past series, Mexico in Revolution, 1912-1920 invites students to stabilize Mexico's fragile government and debate a variety of reforms




Mexico in Verse


Book Description

The history of Mexico is spoken in the voice of ordinary people. In rhymed verse and mariachi song, in letters of romance and whispered words in the cantina, the heart and soul of a nation is revealed in all its intimacy and authenticity. Mexico in Verse, edited by Stephen Neufeld and Michael Matthews, examines Mexican history through its poetry and music, the spoken and the written word. Focusing on modern Mexico, from 1840 to the 1980s, this volume examines the cultural venues in which people articulated their understanding of the social, political, and economic change they witnessed taking place during times of tremendous upheaval, such as the Mexican-American War, the Porfiriato, and the Mexican Revolution. The words of diverse peoples—people of the street, of the field, of the cantinas—reveal the development of the modern nation. Neufeld and Matthews have chosen sources so far unexplored by Mexicanist scholars in order to investigate the ways that individuals interpreted—whether resisting or reinforcing—official narratives about formative historical moments. The contributors offer new research that reveals how different social groups interpreted and understood the Mexican experience. The collected essays cover a wide range of topics: military life, railroad accidents, religious upheaval, children’s literature, alcohol consumption, and the 1985 earthquake. Each chapter provides a translated song or poem that encourages readers to participate in the interpretive practice of historical research and cultural scholarship. In this regard, Mexico in Verse serves both as a volume of collected essays and as a classroom-ready primary document reader.




Made in Mexico


Book Description

The experiment with neoliberal market-oriented economic policy in Latin America, popularly known as the Washington Consensus, has run its course. With left-wing and populist regimes now in power in many countries, there is much debate about what direction economic policy should be taking, and there are those who believe that state-led development might be worth trying again. Susan Gauss’s study of the process by which Mexico transformed from a largely agrarian society into an urban, industrialized one in the two decades following the end of the Revolution is especially timely and may have lessons to offer to policy makers today. The image of a strong, centralized corporatist state led by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) from the 1940s conceals what was actually a prolonged, messy process of debate and negotiation among the postrevolutionary state, labor, and regionally based industrial elites to define the nationalist project. Made in Mexico focuses on the distinctive nature of what happened in the four regions studied in detail: Guadalajara, Mexico City, Monterrey, and Puebla. It shows how industrialism enabled recalcitrant elites to maintain a regionally grounded preserve of local authority outside of formal ruling-party institutions, balancing the tensions among centralization, consolidation of growth, and Mexico’s deep legacies of regional authority.




Myths of Demilitarization in Postrevolutionary Mexico, 1920-1960


Book Description

At the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1920, Mexico's large, rebellious army dominated national politics. By the 1940s, Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was led by a civilian president and claimed to have depoliticized the army and achieved the bloodless pacification of the Mexican countryside through land reform, schooling, and indigenismo. However, historian Thomas Rath argues, Mexico's celebrated demilitarization was more protracted, conflict-ridden, and incomplete than most accounts assume. Civilian governments deployed troops as a police force, often aimed at political suppression, while officers meddled in provincial politics, engaged in corruption, and crafted official history, all against a backdrop of sustained popular protest and debate. Using newly available materials from military, intelligence, and diplomatic archives, Rath weaves together an analysis of national and regional politics, military education, conscription, veteran policy, and popular protest. In doing so, he challenges dominant interpretations of successful, top-down demilitarization and questions the image of the post-1940 PRI regime as strong, stable, and legitimate. Rath also shows how the army's suppression of students and guerrillas in the 1960s and 1970s and the more recent militarization of policing have long roots in Mexican history.




Mexico from the Inside Out


Book Description

The debut book from Mexico's best chef, Enrique Olvera of Pujol, pioneer of contemporary, authentic Mexican food and global gourmet influencer. As featured on Good Morning America. Enrique Olvera is the most famous and celebrated Mexican chef working today. Olvera's restaurant Pujol was ranked #1 in Mexico and #20 in the world at the World's 50 Best Restaurant Awards. This is his first book and the first ever high-end chef cookbook in English on Mexican cuisine. It captures and presents a new contemporary Mexican style of food, rooted in tradition but forward thinking in its modern approach. Olvera has pioneered and defined this new way of cooking and belongs to a global group of gourmet influencers that includes Noma's René Redzepi, Dom's Alex Attala, Osteria Francescana's Massimo Bottura and elBulli's legendary Ferran Adrià. Olvera rethinks how to use traditional, authentic local ingredients using unusual flavor combinations to create a reinvented way of cooking and eating. Mexico from the Inside Out includes both sophisticated and more accessible recipes to explain Enrique's philosophy, vision, and process. He is fueled by a constant exploration of Mexico's ingredients and culinary history, and inspired by his early family memories about food. This book goes beyond stereotypes to reveal new possibilities of Mexican cuisine, which is now an essential part of the international conversation about gastronomy. Features: –Over 65 recipes, each with an elegant photograph, from the sophisticated dishes served at Pujol to more accessible casual dishes that he enjoys with his family at home. –More than 100 atmospheric photographs capture the vivid mosaic of the Mexican landscape while tip-in pages bring the reader up close to Enrique's vision and philosophy about food. Mexico from the Inside Out is the latest addition to Phaidon's bestselling and influential collection of cookbooks by the world's most exciting chefs.




Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico


Book Description

In this history of childbirth and contraception in Mexico, Nora E. Jaffary chronicles colonial and nineteenth-century beliefs and practices surrounding conception, pregnancy and its prevention, and birth. Tracking Mexico's transition from colony to nation, Jaffary demonstrates the central role of reproduction in ideas about female sexuality and virtue, the development of modern Mexico, and the growth of modern medicine in the Latin American context. The story encompasses networks of people in all parts of society, from state and medical authorities to mothers and midwives, husbands and lovers, employers and neighbors. Jaffary focuses on key topics including virginity, conception, contraception and abortion, infanticide, "monstrous" births, and obstetrical medicine. Her approach yields surprising insights into the emergence of modernity in Mexico. Over the course of the nineteenth century, for example, expectations of idealized womanhood and female sexual virtue gained rather than lost importance. In addition, rather than being obliterated by European medical practice, features of pre-Columbian obstetrical knowledge, especially of abortifacients, circulated among the Mexican public throughout the period under study. Jaffary details how, across time, localized contexts shaped the changing history of reproduction, contraception, and maternity.




Living in . . . Mexico


Book Description

Discover what it’s like to grow up in Mexico with this fascinating, nonfiction Level 2 Ready-to-Read, part of a new series all about kids just like you in countries around the world! ¡Hola! My name is Rosa, and I’m a kid just like you living in Mexico. Mexico is a country filled with beautiful art, incredible ancient ruins, and gorgeous beaches, rainforests, and deserts! Have you ever wondered what Mexico is like? Come along with me to find out! Each book in our new Living in… series is narrated by a kid growing up in their home country and is filled with fresh, modern illustrations as well as loads of history, geography, and cultural goodies that fit perfectly into Common Core standards. Join kids from all over the world on a globe-trotting adventure with the Living in… series—sure to be a hit with children, parents, educators, and librarians alike!




The Power and Politics of Art in Postrevolutionary Mexico


Book Description

Stephanie J. Smith brings Mexican politics and art together, chronicling the turbulent relations between radical artists and the postrevolutionary Mexican state. The revolution opened space for new political ideas, but by the late 1920s many government officials argued that consolidating the nation required coercive measures toward dissenters. While artists and intellectuals, some of them professed Communists, sought free expression in matters both artistic and political, Smith reveals how they simultaneously learned the fine art of negotiation with the increasingly authoritarian government in order to secure clout and financial patronage. But the government, Smith shows, also had reason to accommodate artists, and a surprising and volatile interdependence grew between the artists and the politicians. Involving well-known artists such as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, as well as some less well known, including Tina Modotti, Leopoldo Mendez, and Aurora Reyes, politicians began to appropriate the artists' nationalistic visual images as weapons in a national propaganda war. High-stakes negotiating and co-opting took place between the two camps as they sparred over the production of generally accepted notions and representations of the revolution's legacy—and what it meant to be authentically Mexican.