Yucatecans in Dallas, Texas


Book Description

Through fascinating vignettes and case studies, this unique text illustrates how Yucatecan migrants actively maintain social ties across borders. It also paints a vivid picture of the people and their lives. It places them in the context of current U.S. immigration policy and mesmerizes students by bringing them up to speed on one of the most crucial issues facing the U.S. today.




Yucatecans in Dallas, Texas


Book Description

Through fascinating vignettes and case studies, this unique text illustrates how Yucatecan migrants actively maintain social ties across borders. It also paints a vivid picture of the people and their lives. It places them in the context of current U.S. immigration policy and mesmerizes students by bringing them up to speed on one of the most crucial issues facing the U.S. today.




Purity and Exile


Book Description

This book explores how categories of identity such as "Hutu" and "Tuts" produced through violence and exile. In 1972 the Burundi army, controlled by t Tutsis, responded to an attempted Hutu rebellion with mass killings of the Hutu The author conducted a year of anthropological field research in Western Tanzani among two groups of Hutu refugees who had fled the killings. One refugee group Kigoma township and the other in the isolated Mishamo refugee camp. The town refugees tended to seek ways of assimilating and inhabiting multiple shifting id contrast to the camp refugees who continually engaged in an impassioned reconstr of their history as a people. Ethnic traits ascribed by social scientists and were freely borrowed to assert cultural difference in this process of identity r In highlighting the different responses to exile in the two refugee groups, this against the assumption that displacement erodes collective identity and shows th possible for refugees in camps to locate their identities within their very disp Mishamo, the refugee camp itself functioned as a spatial and symbolic site for i political and moral community of Hutu.




Accountability Across Borders


Book Description

Collecting the diverse perspectives of scholars, labor organizers, and human-rights advocates, Accountability across Borders is the first edited collection that connects studies of immigrant integration in host countries to accounts of transnational migrant advocacy efforts, including case studies from the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Covering the role of federal, state, and local governments in both countries of origin and destinations, as well as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), these essays range from reflections on labor solidarity among members of the United Food and Commercial Workers in Toronto to explorations of indigenous students from the Maya diaspora living in San Francisco. Case studies in Mexico also discuss the enforcement of the citizenship rights of Mexican American children and the struggle to affirm the human rights of Central American migrants in transit. As policies regarding immigration, citizenship, and enforcement are reaching a flashpoint in North America, this volume provides key insights into the new dynamics of migrant civil society as well as the scope and limitations of directives from governmental agencies.







Archaeological Human Remains


Book Description

This volume addresses the directions that studies of archaeological human remains have taken in a number of different countries, where attitudes range from widespread support to prohibition. Overlooked in many previous publications, this diversity in attitudes is examined through a variety of lenses, including academic origins, national identities, supporting institutions, archaeological context and globalization. The volume situates this diversity of attitudes by examining past and current tendencies in studies of archaeologically-retrieved human remains across a range of geopolitical settings. In a context where methodological approaches have been increasingly standardized in recent decades, the volume poses the question if this standardization has led to a convergence in approaches to archaeological human remains or if significant differences remain between practitioners in different countries. The volume also explores the future trajectories of the study of skeletal remains in the different jurisdictions under scrutiny.




Mirror-travels


Book Description

Offering a critical analysis of Smithson's view of time, it provides comprehensive case studies of three of his most influential projects: "The Monuments of Passaic," a sardonic tour of a decaying New Jersey city conducted in the wake of the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act; "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan," a textual-sculptural-photographic travelogue that coincided with a series of revolutionary discoveries about Maya history; and the Spiral Jetty."--BOOK JACKET.




Iberian Imperialism and Language Evolution in Latin America


Book Description

As rich as the development of the Spanish and Portuguese languages has been in Latin America, no single book has attempted to chart their complex history. Gathering essays by sociohistorical linguists working across the region, Salikoko S. Mufwene does just that in this book. Exploring the many different contact points between Iberian colonialism and indigenous cultures, the contributors identify the crucial parameters of language evolution that have led to today’s state of linguistic diversity in Latin America. The essays approach language development through an ecological lens, exploring the effects of politics, economics, cultural contact, and natural resources on the indigenization of Spanish and Portuguese in a variety of local settings. They show how languages adapt to new environments, peoples, and practices, and the ramifications of this for the spread of colonial languages, the loss or survival of indigenous ones, and the way hybrid vernaculars get situated in larger political and cultural forces. The result is a sophisticated look at language as a natural phenomenon, one that meets a host of influences with remarkable plasticity.







Zapotecs on the Move


Book Description

Through interviews with three generations of Yalálag Zapotecs (“Yaláltecos”) in Los Angeles and Yalálag, Oaxaca, this book examines the impact of international migration on this community. It traces five decades of migration to Los Angeles in order to delineate migration patterns, community formation in Los Angeles, and the emergence of transnational identities of the first and second generations of Yalálag Zapotecs in the United States, exploring why these immigrants and their descendents now think of themselves as Mexican, Mexican Indian immigrants, Oaxaqueños, and Latinos—identities they did not claim in Mexico. Based on multi-site fieldwork conducted over a five-year period, Adriana Cruz-Manjarrez analyzes how and why Yalálag Zapotec identity and culture have been reconfigured in the United States, using such cultural practices as music, dance, and religious rituals as a lens to bring this dynamic process into focus. By illustrating the sociocultural, economic, and political practices that link immigrants in Los Angeles to those left behind, the book documents how transnational migration has reflected, shaped, and transformed these practices in both their place of origin and immigration.