Hometown Ties


Book Description

Decades ago, four Lindas in the same first-grade classroom decided to go by their middle names, form a club, and be friends forever. Now they're all back home in Clifden, Oregon, all thrilled at the chance to reinvent their lives together. But for all of them, their fifties have brought growing pains. Join the four Lindas as they learn about forgiveness and faith, about asking for help and standing on their own two feet - and about love, which makes everything else possible.




Hometown


Book Description

When Tessa's big-city plans take the A Train to disaster, she lands in her sleepy hometown, smack in the middle of the most unlikely love triangle ever to hit Pennsylvania's Amish Country. Hot-shot Dr. Richard Bruce is bound to Green Ridge by loyalty that runs deep. Deeper still is Jonas Rishel's tie to the land and his family's Amish community. Behind the wheel of a 1979 camper van, Tessa idles at a fork in the road. Will she cruise the superhighway to the future? Or take a slow trot to the past and a mysterious society she never dreamed she'd glimpse from the inside?




Border Lives


Book Description

In Border Lives, Sergio Chávez moves past Tijuana's notorious image as a hub of sex, drugs, and crime to tell the story of the diverse group of individuals who use both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border as a resource to construct their livelihoods. Based on ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews, Chávez explores the complex and often contradictory ways in which the border influences the livelihood strategies and lifestyles of border crossers. The border shapes respondents' knowledge and relationships, controls their time, and allows them to convert U.S. wages into a Mexican standard of living without losing the social and cultural comforts of Tijuana-as-home. A substantial contribution to migration and labor studies, Border Lives provides empirical grounding to theories of how geographical borders shape human action.




Yoruba Hometowns


Book Description

The pattern of migrants maintaining strong ties with their home communities is particularly common in sub-Saharan Africa, where it has important social, cultural, political, and economic implications. This book explores the significance of hometown connections for civil society and local development in Nigeria. Rich ethnographic description and case studies illustrate the links that the Ijesa Yoruba maintain with their communities of origin - links that both help to shape social identity and contribute to local development. Trager also examines indigenous concepts of development, demonstrating how the Yoruba bring their understandings of development to efforts in their own communities. Placing her work in the context of national political and economic change, she raises questions about the motivations, implications, and consequences of local development efforts, not only for the communities and their members, but also for the larger polity.




A Nation of Emigrants


Book Description

What do governments do when much of their population simply gets up and walks away? In Mexico and other migrant-sending countries, mass emigration prompts governments to negotiate a new social contract with their citizens abroad. After decades of failed efforts to control outflow, the Mexican state now emphasizes voluntary ties, dual nationality, and rights over obligations. In this groundbreaking book, David Fitzgerald examines a region of Mexico whose citizens have been migrating to the United States for more than a century. He finds that emigrant citizenship does not signal the decline of the nation-state but does lead to a new form of citizenship, and that bureaucratic efforts to manage emigration and its effects are based on the membership model of the Catholic Church.




Chinese and Indian Merchants in Modern Asia


Book Description

In Chinese and Indian Merchants in Modern Asia, the contributors put together an important and lucid study of overseas Chinese and Indian merchants and their impacts on the emerging global economy from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries. In contrast to the conventional focus on the merchants’ networks per se, the chapters of this volume uncover their “networking,” the process in which they constructed and utilized linkages based on the shared concepts such as caste, kin alliances, and religion. By analyzing the interactions between the merchants and the European and Japanese empires, along with Asian states, this volume provides the critical insights into the configuration of the regional economic order in the past and at present.




Minuteman


Book Description

"Beightler's service in France during World War I and his successful leadership of the 37th in WWII's New Georgia, Bougainville, and Luzon campaigns are portrayed against the often rocky relationship between the Guard and the regular military establishment."--BOOK JACKET.




Hopelessly Alien


Book Description

Hopelessly Alien is an in-depth study of Italian immigration to Chicago Heights, Illinois, between 1910 and 1950. Drawing upon oral histories, interviews, historical documents, and census materials, Louis Corsino examines the critical concept of hope, which most immigration studies have cast in privatized, psychological terms as the motivation to emigrate in search of a better life. This investigation offers a more contentious, sociological perspective, depicting hope as both an ideological lure to recruit and manage the "foreign element" and as a resource immigrants employed to purchase acceptance and avoid a disparaging label as a "hopelessly alien" stranger. These dialectical processes are illustrated through the Italian immigrants' pursuit of occupational mobility and homeownership, and the appropriation of their children's hopes. Each became forms of cultural capital that demonstrated a public commitment to the American ethos of "joyful striving." Each provided measures of success, but these individual pursuits came at the expense of upsetting the necessary tension between individual and communal hopes.




Familia


Book Description

Anthropologists, historians, and sociologists will find here a striking challenge to accepted explanations of the northward movement of migrants from Mexico into the United States. Alvarez investigates the life histories of pioneer migrants and their offspring, finding a human dimension to migration which centers on the family. Spanish, American, and English exploits paved the way for exchange between Baja and Alta California. Alvarez shows how cultural stability actually increased as migrants settled in new locations, bringing their common values and memories with them.




Metropolitan Migrants


Book Description

Challenging many common perceptions, this book is dedicated to understanding a major new phenomenon - the large number of skilled urban workers who are coming to America from Mexico's cities. Based on a ten-year study of one working-class neighbourhood in Monterrey, the book studies the forces that lead to Mexican emigration.