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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Ethnic studies > General
Is Latinidad a racial or an ethnic designation? Both? Neither? The
increasing recognition of diversity within Latinx communities and
the well-known story of shifting census designations have cast
doubt on the idea that Latinidad is a race, akin to white or Black.
And the mainstream media constantly cover the "browning" of the
United States, as though the racial character of Latinidad were
self-evident. Many scholars have argued that the uncertainty
surrounding Latinidad is emancipatory: by queering race--by
upsetting assumptions about categories of human
difference--Latinidad destabilizes the architecture of oppression.
But Laura Grappo is less sanguine. She draws on case studies
including the San Antonio Four (Latinas who were wrongfully accused
of child sex abuse); the football star Aaron Hernandez's
incarceration and suicide; Lorena Bobbitt, the headline-grabbing
Ecuadorian domestic-abuse survivor; and controversies over the
racial identities of public Latinx figures to show how media
institutions and state authorities deploy the ambiguities of
Latinidad in ways that mystify the sources of Latinx political and
economic disadvantage. With Latinidad always in a state of flux, it
is all too easy for the powerful to conjure whatever phantoms serve
their interests.
Son Jarocho was born as the regional sound of Veracruz but over
time became a Mexican national genre, even transnational, genre-a
touchstone of Chicano identity in the United States. Mario Barradas
and Son Jarocho traces a musical journey from the Gulf Coast to
interior Mexico and across the border, describing the
transformations of Son Jarocho along the way. This comprehensive
cultural study pairs ethnographic and musicological insights with
an oral history of the late Mario Barradas, one of Son Jarocho's
preeminent modern musicians. Chicano musician Francisco Gonzalez
offers an insider's account of Barradas's influence and Son
Jarocho's musical qualities, while Rafael Figueroa Hernandez delves
into Barradas's recordings and films. Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez
examines the interplay between Son Jarocho's indigenous roots and
contemporary role in Mexican and US society. The result is a
nuanced portrait of a vital and evolving musical tradition.
The experience of Central Americans in the United States is marked
by a vicious contradiction. In entertainment and information media,
Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, and Hondurans are
hypervisible as threatening guerrillas, MS-13 gangsters, maids, and
"forever illegals." Central Americans are unseen within the broader
conception of Latinx community, foreclosing avenues to recognition.
Yajaira M. Padilla explores how this regime of visibility and
invisibility emerged over the past forty years-bookended by the
right-wing presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump-and how
Central American immigrants and subsequent generations have
contested their rhetorical disfiguration. Drawing from popular
films and TV, news reporting, and social media, Padilla shows how
Central Americans in the United States have been constituted as
belonging nowhere, imagined as permanent refugees outside the
boundaries of even minority representation. Yet in documentaries
about cross-border transit through Mexico, street murals, and other
media, US Central Americans have counteracted their exclusion in
ways that defy dominant paradigms of citizenship and integration.
This special issue advances transnational feminist approaches to
the globally proliferating phenomenon of anti-Muslim racism. The
contributors trace the global circuits and formations of power
through which anti-Muslim racism travels, operates, and shapes
local contexts. The essays center attention on and explore the
gendered, sexualized, and racialized forms of anti-Muslim
oppression and resistance in modern social theory, law, protest
cultures, social media, art, and everyday life in the United States
and transnationally. The contributors illuminate the complex nature
of global anti-Muslim racism through various topics including
Islamophobia in the context of race, gender, and religion; hate
crimes; the sexualization of Islam in social media; queer Muslim
futurism; the connection between secularism and feminism in
Pakistan; the racialization of Muslims in the early Cold War
period; and anti-Muslim racism in Russia. Together the essays
provide a complex picture of the multifaceted nature of the
worldwide spread of anti-Muslim racism. Contributors. Evelyn
Alsultany, Natasha Bakht, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Taneem Husain, Amina
Jamal, Amina Jarmakani, Zeynep K. Korkman, Minoo Moellem, Nadine
Naber, Tatiana Rabinovich, Sherene H. Razack, Tom Joseph Abi Samra,
Elora Shehabuddin, Saiba Varma
Despite their best intentions, professionals in the helping fields
are influenced by a deficit perspective that is pervasive in
research, theory, training programs, workforce preparation
programs, statistical data, and media portrayals of marginalized
groups. They enter their professions ready to fix others and their
interactions are grounded in an assumption that there will be a
problem to fix. They are rarely taught to approach their work with
a positive view that seeks to identify the existing strengths and
assets contributed by individuals who are in difficult
circumstances. Moreover, these professionals are likely to be
entirely unaware of the deficit-based bias that influences the way
they speak, act, and behave during those interactions.
Reconstructing Perceptions of Systemically Marginalized Groups
demonstrates that all individuals in marginalized groups have the
potential to be successful when they are in a strengths-based
environment that recognizes their value and focuses on what works
to promote positive outcomes, rather than on barriers and deficits.
Covering key topics such as education practices, adversity, and
resilience, this reference work is ideal for industry
professionals, administrators, psychologists, policymakers,
researchers, academicians, scholars, instructors, and students.
Little known in America but venerated as a martyr in Iran, Howard
Baskerville was a twenty-two-year-old Christian missionary from
South Dakota who traveled to Persia (modern-day Iran) in 1907 for a
two-year stint teaching English and preaching the gospel. He
arrived in the midst of a democratic revolution-the first of its
kind in the Middle East-led by a group of brilliant young
firebrands committed to transforming their country into a fully
self-determining, constitutional monarchy, one with free elections
and an independent parliament. The Persian students Baskerville
educated in English in turn educated him about their struggle for
democracy, ultimately inspiring him to leave his teaching post and
join them in their fight against a tyrannical shah and his British
and Russian backers. "The only difference between me and these
people is the place of my birth," Baskerville declared, "and that
is not a big difference." In 1909, Baskerville was killed in battle
alongside his students, but his martyrdom spurred on the
revolutionaries who succeeded in removing the shah from power,
signing a new constitution, and rebuilding parliament in Tehran. To
this day, Baskerville's tomb in the city of Tabriz remains a place
of pilgrimage. Every year, thousands of Iranians visit his grave to
honor the American who gave his life for Iran. In this rip-roaring
tale of his life and death, Aslan gives us a powerful parable about
the universal ideals of democracy-and to what degree Americans are
willing to support those ideals in a foreign land. Woven throughout
is an essential history of the nation we now know as
Iran-frequently demonized and misunderstood in the West. Indeed,
Baskerville's life and death represent a "road not taken" in Iran.
Baskerville's story, like his life, is at the center of a whirlwind
in which Americans must ask themselves: How seriously do we take
our ideals of constitutional democracy and whose freedom do we
support?
As early as 1947, Black parents in rural South Carolina began
seeking equal educational opportunities for their children. After
two unsuccessful lawsuits, these families directly challenged
legally mandated segregation in public schools with a third lawsuit
in 1950, which was eventually decided in Brown v. Board of
Education. Amidst the Black parents' resistance, Elizabeth Avery
Waring, a twice-divorced northern socialite, and her third husband,
federal judge J. Waties Waring, launched a rhetorical campaign
condemning white supremacy and segregation. In a series of
speeches, the Warings exposed the incongruity between American
democratic ideals and the reality for Black Americans in the Jim
Crow South. They urged audiences to pressure elected
representatives to force southern states to end legal segregation.
Wanda Little Fenimore employs innovative research methods to
recover the Warings' speeches that said the unsayable about white
supremacy. When the couple poked at the contradiction between
segregation and "all men are created equal," white supremacists
pushed back. As a result, the couple received both damning and
congratulatory letters that reveal the terms upon which segregation
was defended and the reasons those who opposed white supremacy
remained silent. Using rich archival materials, Fenimore crafts an
engaging narrative that illustrates the rhetorical context from
which Brown v. Board of Education arose and dispels the notion that
the decision was inevitable. The first full-length account of the
Warings' rhetoric, this multilayered story of social progress
traces the symbolic battle that provided a locus for change in the
landmark Supreme Court decision.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which
commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out
and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and
impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes
high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using
print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in
1965.
The first Texas-based writer to gain national attention, J. Frank
Dobie proved that authentic writing springs easily from the native
soil of Texas and the Southwest. In best-selling books such as
Tales of Old-Time Texas, Coronado's Children, and The Longhorns,
Dobie captured the Southwest's folk history, which was quickly
disappearing as the United States became ever more urbanized and
industrial. Renowned as "Mr. Texas," Dobie paradoxically has almost
disappeared from view-a casualty of changing tastes in literature
and shifts in social and political attitudes since the 1960s. In
this lively biography, Steven L. Davis takes a fresh look at a J.
Frank Dobie whose "liberated mind" set him on an intellectual
journey that culminated in Dobie becoming a political liberal who
fought for labor, free speech, and civil rights well before these
causes became acceptable to most Anglo Texans. Tracing the full arc
of Dobie's life (1888-1964), Davis shows how Dobie's insistence on
"free-range thinking" led him to such radical actions as calling
for the complete integration of the University of Texas during the
1940s, as well as taking on governors, senators, and the FBI (which
secretly investigated him) as Texas's leading dissenter during the
McCarthy era.
Leonard Moore has been teaching Black history for twenty-five
years, mostly to white people. Drawing on decades of experience in
the classroom and on college campuses throughout the South, as well
as on his own personal history, Moore illustrates how an
understanding of Black history is necessary for everyone. With
Teaching Black History to White People, which is "part memoir, part
Black history, part pedagogy, and part how-to guide," Moore
delivers an accessible and engaging primer on the Black experience
in America. He poses provocative questions, such as "Why is the
teaching of Black history so controversial?" and "What came first:
slavery or racism?" These questions don't have easy answers, and
Moore insists that embracing discomfort is necessary for engaging
in open and honest conversations about race. Moore includes a
syllabus and other tools for actionable steps that white people can
take to move beyond performative justice and toward racial
reparations, healing, and reconciliation.
One of our country's premier cultural and social critics, the
author of such powerful and influential books as Ain't I a Woman
and Black Looks, Bell Hooks has always maintained that eradicating
racism and eradicating sexism must be achieved hand in hand. But
whereas many women have been recognized for their writing on gender
politics, the female voice has been all but locked out of the
public discourse on race. Killing Rage speaks to this imbalance.
These twenty-three essays, most of them new works, are written from
a black and feminist perspective, and they tackle the bitter
difficulties of racism by envisioning a world without it. Hooks
defiantly creates positive plans for the future rather than dwell
in theories of a crisis beyond repair. The essays here address a
spectrum of topics to do with race and racism in the United States:
psychological trauma among African Americans; friendship between
black women and white women; anti-Semitism and racism; internalized
racism in the movies and media. Hooks presents a challenge to the
patriarchal family model, explaining how it perpetuates sexism and
oppression in black life. She calls out the tendency of much of
mainstream America to conflate "black rage" with murderous,
pathological impulses, rather than seeing it as a positive state of
being. And in the title essay she writes about the "killing rage" -
the fierce anger of black people stung by repeated instances of
everyday racism - finding in that rage a healing source of love and
strength, and a catalyst for productive change. Her analysis is
rigorous and her language unsparingly critical, but Hooks writes
with a common touch that has made her a favorite of readers far
from universities.Bell Hooks's work contains multitudes; she is a
feminist who includes and celebrates men, a critic of racism who is
not separatist or Afrocentric, an academic who cares about popular
culture.
More children than ever are crossing international borders alone to
seek asylum worldwide. In the past decade, over a half million
children have fled from Central America to the United States,
seeking safety and a chance to continue lives halted by violence.
Yet upon their arrival, they fail to find the protection that our
laws promise, based on the broadly shared belief that children
should be safeguarded. A meticulously researched ethnography,
Precarious Protections chronicles the experiences and perspectives
of Central American unaccompanied minors and their immigration
attorneys as they pursue applications for refugee status in the US
asylum process. Chiara Galli debunks assumptions about asylum,
including the idea that people are being denied protection because
they file bogus claims. In practice, the United States interprets
asylum law far more narrowly than what is necessary to recognize
real-world experiences of escape from life-threatening violence.
This is especially true for children from Central America. Galli
reveals the formidable challenges of lawyering with children and
exposes the human toll of the US immigration bureaucracy.
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