Acknowledged Legislator: Critical Essays on the Poetry of Martin Espada stands as the first-ever collection of essays on poet and activist Martin Espada. It is also, to date, the only published book-length, single-author study of Espada currently in existence. Relying on innovative, highly original contributions from thirteen Espada scholars, its principal aim is to argue for a long overdue critical awareness of and cultural appreciation for Espada and his body of writing. Acknowledged Legislator accomplishes this task in three fundamental ways: by providing readers with background information on the poet s life and work; offering an examination into the subject matter and dominant themes that are frequently contained in his writing; and finally, by advocating, in a variety of ways, for why we should be reading, discussing, and teaching the Espada canon. Divided into four distinct sections that modulate through several theoretical frames from Espada s attention to resistance poetics and concerns for historical memory to his oppositional critique of neoliberalism and support for a class consciousness grounded in labor rights Acknowledged Legislator offers a cohesive, forward-thinking interpretive statement of the poet s vision and proposes a critical (re)assessment for how we read Espada, now and in the future.

The concept of human rights is often deployed by states in defence of various policies, as well by those resisting the impact of those same policies. Using case studies from contemporary Mexico and Colombia, Perez-Bustillo and Hernandez Mares explore the evolving relationship between these hegemonic and counter-hegemonic visions of human rights.

Acknowledged Legislator: Critical Essays on the Poetry of Martin Espada stands as the first-ever collection of essays on poet and activist Martin Espada. It is also, to date, the only published book-length, single-author study of Espada currently in existence. Relying on innovative, highly original contributions from thirteen Espada scholars, its principal aim is to argue for a long overdue critical awareness of and cultural appreciation for Espada and his body of writing. Acknowledged Legislator accomplishes this task in three fundamental ways: by providing readers with background information on the poet's life and work; offering an examination into the subject matter and dominant themes that are frequently contained in his writing; and finally, by advocating, in a variety of ways, for why we should be reading, discussing, and teaching the Espada canon. Divided into four distinct sections that modulate through several theoretical frames-from Espada's attention to resistance poetics and concerns for historical memory to his oppositional critique of neoliberalism and support for a class consciousness grounded in labor rights-Acknowledged Legislator offers a cohesive, forward-thinking interpretive statement of the poet's vision and proposes a critical (re)assessment for how we read Espada, now and in the future.

Political leaders, social scientists and lawyers are nowadays paying more attention to two, not necessarily related, issues: concrete measures to reduce poverty and practical steps to respect human rights enshrined in international and national legal systems. The innovative contribution of this volume is its bringing together of these two questions. The authors, who are mainly Latin American, are deeply aware of their own continent's particular history vis-a-vis grave human rights violations on the one hand, and the coexistence of great wealth alongside immense inequality on the other. Law, they argue, is no panacea for the intractable problem of poverty. But it can be an indispensable basis for, and complement to, social mobilization, which, in turn, can be strengthened by certain kinds of socially engaged and critical social science. This is all the more so where economic, social and cultural rights are recognized as being just as important as the older agenda of civil and political entitlements. Vigorous advocacy of compliance with international human rights norms and explicit incorporation and actionability of such standards in national legal frameworks can then play a role in the struggle to reduce, and ultimately eradicate, global poverty and social injustice. The contributors include lawyers and social scientists from a number of disciplines. Largely eschewing a set of country case studies, but paying particular attention to indigenous peoples and their struggles against poverty, they explore a range of important questions relating to the intersection of human rights and poverty, including the relatively new notion of the right to development. An important intellectual contribution breaking new ground in the political struggle to reduce world poverty.