This volume, the first of its kind, launches a conversation amongst humanities scholars doing fieldwork on the global south. It both offers indispensable tools and demonstrates the value of such work inside and outside of the academy. The contributors reflect upon their experiences of fieldwork, the methods they improvised, their dilemmas and insights, and the ways in which fieldwork shifted their frames of analysis. They explore how to make fieldwork legible to their disciplines and how fieldwork might extend the work of the humanities. The volume is for both those who are already deeply immersed in fieldwork in the humanities and those who are seeking ways to undertake it.

1. One of the first books to bring a comparative study of contemporary borders between South Asia and Latin America. 2. Chapters are written by well-known scholars from South Asia and Latin America. 3. Immigration and cross-border migrations being the debates of the day, this book will be of interest to departments of South Asian and Latin American studies along with cultural studies, literary studies, border studies, arts and aesthetics, visual studies, sociology, comparative politics, international relations, and peace and conflict resolution studies.

How do we address the idea of the literary now at the end of the second decade in the 21st century? Many traditional categories obscure or overlook significant contemporary forms of cultural production. This volume looks at literature and culture in general in this hinge period. Latin American Literature in Transition 1980-2018 examines the ways literary culture complicates national or area studies understandings of cultural production. Topics point to fresh, intersectional understandings of cultural practice, while keeping in mind the ongoing stakes in a struggle over material and intangible cultural and political borders that are being reinforced in formidable ways.

Scholars in COVID Times documents the new and innovative forms of scholarship, community collaboration, and teaching brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this volume, Melissa Castillo Planas and Debra A. Castillo bring together a diverse range of texts, from research-based studies to self-reflective essays, to reexamine what it means to be a publicly engaged scholar in the era of COVID. Between social distancing, masking, and remote teaching—along with the devastating physical and emotional tolls on individuals and families—the disruption of COVID-19 in academia has given motivated scholars an opportunity (or necessitated them) to reconsider how they interact with and inspire students, conduct research, and continue collaborative projects. Addressing a broad range of factors, from anti-Asian racism to pedagogies of resilience and escapism, digital pen pals to international performance, the essays are connected by a flexible, creative approach to community engagement as a core aspect of research and teaching. Timely and urgent, but with long-term implications and applications, Scholars in COVID Times offers a heterogeneous vision of scholarly and pedagogical innovation in an era of contestation and crisis.

Scholars in COVID Times documents the new and innovative forms of scholarship, community collaboration, and teaching brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this volume, Melissa Castillo Planas and Debra A. Castillo bring together a diverse range of texts, from research-based studies to self-reflective essays, to reexamine what it means to be a publicly engaged scholar in the era of COVID. Between social distancing, masking, and remote teaching—along with the devastating physical and emotional tolls on individuals and families—the disruption of COVID-19 in academia has given motivated scholars an opportunity (or necessitated them) to reconsider how they interact with and inspire students, conduct research, and continue collaborative projects. Addressing a broad range of factors, from anti-Asian racism to pedagogies of resilience and escapism, digital pen pals to international performance, the essays are connected by a flexible, creative approach to community engagement as a core aspect of research and teaching. Timely and urgent, but with long-term implications and applications, Scholars in COVID Times offers a heterogeneous vision of scholarly and pedagogical innovation in an era of contestation and crisis.

It is a peculiar fact that U.S.-Mexico border theory is dominated by those who write about, not from, the border. By looking at the work of women writers from both sides of the border, Debra A. Castillo and Maria-Socorro Tabuenca Cordoba open border studies to a truly transnational analysis while bringing questions of gender to the fore.

Border Women rethinks border theory by emphasizing women writers whose work -- in Spanish, English, or a mixture of the two languages -- calls into question accepted notions of border identities. These writers include those who are already well recognized internationally (Helena Maria Viramontes, Sheila and Sandra Ortiz Taylor, and Maria Novato); those who have become part of the Chicano canon (Norma Cantu, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, and Demetria Martinez); along with some of the lesser-known, yet most exciting, women's voices from the Mexican border (Rosario Sanmiguel, Rosina Conde, and Regina Swain).

This volume, the first of its kind, launches a conversation amongst humanities scholars doing fieldwork on the global south. It both offers indispensable tools and demonstrates the value of such work inside and outside of the academy. The contributors reflect upon their experiences of fieldwork, the methods they improvised, their dilemmas and insights, and the ways in which fieldwork shifted their frames of analysis. They explore how to make fieldwork legible to their disciplines and how fieldwork might extend the work of the humanities. The volume is for both those who are already deeply immersed in fieldwork in the humanities and those who are seeking ways to undertake it.

From the most prominent thinkers in Latin American philosophy, literature, politics, and social science comes a challenge to conventional theories of globalization. The contributors to this volume imagine a discourse in which revolution is defined not as a temporalized march of progress or takeover of state power, but as a movement for local control that upholds standards of material conditions for human dignity. Essays on identity, equality, and ethics propose models of transcultural and intercultural relations that replace center/periphery or world-systems approaches; they impel us to focus on building dialogic relationships rather than on accommodating universalized paradigms. Ultimately suggesting a reconstruction of the world in terms of the interests of one of the peripheral regions of the world, Latin American Perspectives on Globalization argues with cogency and urgency that no one within contemporary globalization debates can afford to ignore the Latin American philosophical tradition.

The Scholar as Human brings together faculty from a wide range of disciplines-history; art; Africana, American, and Latinx studies; literature, law, performance and media arts, development sociology, anthropology, and Science and Technology Studies-to focus on how scholarship is informed, enlivened, deepened, and made more meaningful by each scholar's sense of identity, purpose, and place in the world. Designed to help model new paths for publicly-engaged humanities, the contributions to this groundbreaking volume are guided by one overarching question: How can scholars practice a more human scholarship? Recognizing that colleges and universities must be more responsive to the needs of both their students and surrounding communities, the essays in The Scholar as Human carve out new space for public scholars and practitioners whose rigor and passion are equally important forces in their work. Challenging the approach to research and teaching of earlier generations that valorized disinterestedness, each contributor here demonstrates how they have energized their own scholarship and its reception among their students and in the wider world through a deeper engagement with their own life stories and humanity. Contributors: Anna Sims Bartel, Debra A. Castillo, Ella Diaz, Carolina Osorio Gil, Christine Henseler, Caitlin Kane, Shawn McDaniel, A. T. Miller, Scott J. Peters, Bobby J. Smith II, Jose Ragas, Riche Richardson, Gerald Torres, Matthew Velasco, Sara Warner Thanks to generous funding from Cornell University, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

Addresses the topic of prostitution and "easy women" in Mexican literature.

The figure of the prostitute or sexually liberated woman not only permeates Mexican folk songs and popular movies but stands at the crossroads of its national literary culture. In Easy Women, Debra A. Castillo focuses on the prostitute, or the woman perceived as such, in order to ask why this character exerts such a hold on the Mexican imagination.

Combining early twentieth-century novels, current best-selling pulp fiction, and testimonial narratives, Castillo explores how Mexican writers have positioned the "easy woman" in their works. In each example the transgressive woman -- marked by an active sexuality -- serves a crucial narrative function, one that both promotes and challenges myths about women on the continuum of sexual promiscuity. Ending with a discussion based on a series of in-depth interviews with sex workers in Tijuana, Castillo highlights the complexities and ambiguities of these women's professional and personal lives.

Bridging Latin American literary and cultural criticism, gender studies, and studies of Mexican society, Easy Women provides a sophisticated and groundbreaking examination of the place of the sexually liberated woman in contemporary Mexican culture.

What would American literature look like in language other than English, and what would Latin American literature look life if we understood the United States to be a Latin American country and took seriously the work by U.S. Latinos/as in Spanish? Debra A. Castillo explores these questions by highlighting the contributions of Latinos/as writing in Spanish and Spanish. Beginning with the anonymously published 1826 novel "Jicotencal and ending with fiction published at the turn of the twenty-first century, the book details both the characters' and authors' struggles with how to define an American self. Writers from Cuba. Puerto Rico, and Mexico are featured prominently, alongside a sampling of those writers from other Latin American heritages (Peru, Colombia, Chile). Castillo concludes by offering some thoughts on U.S. curricular practice.