Spanning over 500 years, Pura Belpré Award winner Ruth Behar's epic novel tells the stories of four girls from different generations of a Jewish family, many of them forced to leave their country and start a new life. In 1492, during the Spanish Inquisition, Benvenida and her family are banished from Spain for being Jewish, and must flee the country or be killed. They journey by foot and by sea, eventually settling in Istanbul. Over four centuries later, in 1923, shortly after the Turkish war of independence, Reina’s father disowns her for a small act of disobedience. He ships her away to live with an aunt in Cuba, to be wed in an arranged marriage when she turns fifteen. In 1961, Reina’s daughter, Alegra, is proud to be a brigadista, teaching literacy in the countryside for Fidel Castro. But soon Castro’s crackdowns force her to flee to Miami all alone, leaving her parents behind. Finally, in 2003, Alegra’s daughter, Paloma, is fascinated by all the journeys that had to happen before she could be born. A keeper of memories, she’s thrilled by the opportunity to learn more about her heritage on a family trip to Spain, where she makes a momentous discovery. Though many years and many seas separate these girls, they are united by a love of music and poetry, a desire to belong and to matter, a passion for learning, and their longing for a home where all are welcome. And each is lucky to stand on the shoulders of their courageous ancestors.

This study of a northern Spanish community shows how the residents of Santa MarA?a del Monte have acted together at critical times to ensure the survival of their traditional forms of social organization. The survival of these forms has allowed the villagers, in turn, to weather demographic, political, and economic crises over the centuries.

Originally published in 1991.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905."

William D. Lopez details the incredible strain that immigration raids place on Latino communities-and the families and friends who must recover from their aftermath. 2020 International Latino Book Awards Winner First Place, Mariposa Award for Best First Book - Nonfiction Honorable Mention, Best Political / Current Affairs Book On a Thursday in November 2013, Guadalupe Morales waited anxiously with her sister-in-law and their four small children. Every Latino man who drove away from their shared apartment above a small auto repair shop that day had failed to return-arrested, one by one, by ICE agents and local police. As the two women discussed what to do next, a SWAT team clad in body armor and carrying assault rifles stormed the room. As Guadalupe remembers it, "The soldiers came in the house. They knocked down doors. They threw gas. They had guns. We were two women with small children . . . The kids terrified, the kids screaming." In Separated, William D. Lopez examines the lasting damage done by this daylong act of collaborative immigration enforcement in Washtenaw County, Michigan. Exploring the chaos of enforcement through the lens of community health, Lopez discusses deportation's rippling negative effects on families, communities, and individuals. Focusing on those left behind, Lopez reveals their efforts to cope with trauma, avoid homelessness, handle worsening health, and keep their families together as they attempt to deal with a deportation machine that is militarized, traumatic, implicitly racist, and profoundly violent. Lopez uses this single home raid to show what immigration law enforcement looks like from the perspective of the people who actually experience it. Drawing on in-depth interviews with twenty-four individuals whose lives were changed that day in 2013, as well as field notes, records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and his own experience as an activist, Lopez combines rigorous research with moving storytelling. Putting faces and names to the numbers behind deportation statistics, Separated urges readers to move beyond sound bites and consider the human experience of mixed-status communities in the small towns that dot the interior of the United States.

Winner of the 2018 Pura Belpre Award! "A book for anyone mending from childhood wounds."-Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street In this unforgettable multicultural coming-of-age narrative-based on the author's childhood in the 1960s-a young Cuban-Jewish immigrant girl is adjusting to her new life in New York City when her American dream is suddenly derailed. Ruthie's plight will intrigue readers, and her powerful story of strength and resilience, full of color, light, and poignancy, will stay with them for a long time. Ruthie Mizrahi and her family recently emigrated from Castro's Cuba to New York City. Just when she's finally beginning to gain confidence in her mastery of English-and enjoying her reign as her neighborhood's hopscotch queen-a horrific car accident leaves her in a body cast and confined her to her bed for a long recovery. As Ruthie's world shrinks because of her inability to move, her powers of observation and her heart grow larger and she comes to understand how fragile life is, how vulnerable we all are as human beings, and how friends, neighbors, and the power of the arts can sweeten even the worst of times.

This study of a northern Spanish community shows how the residents of Santa MarAa del Monte have acted together at critical times to ensure the survival of their traditional forms of social organization. The survival of these forms has allowed the villagers, in turn, to weather demographic, political, and economic crises over the centuries. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The 25th-anniversary edition of the groundbreaking book that changed anthropology, asserting that ethnographers needn’t exclude themselves or their vulnerabilities from their work

In a new epilogue to this classic work, renowned ethnographer and storyteller Ruth Behar reflects on the groundbreaking impact The Vulnerable Observer has had on anthropology, sociology, and psychology and on scholarly writing. A pocket companion for writers, journalists, documentarians, and activists alike, this book speaks to the power of including oneself in the story, bringing deeper meaning to the relationship between writer, subject, and reader.

In a move revolutionary for its time, The Vulnerable Observer proposed a new theory and practice for humanistic anthropology. No longer should ethnographers write at a distance, clad in their shroud of “objectivity.” In six luminous essays, Behar calls instead for a fresh approach to ethnography, one that is lived and written more openly. Through this very personal account, readers can travel and relate to other peoples and the world around them.

Eloquently interweaving ethnography and memoir, Behar encourages her readers to be open about their experiences, as open as their subjects are with them. She does so in the hope that this work will lead us toward greater depth of understanding and feeling, not only in anthropology but in all efforts to document the shared vulnerability of the observed and the observer.

In this classic memoir that explores the Nazi presence in the south of Chile after the war, Marjorie Agosin writes in the voice of her mother, Frida, who grew up as the daughter of European Jewish immigrants in Chile in the World War II era. Woven into the narrative are the stories of Frida's father, who had to leave Vienna in 1920 because he fell in love with a Christian cabaret dancer; of her paternal grandmother, who arrived in Chile later with a number tattooed on her arm; and of her great-grandmother from Odessa, who loved the Spanish language so much that she repeated its harmonious sounds even in her sleep. Agosin's A Cross and a Star is a moving testament to endurance and to the power of memory and words. This edition includes a collection of important new photographs, a new afterword by the author, and a foreword by Ruth Behar.

Until recently, the combination of a Cuban old boys' network and an ideological emphasis on "tough" writing kept fiction by Cuban women largely unknown and unread. "Cubana," the U.S. version of a groundbreaking anthology of women's fiction published in Cuba in 1996, introduces these once-ignored writers to a new audience. Havana editor and author Mirta Yanez has assembled an impressive group of sixteen stories that reveals the strength and variety of contemporary writing by Cuban women-and offers a glimpse inside Cuba during a time of both extreme economic difficulty and artistic renaissance.
Many of these stories focus pointedly on economic and social conditions. Josefina de Diego's "Internal Monologue on a Corner in Havana" shows us the current crisis through the eyes and voice of a witty economist-turned-vendor who must sell her extra cigarettes. Others-Magaly Sanchez's erotic fantasy "Catalina in the Afternoons" and Mylene Fernandez Pintado's psychologically deft "Anhedonia (A Story in Two Women)"-reveal a nascent Cuban feminism. The twelve-year-old narrator of Aida Bahr's "The Scent of Limes" tries to make sense of her grandparents' conservative values, her stepfather's disappearance, and her mother's fierce independence. The Cuban-American writer Achy Obejas recreates the strange dual identity of the immigrant, while avant-garde stories like the playful and savvy "The Urn and the Name (A Merry Tale)," written by Ena Lucia Portela, reveal the vitality of the experimental tradition in Cuba. And Rosa Ileana Boudet's "Potosi 11: Address Unknown" is both a romantic paean to a time of youth, passion, and revolution, and an attempt to reconcile that past with a diminished present.

"A rich collection that I will use in teaching graduates and undergraduates about the weave of ethnography, narrative, the women's movement, and feminism. Crafted by an impressive range of scholars, the essays are empirically rich and theoretically cogent. But most important, they engage the complexities of multicultural, feminist, and multinational ethnographies and the stories that matter to politics, scholarship, and lives. With an ear for the tones of race and gender, this book answers the political, generic, and theoretical challenge of "Writing Culture with layered essays that rewrite an important range of cultural conversations."--Donna Haraway, author of "Professor, History of Consciousness Board, UCSC

"Since the advent of the 'post-modern' in ethnography, we have been much in need of a marvelous volume such as this, placing 'woman' at the center of the debate. "Women Writing Culture will prove as stimulating for our time as its great predecessor, "Women, Culture and Society was for the 1970s."--Jose E. Limon, University of Texas

"A groundbreaking book--provocative, illuminating, imaginative--and it is a pleasure to read. A trenchant yet always generous feminist critique of the masculinist bias in the theoretical canon of anthropological texts, it expansively and imaginatively maps the future directions of a feminist anthropology. In moving and courageous acts of reconstruction, the writers in this volume boldly cross disciplinary and generic lines, reading fiction as anthropology, writing theater as ethnography, getting personal, radically reconceiving the relationship of self and other and, thereby, the field itself. Feminist scholars of all disciplines will find hereenabling textual and conceptual strategies as well as memorable voices and powerful stories."--Marianne Hirsch, Dartmouth College, author of "The Mother-Daughter Plot

"Telling to Live" embodies the vision that compelled Latina feminists to engage their differences and find common ground. Its contributors reflect varied class, religious, ethnic, racial, linguistic, sexual, and national backgrounds. Yet in one way or another they are all professional producers of "testimonios"--or life stories--whether as poets, oral historians, literary scholars, ethnographers, or psychologists. Through coalitional politics, these women have forged feminist political stances about generating knowledge through experience. Reclaiming "testimonio" as a tool for understanding the complexities of Latina identity, they compare how each made the journey to become credentialed creative thinkers and writers. "Telling to Live" unleashes the clarifying power of sharing these stories.
The complex and rich tapestry of narratives that comprises this book introduces us to an intergenerational group of Latina women who negotiate their place in U.S. society at the cusp of the twenty-first century. These are the stories of women who struggled to reach the echelons of higher education, often against great odds, and constructed relationships of sustenance and creativity along the way. The stories, poetry, memoirs, and reflections of this diverse group of Puerto Rican, Chicana, Native American, Mexican, Cuban, Dominican, Sephardic, mixed-heritage, and Central American women provide new perspectives on feminist theorizing, perspectives located in the borderlands of Latino cultures.
This often heart wrenching, sometimes playful, yet always insightful collection will interest those who wish to understand the challenges U.S. society poses for women of complex cultural heritages who strive to carve out their own spaces in the ivory tower.

"Contributors." Luz del Alba Acevedo, Norma Alarcon, Celia Alvarez, Ruth Behar, Rina Benmayor, Norma E. Cantu, Daisy Cocco De Filippis, Gloria Holguin Cuadraz, Liza Fiol-Matta, Yvette Flores-Ortiz, Ines Hernandez-Avila, Aurora Levins Morales, Clara Lomas, Iris Ofelia Lopez, Mirtha N. Quintanales, Eliana Rivero, Caridad Souza, Patricia Zavella

"Traveling Heavy" is a deeply moving, unconventional memoir by the master storyteller and cultural anthropologist Ruth Behar. Through evocative stories, she portrays her life as an immigrant child and later, as an adult woman who loves to travel but is terrified of boarding a plane. With an open heart, she writes about her Yiddish-Sephardic-Cuban-American family, as well as the strangers who show her kindness as she makes her way through the world. Compassionate, curious, and unafraid to reveal her failings, Behar embraces the unexpected insights and adventures of travel, whether those be learning that she longed to become a mother after being accused of giving the evil eye to a baby in rural Mexico, or going on a zany pilgrimage to the Behar World Summit in the Spanish town of Bejar.
Behar calls herself an anthropologist who specializes in homesickness. Repeatedly returning to her homeland of Cuba, unwilling to utter her last goodbye, she is obsessed by the question of why we leave home to find home. For those of us who travel heavy with our own baggage, Behar is an indispensable guide, full of grace and hope, in the perpetual search for connection that defines our humanity.

Despite the mass dislocation and repatriation efforts of the last century, the study of return movements still sits on the periphery of anthropology and migration research. Homecomings explores the forces and motives that drive immigrants, war refugees, political exiles, and their descendants back to places of origin. By including a range of homecoming experiences, Markowitz and Stefansson destabilize the key oppositions and the key terminologies that have vexed migration studies for decades, analyzing migration and repatriation; home and homeland; and host, returnee, and newcomer through a comparative ethnographic lens. The volume provides rich answers to the following questions: _ Does group repatriation, sponsored and sometimes coerced by national governments or supranational organizations, create resettlement conditions more or less favorable than those experienced by individuals or families who made this journey alone? _ How important are first impressions, living conditions, and initial reception in shaping the experience of home in the homeland? _ What are the expectations that a mythologized homeland encourages in those who have left? Filling a conspicuous gap in the literature on migration in diverse fields such as anthropology, politics, international law, and cultural studies, Homecomings and the gripping ethnographic studies included in the volume demonstrate that a home and a homeland remain salient cultural imperatives that can inspire a call to political action.