Economic Life of Mexican Beach Vendors: Acapulco, Puerto Vallarta, and Cabo San Lucas is based on interviews with 82 men and 84 women who vend their wares on beaches in three Mexican tourist centers. Assuming that some people may actively choose self-employment in the informal or semi-informal economy, the employment and educational aspirations of the vendors and their levels of satisfaction with their work are explored. Most of the vendors had other family members who were also vendors, and 75 (45.2 percent) had 5 or more family members who vended, most usually on Mexican beaches. The vendors are aware of the forces of globalization (though they do not express these forces in those words), as revealed by their responses to questions as to how the current world economic recession has affected them. The beach vendors live in essentially segregated neighborhoods that can be considered apartheid-like, far from the tourist zones. Most of the vendors or their parents are rural-to-urban migrants and cross ethnic, linguistic, and economic borders as they migrate to and work in what have been called transnational social spaces. Of the vendors interviewed, 82 (49.4 percent) speak an indigenous language, and of these, 60 (73.2 percent) speak Nahuatl. The majority are from the state of Guerrero, but there were also Zapotec-speakers from Oaxaca. Both indigenous and non-indigenous women take part in beach vending. They are often wives, daughters, or sisters of male beach vendors, and they may be single, married, living in free union, or widowed. Their income is often of central importance to the household economy. This monograph aims to bring their stories to tourists and to scholars and students of tourism development and /or the informal or semi-informal economy in Mexican tourist centers.

While animal suffering and abuse have taken place throughout history, the alienation of humanity from nature caused by the development of capitalism - by the logic of capital and its system of generalized commodity production - accelerated and increased the depredations in scope and scale. The capitalist commodification of animals is extensive. It includes, but is not limited to: livestock production in concentrated animal feeding operations leather and fur production the ivory trade in which tusks are used for 'traditional medicines; or carved into decorative objects entertainment such as in zoos, marine parks, and circuses laboratory experimentation to test medicines, beauty products, pesticides, and other chemicals the pursuit of trophy hunting, sometimes on canned farms and sometimes in the wild bioengineering of livestock and of animals used in laboratories The contributors to this special issue of Research in Political Economy provide insightful analyses that address the historical transformations in the material conditions and ideological conceptions of nonhuman animals, alienated speciesism, the larger ecological crisis that is undermining the conditions of life for all species, and the capitalist commodification of animals that results in widespread suffering, death, and profits. This book is a must-read not only for political economists, but also for researchers interested in animal studies, environmentalism, and sustainability.

In these poems Tamar Diana Wilson has created indellible portraits of women, the challenges women of the world face and how they overcome them.
These are people the author came to know - in Mexico, Costa Rica and in port cities of the Far East where she travelled while working for the Norwegian Merchant Marine.
Susan Bright, poet, author of House of the Mother, Breathing Under Water, Next to the Last Word and The Layers of Our Seeing

Some From Zacatecas is the story of the migration and adaptation of an extended family of undocumented immigrants from that Mexican State to the west side of Los Angeles, and how some of them received amnesty after the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act and some did not. The book looks at the daily lives and interactions of a group of brothers, their wives, and their cousins. It looks both at the triumphs and the tragedies that some migrant workers face during their journey to the north.

Creative non-fiction or fiction, Tales from Colonia Popular seeks to describe the lives of people the author met in a squatter settlement in Mexicali, where she lived from 1988 to 1994. They are meant to depict the struggles of the poor in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds. They tell the stories of women who live in the colonia, including a woman who received Special Agricultural Workers' amnesty for working in the fields in the Imperial Valley and Salinas, a woman who was the colonia's president, and a woman who works in the maquiladora plants. They also tell stories of men who live in the colonia, including a former garbage picker, a drywaller who longs to give his family more than their income can provide, and a young man who was a coyote's helper when he was a child.
from "Only Chiapas? (1995)," a poem by the author
I have seen the best minds of five generations destroyed by poverty
struggling naked moaning sobbing howling in despair . . .
Who dragged themselves through dusty streets at dawn searched for a
way to survive laborers for others . . .
Who sowed hoed cut harvested tended sheep cattle
horses goats burros on haciendas from age seven or eight . . .
Who after 16 years of civil strife . . .
Who then joined their urban cousins some to live on lonely brickyards
no electricity no fans no refrigerators no running water. . .
Some to invade unused lands to form squatter settlements
shanty towns colonias paracaidistas colonias perdidas
colonias populares to build shacks of tarpaulin scrapwood
cardboard crushed aluminum cans trashed by Budweiser and Cola Cola
drinkers to tap the holes against the rain . . .