When immigrants to the United States need to learn English, receive health services, open a bank account or get a work certification, US state and local governments or non-profit organizations usually assist as part of the process of supporting immigrant integration and, ultimately, citizenship. But over the past two decades, Mexico, and other origin countries of migrants have been increasingly filling gaps in these activities through their consular representations, particularly focusing on populations with precarious legal status. Put in the larger context of diaspora policies, these practices -- focused on establishing closer ties between the origin country and the emigrant population and protecting their rights through the provision of social services -- are one of the clearest manifestations of the reconceptualization of the boundaries of citizenship and the rights and obligations that come with it. This book looks at citizenship and immigrant integration from the perspective of countries of origin: specifically the processes through which Mexico and other Latin American countries are establishing programs to give their emigrant populations better access to education, health, banking, labor rights, language acquisition and civic participation in the United States. While immigrant integration is often assumed as an issue that mainly concerns the population and institutions of the country of destination, these cases demonstrate the role that origin countries play in supporting migrants' access to opportunities to participate as members of the societies they are a part of, challenging the limits of citizenship and sovereignty, and offering examples of innovative practices in the protection of migrants' rights. As an area of migration governance that is rarely discussed, this book offers a critical evaluation of these programs and their impact on emigrants, particularly on those who are undocumented or have precarious legal status, and the collaborations between governments and civil society groups on which the programs are based.

In this book James Scorer argues that culture remains a force for imagining inclusive urban futures based around what inhabitants of the city have in common. Using Buenos Aires as his case study, Scorer takes the urban commons to be those aspects of the city that are shared and used by its various communities. Exploring a hugely diverse set of works, including literature, film, and comics, and engaging with urban theory, political philosophy, and Latin American cultural studies, City in Common paints a portrait of the city caught between opposing forces. Scorer seeks out alternatives to the current trend in analysis of urban culture to read Buenos Aires purely through the lens of segregation, division, and enclosure. Instead, he argues that urban imaginaries can and often do offer visions of more open communities and more inclusive urban futures.

There are urban myths about all kinds of different things, but how many of these myths are actually true? This book takes a look at many different myths, exploring their origins and assigning a “fact” or “phony” label to each after careful evaluation. Fun fact boxes and amusing cartoons and illustrations help explore common beliefs—can people get sucked out of an airplane bathroom’s toilet? Do human fingernails keep growing after a person dies? The only way to find the truth is to keep turning the page!

Dwellers of Memory is an ethnographic study of how urban youth in Colombia came to be at the intersection of multiple forms of political, drug-related, and territorial violence in a country undergoing forty years of internal armed conflict. It examines the ways in which youth in the city of Medellin reconfigure their lives and, cultural worlds in the face of widespread violence. This violence has transgressed familiar boundaries and destroyed basic social supports and networks of trust. This volume attempts to map and understand its patterns and flows. The author explores how Medellin's youth locate themselves and make, sense of violence through contradictory and shifting memory practices. The violence has not completely taken over their cultural worlds or their subjectivities. Practices of remembering and forgetting are key methods by which these youth rework their identities and make sense of the impact of violence on their lives. While the experience of violence is rooted in urban space and urban youth, the memory dwellers use a sense of place, oral histories of death, and narratives of fear as survival strategies for inhabiting violent neighborhoods. The book also examines fissures in memory, the contradictory constructions of young people's subjective selves, and practices of gendered violence and terror. All have and continue to pose risks to the historical memory and cultural survival of the residents of Medellin. Dwellers of Memory offers an alternative ethnographic approach to the study of memory and violence, one that calls into question whether the, role of the ethnographer of violence is to be a mere witness of terror, or to oppose it by writing against it. It will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, and students of, ethnography.

Oral history is inherently about memory, and when oral history interviews are used "in public," they invariably both reflect and shape public memories of the past. Oral History and Public Memories is the only book that explores this relationship, in fourteen case studies of oral history's use in a variety of venues and media around the world. Readers will learn, for example, of oral history based efforts to reclaim community memory in post-apartheid Cape Town, South Africa; of the role of personal testimony in changing public understanding of Japanese American history in the American West; of oral history's value in mapping heritage sites important to Australia's Aboriginal population; and of the way an oral history project with homeless people in Cleveland, Ohio became a tool for popular education. Taken together, these original essays link the well established practice of oral history to the burgeoning field of memory studies.

Tokio, 1995. Una joven colombiana se convierte en vctima de una organizacin de trata de blancas. Un miembro de la mafia Japonesa pone a prueba su cdigo de honor. Y un sentimiento inesperado nace para revelar la esencia de cada uno. Una novela emocionante que devela los enigmas y rituales de una de las organizaciones de crimen organizado ms poderosas del mundo, La Yakusa y recorre las calles oscuras de Tokio para descubrir la vida de las mujeres dedicadas a la profesin ms antigua del mundo. Basada en una historia real, El Yakusa de mi Corazn nos recuerda que el bien se puede encontrar en las circunstancias ms hostiles.