This clearly written and informative book explores effects of race and culture factors in the US-Mexican relations.

This book captures and reveals the intriguing complexities of daily life in Mexico, from its artistic pursuits to its political and economic patterns. It is of interest to students who during their professional career expect to come into contact with citizens of Mexican origin in the United States.

Mexico comprises 32 diverse states, and this reference is the first to succinctly profile each. Each chapter devoted to one of the states provides a contemporary snapshot of the most important information to know about the state, with essay sections on its characteristics, flora and fauna, cultural groups and languages, history, economy, social customs, arts, noteworthy places, and cuisine with representative recipes. Familiar and noteworthy names in Mexican culture are highlighted in the applicable sections. The format is perfect for students studying Spanish and travelers and general readers wanting a different angle from that provided in guidebooks and more authoritativeness than they can offer. Readers learn about the pulsing metropolis of Mexico City to the jungle isolation found in the Yucatan Peninsula. Considering the huge political, social, and economic focus on Mexico and the number of Mexican immigrants in the United Status today, Americans need to know more about Mexico and the homeland of these new immigrants. Make this one of the sources you recommend to your patrons to get a quick yet substantial feel for the states and their people. A map and photo accompany each chapter, and the volume contains a chronology, glossary, and selected bibliography.

Threshold Time provides an introductory survey of the cultural, social and political history of Mexican American and Chicano literature, as well as new in-depth analyses of a selection of works that between them span a hundred years of this particular branch of American literature. The book begins its explorations of the “passage of crisis” with Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don, continues with Americo Paredes’ George Washington Gómez, Tomás Rivera’s ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory, and ends with Helena María Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus and Benjamin Alire Sáenz’ Carry Me Like Water. In order to do justice to the idiosyncrasies of the individual texts and the complexities they embrace, the analyses refer to a number of other texts belonging to the tradition, and draw on a wide range of theoretical approaches. The final chapter of Threshold Time brings the various readings together in a discussion circumscribed by the negotiations of a temporality that is strongly aligned with a sense of memory peculiar to the history of the Chicano presence in the United States of America.

In the wake of addressing multiculturalism, transculturalism, racism, and ethnicity, the issue of xenophobia and xenophilia has been somewhat marginalized. The present collection seeks, from a variety of angles, to investigate the relations between Self and Other in the New Literatures in English. How do we register differences and what does an embrace signify for both Self and Other? The contributors deal with a variety of topics, ranging from theoretical reflections on xenophobia, its exploration in terms of intertextuality and New Zealand/Maori historiography, to analyses of migrant and border narratives, and issues of transitionality, authenticity, and racism in Canada and South Africa. Others negotiate identity and alterity in Nigerian, Malaysian, Australian, Indian, Canadian, and Caribbean texts, or reflect on diaspora and orientalism in Australian–Asian and West Indian contexts.

The nineteenth century was a period of peak popularity for travel to Latin America, where a new political independence was accompanied by loosened travel restrictions. Such expeditions resulted in numerous travel accounts, most by men. However, because this period was a time of significant change and exploration, a small but growing minority of female voyagers also portrayed the people and places that they encountered. Women through Women's Eyes draws from ten insightful accounts by female visitors to Latin America in the nineteenth century. These firsthand tales bring a number of Latin American women into focus: nuns, market women, plantation workers, the wives and daughters of landowners and politicians, and even a heroine of the independence movement. Questions of family life, religion, women's labor, and education are addressed, in addition to the interrelationships of men and women within the structure of Latin American societies. Women through Women's Eyes is a perceptive look at Latin American women from various walks of life during this period. Within these pages, the reader catches lengthy glimpses of the women on both sides of the travel accounts-author and subject-and thereby may examine them all and their societies close-up.

A collection of articles that looks at the modernization process in Argentina. It analyzes the difficulties the country faces in the 1990s, over a decade after the restoration of democracy and several years after the end of the Cold War.