What was it like working in the fields? Well, it’s laborious work and sometimes dangerous, encountering rattlesnakes. Every year the family had to go out in the road to many towns to pick cotton. This was for six to seven months of the year to make enough money to support our family and to survive. Without the cotton fields, there was no way to make it. Working in the cold weather and summer months were the worst. I was one of twelve in my family. Our predicament was not a matter of choice, but a matter of being born. Back in the day, the cotton fields became our only salvation and provided opportunities for a better life. We traveled the road of hope; the road of struggles; the road of injustice, hate, and discrimination—the roads we traveled to make enough money just to pay our bills and eat. For over twenty years, those roads were traveled in the forties, fifties, and sixties. Working in the cotton fields was hope—a stepping stone to a better future, which was our hope.

What was it like working in the fields? Well, it's laborious work and sometimes dangerous, encountering rattlesnakes. Every year the family had to go out in the road to many towns to pick cotton. This was for six to seven months of the year to make enough money to support our family and to survive. Without the cotton fields, there was no way to make it. Working in the cold weather and summer months were the worst. I was one of twelve in my family. Our predicament was not a matter of choice, but a matter of being born. Back in the day, the cotton fields became our only salvation and provided opportunities for a better life. We traveled the road of hope; the road of struggles; the road of injustice, hate, and discrimination-the roads we traveled to make enough money just to pay our bills and eat. For over twenty years, those roads were traveled in the forties, fifties, and sixties. Working in the cotton fields was hope-a stepping stone to a better future, which was our hope.

"This book, written mainly with the non-Italian reader in mind, addresses a central problem in textual criticism...namely, how to try to correctly reconstruct a text of the past so that, even if not identical, it is as close as possible to the lost original, starting from a number of copies more or less full of mistakes; that is to say, how to preserve part of the memory of our past."--Preface, p. [13].

The anonymous novella 'The Life and Times of Mother Andrea' is an account of the life of the owner of a Madrid brothel. Probably written by a resident of Amsterdam, and following the picaresque mode of first person narrative, it details the amusing experiences of Mother Andrea and the prostitutes under her charge.

For centuries throughout large portions of the globe, petty agriculturalists and industrialists have set their physical and mental energies to work producing products for direct consumption by their households and for exchange. This twofold household reproduction strategy, according to both Marxist and neoclassical approaches to development, should have disappeared from the global economy as labor was transformed into a producer as well as a consumer of capitalist commodities. But in fact, during the twentieth century, only the United States and Britain seem to have approximated this predicted scenario. Tens of millions of households in contemporary Asia, Africa, and Latin America and millions more in industrialized capitalist economies support themselves through petty commodity production alone or in combination with petty industry wage labor. Obliging Need provides a detailed and comprehensive analysis of small-scale peasant and artisan enterprise in the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico. The authors show how commodity production is organized and operates in different craft industries, as well as the ways in which it combines with other activities such as household chores, agriculture, wage labor, and petty commerce. They demonstrate how—contrary to developmentalist dogma—small-scale capitalism develops from within Mexico's rural economy. These findings will be important for everyone concerned with improving the lives and economic opportunities of countryfolk in the Third World. As the authors make clear, political mobilization in rural Mexico will succeed only as it addresses the direct producers' multiple needs for land, credit, more jobs, health insurance, and, most importantly, more equitable remuneration for their labor and greater rewards for their enterprise.