Readers will embrace this engaging first-person account of Ximena. She is a young girl from Colombia, who is adapting to cultural adjustments after moving to the United States. Feelings of social and cultural acceptance prevail as Ximena embraces her identity as a Colombian American. This nonfiction title is paired with the fiction title World's Fair Day.

Twice Colombia is the story of a young woman from a small southern town who follows a dream and finds herself living and working on a plateau high in the Andes Mountains of Colombia, SA. Part memoir, part travelogue, it’s a tale of adventure, friendship, and adoption set against the capital city of Bogotá and the lively city of Cali during the seventies and eighties. A dream to see the world and a curiosity about foreign cultures, and plain old good fortune, along with seized opportunities, all played a part in helping her discover a country that hasn’t always had the best press releases. A tribute, above all, to the culture of an often-misunderstood country, Twice Colombia tells a personal story of discovering and acknowledging the remarkable value of each other’s life experiences.

Selected Issues

DIVTransnational ethnography and history of the School of the Americas, analyzing the military, peasant, and activist cultures that are linked by this institution. /div

Hace años que los entendidos venían pronosticando el exitoso crossover de Shakira. La cantante firmó su primer contrato discográfico a los trece años, grabó su segundo álbum a los quince y actuó en una telenovela popular en su Colombia natal. Tenía solamente diecinueve años cuando su tercer álbum, Pies descalzos, la convirtió en la artista de mayor venta en Latinoamérica. Si bien su siguiente álbum, Dónde están los ladrones?, ganó ocho discos de platino en Estados Unidos, no fue hasta su actuación electrizante en la primera entrega de los Premios Grammy Latinos que llamó la atención de todo el país. Aunque el éxito le llegó a una edad tan temprana, a los veinticuatro años Shakira tiene los pies firmes sobre la tierra y rechaza los estereotipos que rodean a las estrellas de rock. Ella es una católica devota, vive con sus padres y cuando no está grabando o de gira prefiere pasar el tiempo con su familia. Esta rockera es una de las pocas estrellas que combinan talento, carisma y sensibilidad, y que además saben muy bien lo que quieren. Para la cantante más fascinante de América Latina desde Ricky Martin, las posibilidades son ilimitadas. Para los millones de personas que ya compran sus discos, Shakira representa la voz de la nueva generación.

This book studies a significant event in US relations with Latin America, shedding light on the role of dependent states and their foreign policy agency in the process by which local concerns become intertwined with the dominant state’s foreign policy. Plan Colombia was a large-scale foreign aid programme through which the US intervened in the internal affairs of Colombia, by invitation. It proved to be one of the major successes of US foreign policy, and has been credited with stemming a potentially catastrophic security failure of the Colombian state. This book discusses the strategies and practices deployed by the Colombian government to influence US foreign policy decision making at the bureaucratic, legislative and executive levels, and is a distinctive contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of small power agency. Giving a clearer insight into the decision making processes in both the US and Colombia, this book founds its argument on solid empirical analysis assembled from interviews of the major players in the events including: Andres Pastrana, President of Colombia; Thomas Pickering, US State Department; Arturo Valenzuela, Senior Director for Inter-American Affairs at the NSA; General Barry McCaffrey, the US ‘Drug Czar’; and Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the US House of Representatives. Approaching the events in question from a bottom-up theoretical perspective that puts the emphasis on the facts of the case, this book will be of great interest to academics, students and policy makers in the field of foreign policy analysis, US foreign policy studies, and Latin American studies.