Kathryn A. Sloan
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520290310
- eISBN:
- 9780520964532
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520290310.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Latin American History
Popular culture has long conflated Mexico with the macabre. Some persuasive intellectuals argue that Mexicans have a special relationship with death, formed in the crucible of their hybrid ...
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Popular culture has long conflated Mexico with the macabre. Some persuasive intellectuals argue that Mexicans have a special relationship with death, formed in the crucible of their hybrid Aztec-European heritage. Death is their intimate friend; death is mocked and accepted with irony and fatalistic abandon. The commonplace nature of death desensitizes Mexicans to suffering. Death, simply put, defines Mexico. There must have been historical actors who looked away from human misery, but to essentialize a diverse group of people as possessing a unique death cult delights those who want to see the exotic in Mexico or distinguish that society from its peers. Examining tragic and untimely death—namely self-annihilation—reveals a counter narrative. What could be more chilling than suicide, especially the violent death of the young? What desperation or madness pushed the victim to raise the gun to the temple or slip the noose around the neck? A close examination of a wide range of twentieth-century historical documents proves that Mexicans did not accept death with a cavalier chuckle nor develop a unique death cult, for that matter. Quite the reverse, Mexicans behaved just as their contemporaries did in Austria, France, England, and the United States. They devoted scientific inquiry to the malady and mourned the loss of each life to suicide.Less
Popular culture has long conflated Mexico with the macabre. Some persuasive intellectuals argue that Mexicans have a special relationship with death, formed in the crucible of their hybrid Aztec-European heritage. Death is their intimate friend; death is mocked and accepted with irony and fatalistic abandon. The commonplace nature of death desensitizes Mexicans to suffering. Death, simply put, defines Mexico. There must have been historical actors who looked away from human misery, but to essentialize a diverse group of people as possessing a unique death cult delights those who want to see the exotic in Mexico or distinguish that society from its peers. Examining tragic and untimely death—namely self-annihilation—reveals a counter narrative. What could be more chilling than suicide, especially the violent death of the young? What desperation or madness pushed the victim to raise the gun to the temple or slip the noose around the neck? A close examination of a wide range of twentieth-century historical documents proves that Mexicans did not accept death with a cavalier chuckle nor develop a unique death cult, for that matter. Quite the reverse, Mexicans behaved just as their contemporaries did in Austria, France, England, and the United States. They devoted scientific inquiry to the malady and mourned the loss of each life to suicide.
Robert A. Karl
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520293922
- eISBN:
- 9780520967243
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520293922.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Latin American History
This book examines Colombian society's attempt to move beyond the Western Hemisphere's worst mid-century conflict and shows how that effort molded notions of belonging and understandings of the past. ...
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This book examines Colombian society's attempt to move beyond the Western Hemisphere's worst mid-century conflict and shows how that effort molded notions of belonging and understandings of the past. The book reconstructs encounters between government officials, rural peoples, provincial elites, and urban intellectuals during a crucial conjuncture that saw reformist optimism transform into alienation. In addition to offering a sweeping reinterpretation of Colombian history—including the most detailed account of the origins of the FARC insurgency in any language—the book provides a Colombian vantage on global processes of democratic transition, development, and memory formation in the 1950s and 1960s. Broad in scope, this book challenges contemporary theories of violence in Latin America.Less
This book examines Colombian society's attempt to move beyond the Western Hemisphere's worst mid-century conflict and shows how that effort molded notions of belonging and understandings of the past. The book reconstructs encounters between government officials, rural peoples, provincial elites, and urban intellectuals during a crucial conjuncture that saw reformist optimism transform into alienation. In addition to offering a sweeping reinterpretation of Colombian history—including the most detailed account of the origins of the FARC insurgency in any language—the book provides a Colombian vantage on global processes of democratic transition, development, and memory formation in the 1950s and 1960s. Broad in scope, this book challenges contemporary theories of violence in Latin America.
Pablo Piccato
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520292611
- eISBN:
- 9780520966079
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520292611.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Latin American History
This book examines the construction of crime as a central focus of public life in postrevolutionary Mexico. It does so by exploring cases, stories, and characters that attracted Mexican publics ...
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This book examines the construction of crime as a central focus of public life in postrevolutionary Mexico. It does so by exploring cases, stories, and characters that attracted Mexican publics between the 1920s and the 1950s. The problems of learning the truth about criminal events and of adjudicating punishment or forgiveness concerned a broad spectrum of the population. This book looks at narratives, debates, and social practices through which a diversity of actors engaged the state and public opinion around a theme of common interest. Narratives and media about crime and justice that are still in place today developed during the decades of the twentieth century examined in the book: broadly shared ideas about impunity and corruption, extrajudicial punishment and the public meaning of homicide, and the divorce of legal justice and the truth.Less
This book examines the construction of crime as a central focus of public life in postrevolutionary Mexico. It does so by exploring cases, stories, and characters that attracted Mexican publics between the 1920s and the 1950s. The problems of learning the truth about criminal events and of adjudicating punishment or forgiveness concerned a broad spectrum of the population. This book looks at narratives, debates, and social practices through which a diversity of actors engaged the state and public opinion around a theme of common interest. Narratives and media about crime and justice that are still in place today developed during the decades of the twentieth century examined in the book: broadly shared ideas about impunity and corruption, extrajudicial punishment and the public meaning of homicide, and the divorce of legal justice and the truth.
Tom Adam Davies
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520292109
- eISBN:
- 9780520965645
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520292109.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This book upends the narrative that the Black Power movement allowed for a catharsis of black rage but achieved little institutional transformation or black uplift. Retelling the story of the 1960s ...
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This book upends the narrative that the Black Power movement allowed for a catharsis of black rage but achieved little institutional transformation or black uplift. Retelling the story of the 1960s and 1970s across the United States—and focusing on New York, Atlanta, and Los Angeles—this book reveals how the War on Poverty cultivated black self-determination politics and demonstrates that federal, state, and local policies during this period bolstered economic, social, and educational institutions for black control. The book shows more convincingly than ever before that white power structures did engage with Black Power in specific ways that tended ultimately to reinforce rather than challenge existing racial, class, and gender hierarchies. The book emphasizes that Black Power's reach and legacies can be understood only in the context of an ideologically diverse black community.Less
This book upends the narrative that the Black Power movement allowed for a catharsis of black rage but achieved little institutional transformation or black uplift. Retelling the story of the 1960s and 1970s across the United States—and focusing on New York, Atlanta, and Los Angeles—this book reveals how the War on Poverty cultivated black self-determination politics and demonstrates that federal, state, and local policies during this period bolstered economic, social, and educational institutions for black control. The book shows more convincingly than ever before that white power structures did engage with Black Power in specific ways that tended ultimately to reinforce rather than challenge existing racial, class, and gender hierarchies. The book emphasizes that Black Power's reach and legacies can be understood only in the context of an ideologically diverse black community.
Fredy González
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520290198
- eISBN:
- 9780520964488
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520290198.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Latin American History
Threatened by the violence of the anti-Chinese campaigns, Chinese Mexicans strengthened their ties to China as a way to safeguard their presence in the country. Paisanos Chinos illustrates the ways ...
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Threatened by the violence of the anti-Chinese campaigns, Chinese Mexicans strengthened their ties to China as a way to safeguard their presence in the country. Paisanos Chinos illustrates the ways in which these transpacific ties helped Chinese Mexicans make a claim to belonging in Mexico and challenged traditional notions of Mexican identity and nationhood. From celebrating the end of the Second World War alongside Mexican neighbors, to carrying out an annual community pilgrimage to the Basílica de Guadalupe, Chinese Mexicans came from out of the shadows and sought to refute longstanding caricatures about the Chinese presence in the country. Using English-, Spanish-, and Chinese-language sources, Paisanos Chinos is the first work on Chinese Mexicans after 1940.Less
Threatened by the violence of the anti-Chinese campaigns, Chinese Mexicans strengthened their ties to China as a way to safeguard their presence in the country. Paisanos Chinos illustrates the ways in which these transpacific ties helped Chinese Mexicans make a claim to belonging in Mexico and challenged traditional notions of Mexican identity and nationhood. From celebrating the end of the Second World War alongside Mexican neighbors, to carrying out an annual community pilgrimage to the Basílica de Guadalupe, Chinese Mexicans came from out of the shadows and sought to refute longstanding caricatures about the Chinese presence in the country. Using English-, Spanish-, and Chinese-language sources, Paisanos Chinos is the first work on Chinese Mexicans after 1940.
Laura Robson
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520292154
- eISBN:
- 9780520965669
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520292154.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Middle East History
In the interwar Eastern Mediterranean, European colonial modes of establishing land claims and controlling populations converged with a recent Ottoman past featuring desperate and violent efforts at ...
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In the interwar Eastern Mediterranean, European colonial modes of establishing land claims and controlling populations converged with a recent Ottoman past featuring desperate and violent efforts at nationalization and an increasingly empowered Zionist settler colonialism. States of Separation explores how this confluence produced a series of internationally supported plans to move “minority” communities in, around, and out of the newly constituted states of Iraq, Syria, and Palestine. Under the aegis of the new League of Nations and the British and French mandate governments, and often over the protests of those on the ground slated for displacement, these three states saw multiple efforts to remove entire communities, resettle populations, and redraw maps along ethnic lines. These efforts to create ethnically and religiously homogenous national enclaves out of a highly pluralistic political and cultural landscape constituted a massive demographic experiment that carried lasting political and social consequences for the twentieth-century Middle East and for the international order.Less
In the interwar Eastern Mediterranean, European colonial modes of establishing land claims and controlling populations converged with a recent Ottoman past featuring desperate and violent efforts at nationalization and an increasingly empowered Zionist settler colonialism. States of Separation explores how this confluence produced a series of internationally supported plans to move “minority” communities in, around, and out of the newly constituted states of Iraq, Syria, and Palestine. Under the aegis of the new League of Nations and the British and French mandate governments, and often over the protests of those on the ground slated for displacement, these three states saw multiple efforts to remove entire communities, resettle populations, and redraw maps along ethnic lines. These efforts to create ethnically and religiously homogenous national enclaves out of a highly pluralistic political and cultural landscape constituted a massive demographic experiment that carried lasting political and social consequences for the twentieth-century Middle East and for the international order.