The Mexican American orquesta is neither a Mexican nor an American music. Relying on both the Mexican orquesta and the American dance band for repertorial and stylistic cues, it forges a synthesis of the two. The ensemble emerges historically as a powerful artistic vehicle for the expression of what Manuel Peña calls the "dialectic of conflict." Grounded in ethnic and class conflict, this dialectic compels the orquesta and its upwardly mobile advocates to waver between acculturation and ethnic resistance. The musical result: a complex mesh of cultural elements—Mexican and American, working- and middle-class, traditional and contemporary. In this book, Manuel Peña traces the evolution of the orquesta in the Southwest from its beginnings in the nineteenth century through its pinnacle in the 1970s and its decline since the 1980s. Drawing on fifteen years of field research, he embeds the development of the orquesta within a historical-materialist matrix to achieve the optimal balance between description and interpretation. Rich in ethnographic detail and boldly analytical, his book is the first in-depth study of this important but neglected field of artistic culture.

Social polarization has roiled neoliberal political establishments but has rarely culminated in electoral victories for anticapitalist outsiders. Instead, outsiders who accommodate capitalists often prevail. Capitalist Outsiders revisits celebrated exemplars of Latin American populism in Mexico and Venezuela to shed light on this phenomenon. It reveals how anticorruption campaigns boosted Mexico’s neoliberal-era capitalist outsider by drowning out salacious corporate scandals; how Venezuela’s apparently enlightened capitalist outsiders of the 1940s relied on segregationist, punitive labor relations; and how corporate insiders of Venezuela’s neoliberal political establishment unwittingly validated the anticapitalist Hugo Chávez as the true outsider. It weaves together these case studies to reveal an unlikely common origin for capitalist outsiders in both countries: their sequential insertion into global oil production and Mexico’s early twentieth-century radical oil workers. Capitalist Outsiders moves beyond cataloging “populist” traits and tactics or devising the institutions that might avert their rise. Instead, it specifies the distinct social bases of capitalist vs. anticapitalist outsiders. It exposes how a nation’s earlier incorporation into the capitalist world economy casts a long shadow over neoliberal-era outsider politics.

Marriages between Americans and Mexican society women and membership in such organizations as Masonic brotherhoods brought the foreigners into the most important social circles.".

This riveting exposé reveals how a distorted belief in Anglo superiority necessitated the rewriting of American western history, replacing heroic images of Mexican and Spanish cowboys with negative stereotypes. Early Anglo settlers in the Old West crafted negative images of Latinos in part to help justify the takeover of land occupied by Mexicans and Spaniards at the time. Unfortunately, these depictions were perpetuated throughout the 20th century in art, popular culture, and media ... eventually reshaping the narrative of the American West to the exclusion of the non-Anglo people. This book contrasts dominant lore with historical reality to provide a broad overview of the history and contributions of Latinos in the Old West. Author D. H. Figueredo sets out to debunk the myths and falsehoods of the American West by chronicling the cultural perceptions that led to such historical inaccuracies. Through spellbinding accounts, chapters address such topics as the legends behind the caballeros, Mexican culture in the Old West, and the search for cities of gold in the Southwest. Arranged chronologically and thematically, the book examines how popular culture diminished the role of the Mexican vaqueros and illustrates how the image of the Anglo cowboy became the iconic symbol of the Old West.

Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement is the most comprehensive account of the arduous struggle by Mexican Americans to secure and protect their civil rights. It is also a companion volume to the critically acclaimed, four-part documentary series of the same title, which is now available on video from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Both this published volume and the video series are a testament to the Mexican American communityÍs hard-fought battle for social and legal equality as well as political and cultural identity. Since the United States-Mexico War, 1846-1848, Mexican Americans have striven to achieve full rights as citizens. From peaceful resistance and violent demonstrations, when their rights were ignored or abused, to the establishment of support organizations to carry on the struggle and the formation of labor unions to provide a united voice, the movement grew in strength and in numbers. However, it was during the 1960s and 1970s that the campaign exploded into a nationwide groundswell of Mexican Americans laying claim, once and for all, to their civil rights and asserting their cultural heritage. They took a name that had been used disparagingly against them for years„Chicano„and fashioned it into a battle cry, a term of pride, affirmation and struggle. Aimed at a broad general audience as well as college and high school students, Chicano! focuses on four themes: land, labor, educational reform and government. With solid research, accessible language and historical photographs, this volume highlights individuals, issues and pivotal developments that culminated in and comprised a landmark period for the second largest ethnic minority in the United States. Chicano! is a compelling monument to the individuals and events that transformed society.

This innovative history of California opens up new vistas on the interrelationship among culture, nature, and society by focusing on the state's signature export—the orange. From the 1870s onward, California oranges were packaged in crates bearing colorful images of an Edenic landscape. This book demystifies those lush images, revealing the orange as a manufactured product of the state's orange industry. Orange Empire brings together for the first time the full story of the orange industry—how growers, scientists, and workers transformed the natural and social landscape of California, turning it into a factory for the production of millions of oranges. That industry put up billboards in cities across the nation and placed enticing pictures of sun-kissed fruits into nearly every American's home. It convinced Americans that oranges could be consumed as embodiments of pure nature and talismans of good health. But, as this book shows, the tables were turned during the Great Depression when Upton Sinclair, Carey McWilliams, Dorothea Lange, and John Steinbeck made the Orange Empire into a symbol of what was wrong with America's relationship to nature.

The deep relationship between the United States and Mexico has had repercussions felt around the world. This sweeping and unprecedented chronicle of the economic and social connections between the two nations opens a new window onto history from the Civil War to today and brilliantly illuminates the course of events that made the United States a global empire. The Mexican Revolution, Manifest Destiny, World War II, and NAFTA are all part of the story, but John Mason Hart's narrative transcends these moments of economic and political drama, resonating with the themes of wealth and power. Combining economic and historical analysis with personal memoirs and vivid descriptions of key episodes and players, Empire and Revolution is based on substantial amounts of previously unexplored source material. Hart excavated recently declassified documents in the archives of the United States government and traveled extensively in rural Mexico to uncover the rich sources for this gripping story of 135 years of intervention, cooperation, and corruption. Beginning just after the American Civil War, Hart traces the activities of an elite group of financiers and industrialists who, sensing opportunities for wealth to the south, began to develop Mexico's infrastructure. He charts their activities through the pivotal regime of Porfirio Díaz, when Americans began to gain ownership of Mexico's natural resources, and through the Mexican Revolution, when Americans lost many of their holdings in Mexico. Hart concentrates less on traditional political history in the twentieth century and more on the hidden interactions between Americans and Mexicans, especially the unfolding story of industrial production in Mexico for export to the United States. Throughout, this masterful narrative illuminates the development and expansion of the American railroad, oil, mining, and banking industries. Hart also shows how the export of the "American Dream" has shaped such areas as religion and work attitudes in Mexico. Empire and Revolution reveals much about the American psyche, especially the compulsion of American elites toward wealth, global power, and contact with other peoples, often in order to "save" them. These characteristics were first expressed internationally in Mexico, and Hart shows that the Mexican experience was and continues to be a prototype for U.S. expansion around the world. His work demonstrates the often inconspicuous yet profoundly damaging impact of American investment in the underdeveloped countries of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Empire and Revolution will be the definitive book on U.S.-Mexico relations and their local and global ramifications.

Presents a history of Mexico, from pre-Columbian times through the early 2000s.

Examines, from various perspectives, the school failure and success of Chicano students. The contributors include specialists in cultural and educational anthropology, bilingual and special education, educational history, developmental psychology.

In this groundbreaking analysis, Marco Portales examines the way in which education and the media act as immobilizing social forces to shape the Latino world that exists despite the best efforts of many Mexican Americans and other Latinos. The delicate relationships between what Latinos are and what they seem to be, as perceived both by the larger society and by Latinos themselves, create and craft a culture that students of American culture have not sufficiently studied or understood. As bandidos or gigolos, drug users or unwed mothers, Latinos continue to figure in the public consciousness primarily as undesirables. Despite decades of effort by Spanish-speaking Americans to improve their image in the United States, Mexican Americans and other resident Latinos are still largely perceived by other Americans as poverty-stricken immigrants and second-class citizens. Accordingly, the great majority of Latino citizens receive substandard educations, equipping them for substandard jobs in substandard living environments. The lives of Mexican Americans and other Latinos, Portales contends, can best be illuminated by looking at the history of Chicanos and particularly Chicano literature, which dramatizes the impact of education and the media on Latinos. Like Irish literature, Chicano literature has sought to articulate and to establish itself as a postcolonial voice that has struggles for national attention. Through psychological and sociopolitical representations, Chicano writers have variously used anger, indifference, fear, accommodation, and other conflicting emotions and attitudes to express how it feels to be seen as an immigrant or a foreigner in one's own country. Portales looks at four Chicano literary works -- Americo Paredes' George Washington Gomez, Anthony Quinn's The Original Sin, Sandra Cisnero's House on Mango Street, and Ana Castillo's Massacre of the Dreamers -- to focus attention on social issues that impede the progress of Latinos. By doing so, he hopes to engage both Latino and non-Latino Americans in an overdue dialogue about the power of education and the media to form perceptions that can either empower or repress Latino citizens.