Conchita Herdman Marianella's book develops the words "Duena" and" Doncella" in their Cervantine context. The book offers the two sides of this character type in pre-Cervantine usage, from the tendency of the duena or doncella to appear as a lady-in-waiting, damsel in distress, or other high-level intermediary and to behave in patterns commensurate with that socio-cultural status, to the stereotyped, irate, scheming, gossiping chaperone. While Cervantes often uses this second type in other prose works, the relationship between the two semantic fields becomes much more complex in the Quijote, so explicitly constructed as a satire of the earlier style. It is this tangle of character type and history that Marianella unwinds. This analysis newly illuminates the episode of Dona Rodriguez, one of the pinnacles of the creative craft of the Quijote.

Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in two impoverished California communities—one made up of recent immigrants from Mexico, the other of U.S.-born Chicano citizens—this book provides an invaluable comparative perspective on Latino poverty in contemporary America. In northern California’s high-tech Silicon Valley, author Daniel Dohan shows how recent immigrants get by on low-wage babysitting and dish-cleaning jobs. In the housing projects of Los Angeles, he documents how families and communities of U.S.-born Mexican Americans manage the social and economic dislocations of persistent poverty. Taking readers into worlds where public assistance, street crime, competition for low-wage jobs, and family, pride, and cross-cultural experiences intermingle, The Price of Poverty offers vivid portraits of everyday life in these Mexican American communities while addressing urgent policy questions such as: What accounts for joblessness? How can we make sense of crime in poor communities? Does welfare hurt or help?