Shantytowns once occupied a central place in America’s urban landscape. Lisa Goff shows how these resourceful dwellings were not merely the byproducts of hardship but potent assertions of self-reliance. Their legacy is felt in sites of political activism, from campus shanties protesting apartheid to the tent cities of Occupy Wall Street.

A middle-class, directionless ox of a young man who helps the trash pickers of Buenos Aires's shantytown attracts the attention of a corrupt policeman who would use anyone including innocent kids to break a drug ring he believes is operating in the slum. By the author of An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter.

Surrounded by one of the largest petrochemical compounds in Argentina, a highly polluted river that brings the toxic waste of tanneries and other industries, a hazardous and largely unsupervised waste incinerator, and an unmonitored landfill, Flammable's soil, air, and water are contaminated with lead, chromium, benzene, and other chemicals. So are its nearly five thousand sickened and frail inhabitants. How do poor people make sense of and cope with toxic pollution? Why do they fail to understand what is objectively a clear and present danger? How are perceptions and misperceptions shared within a community? Based on archival research and two and a half years of collaborative ethnographic fieldwork in Flammable, this book examines the lived experiences of environmental suffering. Despite clear evidence to the contrary, residents allow themselves to doubt or even deny the hard facts of industrial pollution. This happens, the authors argue, through a "labor of confusion" enabled by state officials who frequently raise the issue of relocation and just as frequently suspend it; by the companies who fund local health care but assert that the area is unfit for human residence; by doctors who say the illnesses are no different from anywhere else but tell mothers they must leave the neighborhood if their families are to be cured; by journalists who randomly appear and focus on the most extreme aspects of life there; and by lawyers who encourage residents to hold out for a settlement. These contradictory actions, advice, and information work together to shape the confused experience of living in danger and ultimately translates into a long, ineffective, and uncertain waiting time, a time dictated by powerful interests and shared by all marginalized groups. With luminous and vivid descriptions of everyday life in the neighborhood, Auyero and Swistun depict this on-going slow motion human and environmental disaster and dissect the manifold ways in which it is experienced by Flammable residents.

An autobiographical novel of growing up in the multicultural environment of contemporary France tells the story of Azouz Begag, the son of an illiterate Algerian immigrant in Lyon and his coming of age in a world of ethnic and racial tensions.

Drawing on the author's experience in Brazil, this text provides a portrait of everyday life among the women of the favelas - a portrait that challenges much of what we think we know about the 'culture of poverty'. It helps us understand the nature of joking and laughter in the shantytown.

A study of Chile's shantytown resistance testifies to the power of popular struggles.

Provides information on Dignity Village, the first city-sanctioned homeless community located in Portland, Oregon.

Celebrated urban theorist Davis provides a global overview of the diverse religious, ethnic, and political movements competing for the souls of the new urban poor.

This collection of essays challenges long-entrenched ideas about the history, nature, and significance of the informal neighborhoods that house the vast majority of Latin America's urban poor. Until recently, scholars have mainly viewed these settlements through the prisms of crime and drug-related violence, modernization and development theories, populist or revolutionary politics, or debates about the cultures of poverty. Yet shantytowns have proven both more durable and more multifaceted than any of these perspectives foresaw. Far from being accidental offshoots of more dynamic economic and political developments, they are now a permanent and integral part of Latin America's urban societies, critical to struggles over democratization, economic transformation, identity politics, and the drug and arms trades. Integrating historical, cultural, and social scientific methodologies, this collection brings together recent research from across Latin America, from the informal neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City, Managua and Buenos Aires. Amid alarmist exposés, Cities from Scratch intervenes by considering Latin American shantytowns at a new level of interdisciplinary complexity. Contributors. Javier Auyero, Mariana Cavalcanti, Ratão Diniz, Emilio Duhau, Sujatha Fernandes, Brodwyn Fischer, Bryan McCann, Edward Murphy, Dennis Rodgers

One shot. Centuries of false truths upended. An entire sport redefined. Madalitso Muthiya did both at the U.S. Open in New York on June 5, 2006, armed only with a glistening driver, inexplicable talent, and stern but loving tutelage from his father. His warm smile and casual demeanor cloaked a hardened determination that came from a life surrounded by disease and extreme poverty and enduring the awkward stares and quiet whispers that made him an outsider. To everyone here, "Mad" was new. A fresh face. An unexpected splash of uniqueness that sent fans scrambling for information. But their tournament programs didn't reveal the origin of his story. It certainly wasn't a stately golf course in New York under the warm morning sky, rubbing elbows with the well-heeled. The elite. It began decades earlier, oceans and continents away, in a land defined by one peoples' crimes against another. Racism, forced labor, cultures destroyed, families torn apart. History was often his fuel. At other times, a lead weight chained to his golf bag. A burden he carried everywhere, to every tournament until his father's voice exhorted him to let it go. 'Just focus on what you need to do.' At 9:01 AM on June 5 his ball and tee were firmly planted. The fairway beckoned in front of him. The heavens shined down. A single display of his God-given swing would change golf. Forever. One shot.