This is a biography of Baptist minister-turned educational reformer Vahac Mardirosian, a remarkable man who has accomplished a great deal over a long, fascinating career. Now in his late eighties and long since retired, he looks back on a long and eventful life. The arc of his personal narrative is a window into captivating chapters of history in the twentieth century. He is the child of survivors of the Turkish genocide perpetrated on Armenians. He grew up in post-revolutionary Mexico and came to the United States during World War II. He served as a Baptist minister until he became a political activist and educational reformer during the turbulent days of the Chicano Movement of the late 1960s. He capped his career by creating a nonprofit organization that helps immigrant parents become partners with the public schools in order to improve educational opportunities for their children. This is the remarkable story of an Armenian-Mexican-American.

First published in 1983, this book remains the only full-length study documenting the historical development of the Puerto Rican community in the United States. Expanded to bring it up to the present, Virginia Sánchez Korrol's work traces the growth of the early Puerto Rican settlements--"colonias"--into the unique, vibrant, and well-defined community of today.

Roberto E. Barrios presents an ethnographic study of the aftermaths of four natural disasters: southern Honduras after Hurricane Mitch; New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina; Chiapas, Mexico, after the Grijalva River landslide; and southern Illinois following the Mississippi River flood. Focusing on the role of affect, Barrios examines the ways in which people who live through disasters use emotions as a means of assessing the relevance of governmentally sanctioned recovery plans, judging the effectiveness of such programs, and reflecting on the risk of living in areas that have been deemed prone to disaster. Emotions such as terror, disgust, or sentimental attachment to place all shape the meanings we assign to disasters as well as our political responses to them. The ethnographic cases in Governing Affect highlight how reconstruction programs, government agencies, and recovery experts often view postdisaster contexts as opportune moments to transform disaster-affected communities through principles and practices of modernist and neoliberal development. Governing Affect brings policy and politics into dialogue with human emotion to provide researchers and practitioners with an analytical toolkit for apprehending and addressing issues of difference, voice, and inequity in the aftermath of catastrophes.

We now live on a planet that is troubled—even overworked—in ways that compel us to reckon with inherited common sense about the relationship between human labor and nonhuman nature. In Paraguay, fast-growing soy plants are displacing both prior crops and people. In Malaysia, dispossessed farmers are training captive orangutans to earn their own meals. In India, a prized dairy cow suddenly refuses to give more milk. Built from these sorts of scenes and sites, where the ultimate subjects and agents of work are ambiguous, How Nature Works develops an anthropology of labor that is sharply attuned to the irreversible effects of climate change, extinction, and deforestation. The authors of this volume push ethnographic inquiry beyond the anthropocentric documentation of human work on nature in order to develop a language for thinking about how all labor is a collective ecological act.

Mobile Selves illuminates how transnational communicative practices and forms of exchange produce new forms of kinship, social relations, and subjectivities for global labor migrants. It shows how migrants create and circulate new portrayals of themselves, which work both to challenge the class and racial biases that they had faced in their home country and to shape how they construct and experience their mobility, and reenvision themselves and their communities in the process. In this engaging volume Ulla D. Berg examines the conditions under which racialized Peruvians of rural and working-class origins leave the central highlands of Peru to migrate to the United States, how they fare, and what constrains their movement and their attempts to maintain meaningful social relations across borders. By exploring the ways in which migration is mediated between the Peruvian Andes and the United States-by documents, money, and images and objects in circulation-this book makes a major contribution to the documentation and theorization of the role of technology and, more broadly, of communicative practices in fostering new forms of migrant sociality and subjectivity. In its focus on the forms of person-hood and belonging that these mediations enable, the volume adds to key anthropological debates about affect, subjectivity, and sociality in today's mobile world. It also makes significant contributions to studies of inequality in Latin America, showcasing the intersection of transnational mobility with structures and processes of exclusion in both national and global contexts.

In this revised and updated edition, Judith Friedlander places her widely acclaimed work in historical context. The book describes the lives of the inhabitants of an indigenous pueblo during the late 1960s and early 1970s and analyzes the ways that Indians like them have been discriminated against since early colonial times.

Chicana/o history has reached an intriguing juncture. While academic and intellectual studies are embracing new, highly nuanced perspectives on race, class, gender, education, identity, and community, the field itself continues to be viewed as a battleground, subject to attacks from outside academia by those who claim that the discipline promotes racial hatred and anti-Americanism. Against a backdrop of deportations and voter suppression targeting Latinos, A Promising Problem presents the optimistic voices of scholars who call for sophisticated solutions while embracing transnationalism and the reality of multiple, overlapping identities. Showcasing a variety of new directions, this anthology spans topics such as growth and reassessment in Chicana/o history manifested in a disruption of nationalism and geographic essentialism, the impact of legal history, interracial relations and the experiences of Latino subpopulations in the US South, race and the politics of religious history, transborder feminism in the early twentieth century, and aspirations for a field that increasingly demonstrates the relational dynamics of cultural production. As they reflect on the state of their field, the contributors offer significant insights into sociology, psychology, anthropology, political science, education, and literature, while tracing the history of activism throughout the last century and debating the very concepts of “Chicano” and “Chicano history.” Although the political landscape is fraught with closed-off rhetoric, A Promising Problem encourages diversity of thought and opens the possibilities of historical imagination.

“A colorful, revealing portrait of Puerto Rican culture and domestic relationship” from the award-winning poet and author of An Island Like You (Publishers Weekly). Set in the 1950s and 1960s, The Line of the Sun moves from a rural Puerto Rican village to a tough immigrant housing project in New Jersey, telling the story of a Hispanic family’s struggle to become part of a new culture without relinquishing the old. At the story’s center is Guzmán, an almost mythic figure whose adventures and exile, salvation and return leave him a broken man but preserve his place in the heart and imagination of his niece, who is his secret biographer. “Cofer . . . reveals herself to be a prose writer of evocatively lyrical authority, a novelist of historical compass and sensitivity . . . One recognizes in the rich weave and vigorous elegance of the language of The Line of the Sun a writer of authentic gifts, with a genuine and important story to tell.”—The New York Times Book Review “There is great strength in the way Cofer evokes the fierce, loving, and brave Latin spirit that is the novel’s real theme.”—Joyce Johnson, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author “The Line of the Sun reads like a dream, from the beautifully realized description of the deceptive Paradise Lost, to the utterly different but equally vivid world of the urban North . . . This is a splendid first novel.”—The State (Columbia, South Carolina) “The writing in this superb novel stuns and surprises at every turn. Its sensuality and imagery . . . are riveting.”—The San Juan Star

Winner of the Premio Aztlán Literary Prize Canícula--the dog days--a particularly intense part of the summer when most cotton is harvested in South Texas. In Norma Cantú's fictionalized memoir of Laredo in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, it also represents a time between childhood and a still-unknown adulthood. Snapshots and the author's re-created memories allow readers to experience the pivotal events of this world--births, deaths, injuries, fiestas, and rites of passage. In celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the original publication, this updated edition includes newly written pieces as well as never-before-published images--culled from hundreds of the author's family photos--adding further depth and insight into this unique contribution to Chicana literature.