American and British Writers in Mexico, 1556-1973

American and British Writers in Mexico, 1556-1973
Author: Drewey Wayne Gunn
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2014-07-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0292773110

American and British Writers in Mexico is the study that laid the foundation upon which subsequent examinations of Mexico’s impact upon American and British letters have built. Chosen by the Mexican government to be placed, in translation, in its public libraries, the book was also referenced by Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz in an article in the New Yorker, “Reflections—Mexico and the United States.” Drewey Wayne Gunn demonstrates how Mexican experiences had a singular impact upon the development of English writers, beginning with early British explorers who recorded their impressions for Hakluyt’s Voyages, through the American Beats, who sought to escape the strictures of American culture. Among the 140 or so writers considered are Stephen Crane, Ambrose Bierce, Langston Hughes, D. H. Lawrence, Somerset Maugham, Katherine Anne Porter, Hart Crane, Malcolm Lowry, John Steinbeck, Graham Greene, Tennessee Williams, Saul Bellow, William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, Ray Bradbury, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac. Gunn finds that, while certain elements reflecting the Mexican experience—colors, landscape, manners, political atmosphere, a sense of the alien—are common in their writings, the authors reveal less about Mexico than they do about themselves. A Mexican sojourn often marked the beginning, the end, or the turning point in a literary career. The insights that this pioneering study provide into our complex cultural relationship with Mexico, so different from American and British authors’ encounters with Continental cultures, remain vital. The book is essential for anyone interested in understanding the full range of the impact of the expatriate experience on writers.

Cultural Tourism in Latin America

Cultural Tourism in Latin America
Author: Michiel Baud
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2009-06-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9047429842

Cultural tourism has become an important source of revenue for Latin American countries, especially in the Andes and Meso-America. Tourists go there looking for authentic cultures and artefacts and interact directly with indigenous people. Cultural tourism therefore takes place in close engagement with local societies. This book analyse the effects of cultural tourism and the processes of change it provokes in local societies. It analyses the intricacies of informal markets, the consequences of enforcing tourist policies, the varied encounters of foreign tourists with local populations, and the images and identities that result from the development of tourism. The contributors convincingly show that the tourist experience and the reactions to tourist activities can only be understood if analysed from within local contexts. Contributors: Michiel Baud, Annelou Ypeij, Lisa Breglia, Quetzil E. Castañeda, Ben Feinberg, Carla Guerrón Montero, Walter E. Little, Keely B. Maxwell, Lynn A. Meisch, Zoila S. Mendoza, Alan Middleton, Beatrice Simon, Griet Steel, Gabriela Vargas-Cetina. “Tourism in Latin America – especially the sort of cultural tourism that plays to desires for authentic experiences – has become a key foreigner currency earner for many countries. This important volume examines the impact of tourism across the region, providing a rich survey of the range of experiences and teasing out the theoretical implications. From the almost surreal Mi Pueblito theme park in Panama to mushroom-hunting tourists in Oaxaca to the eco-trail leading to Machu Pichu, these chapters present compelling cases that speak to identity formation, nationalism, and economic impacts. As the contributors show, benefits are differentially accrued to various actors – and often not to the communities that tourists come to see. Yet, the contributors also make it clear that in struggles over ownership, authenticity, and political representation, local communities actively shape the contours and meanings of tourism, at times successfully leveraging cultural capital into economic gains.” Edward F. Fischer, Director Center for Latin American Studies, Vanderbilt University

Mexico Otherwise

Mexico Otherwise
Author: Jürgen Buchenau
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780826323132

A diverse collection of observations on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexico by non-Mexican authors.

Adventures Into Mexico

Adventures Into Mexico
Author: Nicholas Dagen Bloom
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2006
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780742537453

Moving beyond the tequila-soaked clich s of Mexican tourism, this multifaceted book explores the influence and experiences of Americans in Mexico since World War II. The authors trace Mexico's growing role as an important refuge for Americans seeking not only sun and fun but also an alternative cultural and social model. And on the other side of the border, Mexican citizens and politicians have responded in creative and unexpected ways to growing numbers of migrants from their northern neighbor. Delving into the rich and varied worlds of political exiles, students, art dealers, retiree/artist colonies, and tourist zones, this work illustrates why large numbers of Americans have been irresistibly drawn to Mexico for the past sixty years. Specialists in literature, anthropology, history, and geography bring their unique perspectives to the stories of both short- and long-term migrants. Together their essays illuminate the complex goals and impact of American tourism, offering a fascinating interpretation to all those interested in modern Mexican history, border studies, tourism, and retirement in Mexico. Contributions by: Diana Anhalt, Dina M. Berger, Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Michael Chibnik, Drewey Wayne Gunn, Janet Henshall Momsen, Rebecca M. Schreiber, Rebecca Torres, David Truly, and Richard W. Wilkie

Mexico Through Russian Eyes, 1806-1940

Mexico Through Russian Eyes, 1806-1940
Author: William Harrison Richardson
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2010-11-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822977125

In this unique book, William Richardson analyzes the descriptions given of Mexico by an assortment of Russian visitors, from the employees of the Russian-American Company who made their first contacts in the early nineteenth century to the artists, diplomats, and exiles of the twentieth century. He explores the biases they brought with them and the interpretations they relayed back to readers at home. Richardson finds that Russians had a particular empathy for the Mexicans, sharing a perceived similarity in their histories: conquest by a foreign power; a long period of centralized, authoritarian rule; an attempt at liberal reform followed by revolution.

A Map of Mexico City Blues

A Map of Mexico City Blues
Author: James T Jones
Publisher: SIU Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2010-08-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0809385988

In this pioneering critical study of Jack Kerouac’s book-length poem, Mexico City Blues—apoetic parallel to the writer’s fictional saga, the Duluoz Legend—James T. Jones uses a rich and flexible neoformalist approach to argue his case for the importance of Kerouac’s rarely studied poem. After a brief summary of Kerouac’s poetic career, Jones embarks on a thorough reading of Mexico City Blues from several different perspectives: he first focuses on Kerouac’s use of autobiography in the poem and then discusses how Kerouac’s various trips to Mexico, his conversion to Buddhism, his theory of spontaneous poetics, and his attraction to blues and jazz influenced the theme, structure, and sound of Mexico City Blues. Jones’s multidimensional explication suggests the formal and thematic complexity of Kerouac’s long poem and demonstrates the major contribution Mexico City Blues makes to post–World War II American poetry and poetics.

Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction

Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction
Author: Darlene Harbour Unrue
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2008-12-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0820333549

My stories are fragments of a larger plan, Katherine Anne Porter once wrote. And on another occasion she praised a critic who perceived that all her work, from the very beginning, was part of an "unbroken progression, all related." In Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction, Darlene Unrue examines the encompassing themes that underlie Porter's shorter fiction and that combined to create the haunting events of her complex metaphorical novel, Ship of Fools. Porter believed that men and women are compelled toward discovering the truth about their existence, but that the nature of our world makes those truths difficult to discern. In her writing, Unrue finds, Porter explored not only this basic human need to confront the truth, but also the bewilderment and suffering that are so often the results of failing to fulfill that need. Often in Porter's fiction the movement toward truth is obstructed by the hollow beliefs and illusions that abound in the world--by the seductions of ideology and dogmatic religion, by romantic love or the vision of a golden past. Clinging to such illusions, using them to lend a false coherence to their lives, Porter's characters are led away from the hard realization that truth requires accepting the existence of the unknowable at the center of life, and that what is knowable lies within themselves. Drawing on essays, reviews, letters, and notes, as well as on the intricate fabric of the fiction, this study traces Porter's pursuit of the truth through the creation of a body of fiction in which, from fragments of life, she could assemble an honest vision of the world.

Culture of Empire

Culture of Empire
Author: Gilbert G. González
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0292778988

A history of the Chicano community cannot be complete without taking into account the United States' domination of the Mexican economy beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writes Gilbert G. González. For that economic conquest inspired U.S. writers to create a "culture of empire" that legitimated American dominance by portraying Mexicans and Mexican immigrants as childlike "peons" in need of foreign tutelage, incapable of modernizing without Americanizing, that is, submitting to the control of U.S. capital. So powerful was and is the culture of empire that its messages about Mexicans shaped U.S. public policy, particularly in education, throughout the twentieth century and even into the twenty-first. In this stimulating history, Gilbert G. González traces the development of the culture of empire and its effects on U.S. attitudes and policies toward Mexican immigrants. Following a discussion of the United States' economic conquest of the Mexican economy, González examines several hundred pieces of writing by American missionaries, diplomats, business people, journalists, academics, travelers, and others who together created the stereotype of the Mexican peon and the perception of a "Mexican problem." He then fully and insightfully discusses how this misinformation has shaped decades of U.S. public policy toward Mexican immigrants and the Chicano (now Latino) community, especially in terms of the way university training of school superintendents, teachers, and counselors drew on this literature in forming the educational practices that have long been applied to the Mexican immigrant community.

The Beats in Mexico

The Beats in Mexico
Author: David Stephen Calonne
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2022-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 197882873X

Mexico features prominently in the literature and personal legends of the Beat writers, from its depiction as an extension of the American frontier in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road to its role as a refuge for writers with criminal pasts like William S. Burroughs. Yet the story of Beat literature and Mexico takes us beyond the movement’s superstars to consider the important roles played by lesser-known female Beat writers. The first book-length study of why the Beats were so fascinated by Mexico and how they represented its culture in their work, this volume examines such canonical figures as Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Lamantia, McClure, and Ferlinghetti. It also devotes individual chapters to women such as Margaret Randall, Bonnie Bremser, and Joanne Kyger, who each made Mexico a central setting of their work and interrogated the misogyny they encountered in both American and Mexican culture. The Beats in Mexico not only considers individual Beat writers, but also places them within a larger history of countercultural figures, from D.H. Lawrence to Antonin Artaud to Jim Morrison, who mythologized Mexico as the land of the Aztecs and Maya, where shamanism and psychotropic drugs could take you on a trip far beyond the limits of the American imagination.

The Cambridge History of Native American Literature

The Cambridge History of Native American Literature
Author: Melanie Benson Taylor
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 927
Release: 2020-09-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108643183

Native American literature has always been uniquely embattled. It is marked by divergent opinions about what constitutes authenticity, sovereignty, and even literature. It announces a culture beset by paradox: simultaneously primordial and postmodern; oral and inscribed; outmoded and novel. Its texts are a site of political struggle, shifting to meet external and internal expectations. This Cambridge History endeavors to capture and question the contested character of Indigenous texts and the way they are evaluated. It delineates significant periods of literary and cultural development in four sections: “Traces & Removals” (pre-1870s); “Assimilation and Modernity” (1879-1967); “Native American Renaissance” (post-1960s); and “Visions & Revisions” (21st century). These rubrics highlight how Native literatures have evolved alongside major transitions in federal policy toward the Indian, and via contact with broader cultural phenomena such, as the American Civil Rights movement. There is a balance between a history of canonical authors and traditions, introducing less-studied works and themes, and foregrounding critical discussions, approaches, and controversies.