Santa Anna’s Mexican Army 1821–48

Santa Anna’s Mexican Army 1821–48
Author: René Chartrand
Publisher: Osprey Publishing
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2004-03-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781841766676

Osprey's examination of the Mexican Army of Santa Anna, from 1821 to 1848. Detailed information on the Mexican Army which fought the Texans in the Battle of the Alamo (1836) and the US Army in its first important foreign war ten years later, is notoriously elusive. In this ground-breaking book an internationally respected military historian presents a mass of new information from Mexican archives and a variety of other contemporary sources. For the first time the armies of the notorious General Santa Anna are explained coherently for the English-speaking reader, and their frequently changing and unevenly issued uniforms are illustrated with early prints, portraits, photos of rare surviving items, and meticulous colour reconstructions.

Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Michigan

Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Michigan
Author: Rudolph V. Alvarado
Publisher: MSU Press
Total Pages: 92
Release: 2003-08-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0870138855

Unlike most of their immigrant counterparts, up until the turn of the twentieth century most Mexicans and Mexican Americans did not settle permanently in Michigan but were seasonal laborers, returning to homes in the southwestern United States or Mexico in the winter. Nevertheless, during the past century the number of Mexicans and Mexican Americans settling in Michigan has increased dramatically, and today Michigan is undergoing its third “great wave” of Mexican immigration. Though many Mexican and Mexican American immigrants still come to Michigan seeking work on farms, many others now come seeking work in manufacturing and construction, college educations, opportunities to start businesses, and to join family members already established in the state. In Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Michigan, Rudolph Valier Alvarado and Sonya Yvette Alvarado examine the settlement trends and growth of this population, as well as the cultural and social impact that the state and these immigrants have had on one another. The story of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Michigan is one of a steadily increasing presence and influence that well illustrates how peoples and places combine to create traditions and institutions.

War of a Thousand Deserts

War of a Thousand Deserts
Author: Brian DeLay
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2008-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300150423

In the early 1830s, after decades of relative peace, northern Mexicans and the Indians whom they called "the barbarians" descended into a terrifying cycle of violence. For the next fifteen years, owing in part to changes unleashed by American expansion, Indian warriors launched devastating attacks across ten Mexican states. Raids and counter-raids claimed thousands of lives, ruined much of northern Mexico's economy, depopulated its countryside, and left man-made "deserts" in place of thriving settlements. Just as important, this vast interethnic war informed and emboldened U.S. arguments in favor of seizing Mexican territory while leaving northern Mexicans too divided, exhausted, and distracted to resist the American invasion and subsequent occupation. Exploring Mexican, American, and Indian sources ranging from diplomatic correspondence and congressional debates to captivity narratives and plains Indians' pictorial calendars, "War of a Thousand Deserts" recovers the surprising and previously unrecognized ways in which economic, cultural, and political developments within native communities affected nineteenth-century nation-states. In the process this ambitious book offers a rich and often harrowing new narrative of the era when the United States seized half of Mexico's national territory.

Home Grown

Home Grown
Author: Isaac Campos
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2012-04-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807882682

Historian Isaac Campos combines wide-ranging archival research with the latest scholarship on the social and cultural dimensions of drug-related behavior in this telling of marijuana's remarkable history in Mexico. Introduced in the sixteenth century by the Spanish, cannabis came to Mexico as an industrial fiber and symbol of European empire. But, Campos demonstrates, as it gradually spread to indigenous pharmacopoeias, then prisons and soldiers' barracks, it took on both a Mexican name--marijuana--and identity as a quintessentially "Mexican" drug. A century ago, Mexicans believed that marijuana could instantly trigger madness and violence in its users, and the drug was outlawed nationwide in 1920. Home Grown thus traces the deep roots of the antidrug ideology and prohibitionist policies that anchor the drug-war violence that engulfs Mexico today. Campos also counters the standard narrative of modern drug wars, which casts global drug prohibition as a sort of informal American cultural colonization. Instead, he argues, Mexican ideas were the foundation for notions of "reefer madness" in the United States. This book is an indispensable guide for anyone who hopes to understand the deep and complex origins of marijuana's controversial place in North American history.

Why Mexicans Think & Behave the Way They Do!

Why Mexicans Think & Behave the Way They Do!
Author: Boye De Mente
Publisher: Cultural-Insight Books
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2005-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0914778560

A Cultural-Inside Guide for Businessmen & Travelers: Mexico's traditional values and morals were forged in a caldron of aggressive religious intolerance, corruption, racism, male chauvinism, and an elitist political system that connived with the Church to keep ordinary people ignorant and powerless, and deny them the most basic human rights. But the reality of Mexico has always been obscured behind a variety of masks-of piety, pride, courage, gaiety, indifference and stoicism. In this provocative and insightful book internationally known author Boye Lafayette De Mente goes behind the masks that have long obscured Mexico to reveal the cultural influences that created the character and personality of Mexicans, and provides guidelines for dealing with them.

Mexican WhiteBoy

Mexican WhiteBoy
Author: Matt de la Peña
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2008-08-12
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0375891188

Newbery Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Matt de la Peña's Mexican WhiteBoy is a story of friendship, acceptance, and the struggle to find your identity in a world of definitions. Danny's tall and skinny. Even though he’s not built, his arms are long enough to give his pitch a power so fierce any college scout would sign him on the spot. Ninety-five mile an hour fastball, but the boy’s not even on a team. Every time he gets up on the mound he loses it. But at his private school, they don’t expect much else from him. Danny’ s brown. Half-Mexican brown. And growing up in San Diego that close to the border means everyone else knows exactly who he is before he even opens his mouth. Before they find out he can’t speak Spanish, and before they realize his mom has blond hair and blue eyes, they’ve got him pegged. But it works the other way too. And Danny’s convinced it’s his whiteness that sent his father back to Mexico. That’s why he’s spending the summer with his dad’s family. Only, to find himself, he may just have to face the demons he refuses to see--the demons that are right in front of his face. And open up to a friendship he never saw coming. Matt de la Peña's critically acclaimed novel is an intimate and moving story that offers hope to those who least expect it. "[A] first-rate exploration of self-identity."-SLJ "Unique in its gritty realism and honest portrayal of the complexities of life for inner-city teens...De la Peña poignantly conveys the message that, despite obstacles, you must believe in yourself and shape your own future."-The Horn Book Magazine "The baseball scenes...sizzle like Danny's fastball...Danny's struggle to find his place will speak strongly to all teens, but especially to those of mixed race."-Booklist "De la Peña blends sports and street together in a satisfying search for personal identity."-Kirkus Reviews "Mexican WhiteBoy...shows that no matter what obstacles you face, you can still reach your dreams with a positive attitude. This is more than a book about a baseball player--this is a book about life."-Curtis Granderson, New York Mets outfielder An ALA-YALSA Top Ten Best Book for Young Adults A Junior Library Guild Selection

The Mexican Revolution

The Mexican Revolution
Author: Adolfo Gilly
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2006
Genre: Mexico
ISBN: 9781595581235

The classic account of the mexican revolution from the acclaimed author. First published in Spanish in 1971, "The Mexican Revolution" has been praised by Mexico's Nobel Prize-winning author Octavio Paz as a notable contribution to history and is widely recognized as a seminal account of the Mexican Revolution. Written during the author's time as a political prisoner in the famous penitentiary of Lecumberri in Mexico, it sold thousands of copies in its first edition, becoming widely accepted as the official textbook by history faculties in Mexico despite Gilly's continued incarceration. It has gone through more than thirty editions in Mexico and been translated into French and Greek. This is a comprehensively revised and updated edition of the original text with a foreword by Latin American history scholar Friedrich Katz and a new preface to the English edition by the author. A true "people's history," "The Mexican Revolution" is a stirring, bottom-up account of an event whose reverberations are still felt throughout Latin America and the rest of the world. What you didn't know about the Mexican Revolution: - In December 1914 the peasant armies of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata conquered Mexico City and established a peasant government there. - Mexico's 1917 constitution granted the right of peasants and peasant communities to own the land they tilled. - Mexico's 1917 constitution established an eight-hour workday, a minimum wage, the rights to establish unions and to collectively bargain, and a right to strike--rights not seen in the United States until the 1930s and later.

Mexicans at Arms

Mexicans at Arms
Author: Pedro Santoni
Publisher: TCU Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 1996
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780875651583

The decades that followed independence from Spain in 1821 transformed Mexico from a strong, stable colony to a republic suffering from economic decline, political turmoil, regional divisions and class hatred. This chaotic state hindered efforts of the young republic to meet the aggressive expansionism of the United States between 1845 and 1848. Pedro Santoni sheds new light on Mexican political history during the conflict - a much neglected subject - through a comprehensive examination of the only Mexican political bloc that wanted war with the United States. Led by Valentin Gomez Farias, this faction was the radical federalists, who in 1846 took the name of puros. Santoni demonstrates the reasons for the failure of the puros' efforts to gain political power and coordinate the war effort. Examining the puros' attempts to reestablish federalism in Mexico, shape public opinion, develop a civic militia and forge alliances with senior army officers and opposing political groups, Santoni maintains that the economic, social and political troubles of Mexico nullified the puros' endeavors to direct armed resistance against the Americans. He also dispels some of the erroneous notions - that the puros and Gomez Farias were self-serving and corrupt and sold out Mexico to the United States, for example - that have been propagated by historians in the past.

Made in Mexico

Made in Mexico
Author: Susan M. Gauss
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2015-09-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0271074450

The experiment with neoliberal market-oriented economic policy in Latin America, popularly known as the Washington Consensus, has run its course. With left-wing and populist regimes now in power in many countries, there is much debate about what direction economic policy should be taking, and there are those who believe that state-led development might be worth trying again. Susan Gauss’s study of the process by which Mexico transformed from a largely agrarian society into an urban, industrialized one in the two decades following the end of the Revolution is especially timely and may have lessons to offer to policy makers today. The image of a strong, centralized corporatist state led by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) from the 1940s conceals what was actually a prolonged, messy process of debate and negotiation among the postrevolutionary state, labor, and regionally based industrial elites to define the nationalist project. Made in Mexico focuses on the distinctive nature of what happened in the four regions studied in detail: Guadalajara, Mexico City, Monterrey, and Puebla. It shows how industrialism enabled recalcitrant elites to maintain a regionally grounded preserve of local authority outside of formal ruling-party institutions, balancing the tensions among centralization, consolidation of growth, and Mexico’s deep legacies of regional authority.