The U.S.-Mexico Transborder Region

The U.S.-Mexico Transborder Region
Author: Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2017-04-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0816535159

"One of the most complete collections of essays on U.S.-Mexico border studies"--Provided by publisher.

The U.S.-Mexico Transborder Region

The U.S.-Mexico Transborder Region
Author: Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2017-04-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0816537259

The U.S.-Mexico Transborder Region presents advanced anthropological theorizing of culture in an important regional setting. Not a static entity, the transborder region is peopled by ever-changing groups who face the challenges of social inequality: political enforcement of privilege, economic subordination of indigenous communities, and organized resistance to domination. The book, influenced by the work of Eric Wolf and senior editor Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez, centers on the greater Mexican North/U.S. Southwest, although the geographic range extends farther. This tradition, like other transborder approaches, attends to complex and fluid cultural and linguistic processes, going beyond the classical modern anthropological vision of one people, one culture, one language. With respect to recent approaches, however, it is more deeply social, focusing on vertical relations of power and horizontal bonds of mutuality. Vélez-Ibáñez and Heyman envision this region as involving diverse and unequal social groups in dynamic motion over thousands of years. Thus the historical interaction of the U.S.-Mexico border, however massively unequal and powerful, is only the most recent manifestation of this longer history and common ecology. Contributors emphasize the dynamic “transborder” quality—conflicts, resistance, slanting, displacements, and persistence—in order to combine a critical perspective on unequal power relations with a questioning perspective on claims to bounded simplicity and perfection. The book is notable for its high degree of connection across the various chapters, strengthened by internal syntheses from notable border scholars, including Robert R. Alvarez and Alejandro Lugo. In the final section, Judith Freidenberg draws general lessons from particular case studies, summarizing that “access to valued scarce resources prompts the erection of human differences that get solidified into borders,” dividing and limiting, engendering vulnerabilities and marginalizing some people. At a time when understanding the U.S.-Mexico border is more important than ever, this volume offers a critical anthropological and historical approach to working in transborder regions. Contributors: Amado Alarcón Robert R. Álvarez Miguel Díaz-Barriga Margaret E. Dorsey Judith Freidenberg Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz James Greenberg Josiah Heyman Jane H. Hill Sarah Horton Alejandro Lugo Luminiţa-Anda Mandache Corina Marrufo Guillermina Gina Núñez-Mchiri Anna Ochoa O’Leary Luis F. B. Plascencia Lucero Radonic Diana Riviera Thomas E. Sheridan Kathleen Staudt Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez

Divided Peoples

Divided Peoples
Author: Christina Leza
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2019-11-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0816537003

The border region of the Sonoran Desert, which spans southern Arizona in the United States and northern Sonora, Mexico, has attracted national and international attention. But what is less discussed in national discourses is the impact of current border policies on the Native peoples of the region. There are twenty-six tribal nations recognized by the U.S. federal government in the southern border region and approximately eight groups of Indigenous peoples in the United States with historical ties to Mexico—the Yaqui, the O’odham, the Cocopah, the Kumeyaay, the Pai, the Apaches, the Tiwa (Tigua), and the Kickapoo. Divided Peoples addresses the impact border policies have on traditional lands and the peoples who live there—whether environmental degradation, border patrol harassment, or the disruption of traditional ceremonies. Anthropologist Christina Leza shows how such policies affect the traditional cultural survival of Indigenous peoples along the border. The author examines local interpretations and uses of international rights tools by Native activists, counterdiscourse on the U.S.-Mexico border, and challenges faced by Indigenous border activists when communicating their issues to a broader public. Through ethnographic research with grassroots Indigenous activists in the region, the author reveals several layers of division—the division of Indigenous peoples by the physical U.S.-Mexico border, the divisions that exist between Indigenous perspectives and mainstream U.S. perspectives regarding the border, and the traditionalist/nontraditionalist split among Indigenous nations within the United States. Divided Peoples asks us to consider the possibilities for challenging settler colonialism both in sociopolitical movements and in scholarship about Indigenous peoples and lands.

Border Visions

Border Visions
Author: Carlos G. VŽlez-Iba–ez
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 388
Release: 1996-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780816516841

The U.S.-Mexico border region is home to anthropologist Carlos VŽlez-Ib‡–ez. Into these pages he pours nearly half a century of searching and finding answers to the Mexican experience in the southwestern United States. He describes and analyzes the process, as generation upon generation of Mexicans moved north and attempted to create an identity or sense of cultural space and place. In todayÕs border fences he also sees barriers to how Mexicans understand themselves and how they are fundamentally understood. From prehistory to the present, VŽlez-Ib‡–ez traces the intense bumping among Native Americans, Spaniards, and Mexicans, as Mesoamerican populations and ideas moved northward. He demonstrates how cultural glue is constantly replenished by strengthening family ties that reach across both sides of the border. The author describes ways in which Mexicans have resisted and accommodated the dominant culture by creating communities and by forming labor unions, voluntary associations, and cultural movements. He analyzes the distribution of sadness, or overrepresentation of Mexicans in poverty, crime, illness, and war, and shows how that sadness is balanced by creative expressions of literature and art, especially mural art, in the ongoing search for space and place. Here is a book for the nineties and beyond, a book that relates to NAFTA, to complex questions of immigration, and to the expanding population of Mexicans in the U.S.-Mexico border region and other parts of the country. An important new volume for social science, humanities, and Latin American scholars, Border Visions will also attract general readers for its robust narrative and autobiographical edge. For all readers, the book points to new ways of seeing borders, whether they are visible walls of brick and stone or less visible, infinitely more powerful barriers of the mind.

An Impossible Living in a Transborder World

An Impossible Living in a Transborder World
Author: Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2010-12-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0816501084

They are known as cundinas or tandas in Mexico, and for many people these local savings-and-loan operations play an indispensable role in the struggle to succeed in today’s transborder economy. With this extensively researched book, Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez updates and expands upon his major 1983 study of rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs), incorporating new data that reflect the explosion of Mexican-origin populations in the United States. Much more than a study of one economic phenomenon though, the book examines the way in which these practices are part of greater transnational economies and how these populations engage in—and suffer through—the twenty-first century global economy. Central to the ROSCA is the cultural concept of mutual trust, or confianza. This is the cultural glue that holds the reciprocal relationship together. As Vélez-Ibáñez explains, confianza “shapes the expectations for relationships within broad networks of interpersonal links, in which intimacies, favors, goods, services, emotion, power, or information are exchanged.” In a border region where migration, class movement, economic changes, and institutional inaccessibility produce a great deal of uncertainty, Mexican-origin populations rely on confianza and ROSCAs to maintain a sense of security in daily life. How do transborder people adapt these common practices to meet the demands of a global economy? That is precisely what Vélez-Ibáñez investigates.

Cities and Citizenship at the U.S.-Mexico Border

Cities and Citizenship at the U.S.-Mexico Border
Author: Kathleen Staudt
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2010-09-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

At the center of the 2,000 mile U.S.-Mexico border, a sprawling transnational urban space has mushroomed into a metropolitan region with over two million people whose livelihoods depend on global manufacturing, cross-border trade, and border control jobs. Our volume advances knowledge on urban space, gender, education, security, and work, focusing on Ciudad Juárez, the export-processing (maquiladora) manufacturing capital of the Americas and the infamous site of femicide and outlier murder rates connected with arms and drug trafficking. Given global economic trends, this transnational urban region is a likely paradigmatic future for other world regions.

Transborder Lives

Transborder Lives
Author: Lynn Stephen
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2007-06-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780822389965

Lynn Stephen’s innovative ethnography follows indigenous Mexicans from two towns in the state of Oaxaca—the Mixtec community of San Agustín Atenango and the Zapotec community of Teotitlán del Valle—who periodically leave their homes in Mexico for extended periods of work in California and Oregon. Demonstrating that the line separating Mexico and the United States is only one among the many borders that these migrants repeatedly cross (including national, regional, cultural, ethnic, and class borders and divisions), Stephen advocates an ethnographic framework focused on transborder, rather than transnational, lives. Yet she does not disregard the state: She assesses the impact migration has had on local systems of government in both Mexico and the United States as well as the abilities of states to police and affect transborder communities. Stephen weaves the personal histories and narratives of indigenous transborder migrants together with explorations of the larger structures that affect their lives. Taking into account U.S. immigration policies and the demands of both commercial agriculture and the service sectors, she chronicles how migrants experience and remember low-wage work in agriculture, landscaping, and childcare and how gender relations in Oaxaca and the United States are reconfigured by migration. She looks at the ways that racial and ethnic hierarchies inherited from the colonial era—hierarchies that debase Mexico’s indigenous groups—are reproduced within heterogeneous Mexican populations in the United States. Stephen provides case studies of four grass-roots organizations in which Mixtec migrants are involved, and she considers specific uses of digital technology by transborder communities. Ultimately Stephen demonstrates that transborder migrants are reshaping notions of territory and politics by developing creative models of governance, education, and economic development as well as ways of maintaining their cultures and languages across geographic distances.

Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas

Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas
Author: Michelle Téllez
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2021-10-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0816542473

Near Tijuana, Baja California, the autonomous community of Maclovio Rojas demonstrates what is possible for urban place-based political movements. More than a community, Maclovio Rojas is a women-led social movement that works for economic and political autonomy to address issues of health, education, housing, nutrition, and security. Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas tells the story of the community’s struggle to carve out space for survival and thriving in the shadows of the U.S.-Mexico geopolitical border. This ethnography by Michelle Téllez demonstrates the state’s neglect in providing social services and local infrastructure. This neglect exacerbates the structural violence endemic to the border region—a continuation of colonial systems of power on the urban, rural, and racialized poor. Téllez shows that in creating the community of Maclovio Rojas, residents have challenged prescriptive notions of nation and belonging. Through women’s active participation and leadership, a women’s political subjectivity has emerged—Maclovianas. These border women both contest and invoke their citizenship as they struggle to have their land rights recognized, and they transform traditional political roles into that of agency and responsibility. This book highlights the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as a space of resistance, conviviality, agency, and creative community building where transformative politics can take place. It shows hope, struggle, and possibility in the context of gendered violences of racial capitalism on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Hegemonies of Language and Their Discontents

Hegemonies of Language and Their Discontents
Author: Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2017-12-12
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 0816537119

The book provides a unique and broad look at the history, power, duality, and promise of Spanish and English in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands--Provided by publisher.

Transborder Media Spaces

Transborder Media Spaces
Author: Ingrid Kummels
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2017-07-01
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 1785335839

Transborder Media Spaces offers a new perspective on how media forms like photography, video, radio, television, and the Internet have been appropriated by Mexican indigenous people in the light of transnational migration and ethnopolitical movements. In producing and consuming self-determined media genres, actors in Tamazulapam Mixe and its diaspora community in Los Angeles open up media spaces and seek to forge more equal relations both within Mexico and beyond its borders. It is within these spaces that Ayuujk people carve out their own, at times conflicting, visions of development, modernity, gender, and what it means to be indigenous in the twenty-first century.