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In Consumers and Citizens, Nestor Garcia Canclini, the best-known and most innovative cultural studies scholar in Latin America, maps the critical effects of urban sprawl and global media and commodity markets on citizens and shows that the complex results mean not only a shrinkage of certain traditional rights (particularly those of the welfare or client state), but also new openings for expanding citizenship. Garcia Canclini focuses on the diverse ways in which democratic societies recognize markets of citizen opinions, however heterogeneous and dissonant, as in the fashion and entertainment industries. He shows how identity issues, brought to the fore by the aligning of citizenship and consumption, can no longer be understood strictly within the purview of territory or nation. Defining a new space structured along the lines of markets, Garcia Canclini seeks to formulate a participatory and critical approach to consumption in which national culture, far from being extinguished, is reconstituted in transnational, cultural interactions.
Praise for the first edition: "Gutmann has done the hithertofore seemingly unthinkable. [A] wholly other vision of Mexican gender relations emerges."—José Limón, American Anthropologist "This book does for the study of men what two generations of feminist anthropologists have done for the study of women."—Lynn Stephen, author of Zapotec Women
Greening the Media rethinks media technologies from an ecological perspective, developing a new approach to historical and social analysis of information and communication technology.
The Romance of Democracy gives a unique insider perspective on contemporary Mexico by examining the meaning of democracy in the lives of working-class residents in Mexico City today. A highly absorbing and vividly detailed ethnographic study of popular politics and official subjugation, the book provides a detailed, bottom-up exploration of what men and women think about national and neighborhood democracy, what their dreams are for a better society, and how these dreams play out in their daily lives. Based on extensive fieldwork in the same neighborhood he discussed in his acclaimed book The Meanings of Macho, Matthew C. Gutmann now explores the possibilities for political and social change in the world's most populous city. In the process he provides a new perspective on many issues affecting Mexicans countrywide.
September 19, 1985: A powerful earthquake hits Mexico City in the early morning hours. As the city collapses, the government fails to respond. Long a voice of social conscience, prominent Mexican journalist Elena Poniatowska chronicles the disintegration of the city's physical and social structure, the widespread grassroots organizing against government corruption and incompetence, and the reliency of the human spirit. As a transformative moment in the life of mexican society, the earthquake is as much a component of the country's current crisis as the 1982 debt crisis, the problematic economic of the last ten years, and the recent elections. In masterfully weaving together a multiplicity of...
This book focuses on the migration strategies of Chinese women who travel to Mexico City in search of opportunities and survival. Specifically, it explores the experiences and contributions of women who have placed themselves within the local and conflictive networks of Mexico City ́s downtown street markets (particularly in Tepito), where they work as suppliers and petty vendors of inexpensive products made in China (specifically in Yiwu). Street markets are the vital nodes of Mexican “popular” economy (economía popular), but the people that work and live among them have a long history of marginalization in relation to formal economic networks in Mexico City. Despite the difficult conditions of these spaces, in the last three decades they have become a new source of economic opportunities and labor market access for Chinese migrants, particularly for women. Through their commerce, these migrants have introduced new commodities and new trade dynamics into these markets, which are thereby transformed into alternative spaces of globalization.
City dwellers are direct agents in the making of cities; yet how do they actually constitute and sustain the urban and its forms? How do they practice the urban and through this practice shape the city-in-the-making that emerges along with them on the backs of their working bodies? Dwelling Urbanism re-thinks the urban from this perspective of corporeal making and with regard to the cityness that it bears. It delves into the thick of life in the periphery of Mexico City, uncovering the everyday actions and efforts that practitioners of space accomplish when building houses, creating jobs and putting themselves to work as infrastructure. How are consequential conjunctions, how is access to, and presence in the city actively grown? And what does such thinking the city as a verb, as citying, imply for urban planning?
"A wake-up call to those who are honestly concerned with global childhood safety."—Carol Stack, author of All Our Kin
In A City on a Lake Matthew Vitz tracks the environmental and political history of Mexico City and explains its transformation from a forested, water-rich environment into a smog-infested megacity plagued by environmental problems and social inequality. Vitz shows how Mexico City's unequal urbanization and environmental decline stemmed from numerous scientific and social disputes over water policy, housing, forestry, and sanitary engineering. From the prerevolutionary efforts to create a hygienic city supportive of capitalist growth, through revolutionary demands for a more democratic distribution of resources, to the mid-twentieth-century emergence of a technocratic bureaucracy that served the interests of urban elites, Mexico City's environmental history helps us better understand how urban power has been exercised, reproduced, and challenged throughout Latin America.