Border visions : Mexican cultures of the Southwest United States / Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Vélez-Ibañez, Carlos G., 1936-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Mexican Americans--Southwest, New.

Mexican Americans.

Mexican-American Border Region.

Mexican Americans--Southwest, New--Social conditions.

Mexican Americans--Southwest, New--Ethnic identity.

Mexico--Emigration and immigration.

Mexico.

Southwest, New--Emigration and immigration.

Southwest, New.

Hispanic or Latino.

Hispanic or Latino--ethnology.

Acculturation.

Emigration and Immigration.

Southwestern United States.

Emigration and immigration.

Mexican Americans--Ethnic identity.

Mexican Americans--Social conditions.

North America--Mexican-American Border Region.

New Southwest.

Medical Subjects:

Hispanic or Latino.

Hispanic or Latino--ethnology.

Acculturation.

Emigration and Immigration.

Southwestern United States.

Physical Description:

xii, 360 pages : illustrations (some color), maps ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Tucson : University of Arizona Press, ©1996.

Summary:

"The U.S.-Mexico border region is home to anthropologist Carlos Velez-Ibanez. 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 today's border fences he also sees barriers to how Mexicans understand themselves and how they are fundamentally understood." "From prehistory to the present, Velez-Ibanez traces the intense "bumping" among Native Americans, Spaniards, and Mexicans, as Mesoamerican population and ideas moved northward. He demonstrates how "cultural glue" is constantly replenished through strong 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 overrepresenation of Mexicans in poverty, crime, illnes, 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 the 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."--Jacket.

Contents:

The continuing process : an ethnobiography. Without borders, the original vision

The American entrada : barrioization and the development of Mexican commodity identity

Political process, cultural invention, and social frailty : road to discovery. The politics of survival and revival : the struggle for existence and cultural dignity, 1848

1994

Living in confianza and patriarchy : the cultural systems of U.S. Mexican households

The distribution of sadness : poverty, crime, drugs, illness, and war

So farewell hope and with hope farewell fear, coming full circle : finding a place and space. The search for meaning and space through literature. Making pictures : U.S. Mexican place and space in mural art

Conclusions : unmasking borders of minds and method.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 323-341) and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Vélez-Ibañez, Carlos G., 1936- Border visions.

ISBN:

0816514224

9780816514229

0816516847

9780816516841

OCLC:

34623342