Brazil changed drastically in the 21st century’s second decade. In 2010, the country’s outgoing president Lula left office with almost 90% approval. As the presidency passed to his Workers' Party successor, Dilma Rousseff, many across the world hailed Brazil as a model of progressive governance in the Global South. Yet, by 2019, those progressive gains were being dismantled as the far right-wing politician Jair Bolsonaro assumed the presidency of a bitterly divided country. Digging beneath...

In the last half century Brazil’s rural economy has developed profitable soy and sugarcane plantations, causing mass displacement of rural inhabitants, deforestation, casualization of labor, and reorganization of politics. Since the early 2000s Indigenous peoples have protested the taking of their land and transformed terms provided by state institutions, NGOs, agribusiness firms, and myriad local middlemen toward their material survival, leading to significant violence from third-party se...

Is a native-born tour guide who has sex with tourists—in exchange for dinner or gifts or cash—merely a prostitute or gigolo? What if the tourist continues to send gifts or money to the tour guide after returning home? As this original and provocative book demonstrates, when it comes to sex—and the effects of capitalism and globalization—nothing is as simple as it might seem.Based on ten years of research, Economies of Desire is the first ethnographic study to examine the e...

Venezuela’s Bolivarian Democracy brings together a variety of perspectives on participation and democracy in Venezuela. An interdisciplinary group of contributors focuses on the everyday lives of Venezuelans, examining the forms of participation that have emerged in communal councils, cultural activities, blogs, community media, and several other forums. The essays validate many of the critiques of democracy under Chávez, as well as much of the praise. They show that while governm...

Over the past two decades, Zapatista indigenous community members have asserted their autonomy and self-determination by using everyday practices as part of their struggle for lekil kuxlejal, a dignified collective life connected to a specific territory. This in-depth ethnography summarizes Mariana Mora’s more than ten years of extended research and solidarity work in Chiapas, with Tseltal and Tojolabal community members helping to design and evaluate her fieldwork. The result of ...

I’m Neither Here nor There explores how immigration influences the construction of family, identity, and community among Mexican Americans and migrants from Mexico. Based on long-term ethnographic research, Patricia Zavella describes how poor and working-class Mexican Americans and migrants to California’s central coast struggle for agency amid the region’s deteriorating economic conditions and the rise of racial nativism in the United States. Zavella also examines tensions within...

In summer 2014, a surge of unaccompanied child migrants from Central America to the United States gained mainstream visibility—yet migration from Central America has been happening for decades. U.S. Central Americans explores the shared yet distinctive experiences, histories, and cultures of 1.5-and second-generation Central Americans in the United States.While much has been written about U.S. and Central American military, economic, and political relations, this is the fi...

Security and risk have become central to how cities are planned, built, governed, and inhabited in the twenty-first century. In Endangered City, Austin Zeiderman focuses on this new political imperative to govern the present in anticipation of future harm. Through ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Bogotá, Colombia, he examines how state actors work to protect the lives of poor and vulnerable citizens from a range of threats, including environmental hazards and urban ...

In the 1980s and 1990s, neoliberal forms of governance largely dominated Latin American political and social life. Neoliberalism, Interrupted examines the recent and diverse proliferation of responses to neoliberalism's hegemony. In so doing, this vanguard collection of case studies undermines the conventional dichotomies used to understand transformation in this region, such as neoliberalism vs. socialism, right vs. left, indigenous vs. mestizo, and national vs. transnational.

This book is published open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.This book presents an ethnographic study of how grassroots activism in Venezuela during the Chávez presidency can be understood in relation to the country's history as a petro-state. Taking the contested relationship between the popular sectors and the Venezuelan state as a point of departure, Iselin Åsedotter Strønen explores how notions such as class, race, state, bureaucracy, popular politics, capitalism, neoliberalism...

Meaningful Resistance explores the origins and dynamics of resistance to markets through an examination of two social movements that emerged to voice and channel opposition to market reforms. Protests against water privatization in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and rising corn prices in Mexico City, Mexico, offer a lens to analyze the mechanisms by which perceived, market-driven threats to material livelihood can prompt resistance. By exploring connections among marketization, local practices, and ...

Challenging Fronteras reflects an important new wave of research that moves beyond sweeping generalizations that treat Latinos as a monolithic cultural group. This anthology focuses on the diversity of Latino experiences by providing historical specificity and cutting-edge research that employs the conceptual and analytical tools of social science. Contributors, selected from leading researchers in Latino Studies, include Patricia Zavella, Suzanne Oboler, Alejandro Portes, Clara R...