Mexico has become notorious for crime-related violence, and the efforts of governments and national and international NGOs to counter this violence have proven largely futile. Citizens against Crime and Violence studies societal responses to crime and violence within one of Mexico’s most affected regions, the state of Michoacán. Based on comparative ethnography conducted over twelve months by a team of anthropologists and sociologists across six localities of Michoacán, ranging fr...

Engaging Authority: Citizenship and Political Community aims to explore how authority is entailed in different versions of citizenship and political community. Who or what claims authority in the name of “a people,” and to what effect? What kind and scope of authority is claimed? And who is held to be part of such a people”? Engaging Authority brings together scholars from anthropology, constitutional studies, cultural studies, politics, political theory, sociology, and p...

It is not only a paradox but something of an intellectual scandal that, in an era so shaken by radical actions and ideologies, social science has had nothing theoretically new to say about radicalism since the middle of the last century. Breaching the Civil Order fills this void. It argues that, rather than seeing radicalism in substantive terms - as violent or militant, communist or fascist - radicalism should be seen more broadly as any organized effort to breach the civil order. The the...

In The Broken Village, Daniel R. Reichman tells the story of a remote village in Honduras that transformed almost overnight from a sleepy coffee-growing community to a hotbed of undocumented migration to and from the United States. The small village—called here by the pseudonym La Quebrada—was once home to a thriving coffee economy. Recently, it has become dependent on migrants working in distant places like Long Island and South Dakota, who live in ways that most Honduran...

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 ...

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...

The first book by Amaia Pérez Orosco translated into EnglishOne of the leading thinkers on the Spanish left explores the interactions of patriarchy and capitalismConnects theoretical arguments with on-the-ground lived experiencesHow has social reproduction been transformed by a series of environmental and public health crisesPEN Award winning translator of Spanish feminist economic texts Liz Mason-Deese translated and updated the book in colabo...

In Dilemmas of Difference Sarah A. Radcliffe explores the relationship of rural indigenous women in Ecuador to the development policies and actors that are ostensibly there to help ameliorate social and economic inequality. Radcliffe finds that development policies’s inability to recognize and reckon with the legacies of colonialism reinforces long-standing social hierarchies, thereby reproducing the very poverty and disempowerment they are there to solve. This ineffectiveness res...

Why are Latin American cities amongst the most violent in the world? Over the past decades Latin America has not only become the most urbanised of the regions of the so-called global South, it has also been the scene of the urbanisation of poverty and exclusion. Overall regional homicides rates are the highest in the world, a fact closely related to the spread and use of firearms by male youths, who are frequently involved in local and translocal forms of organised crime. In response, gove...

The women’s movement is a central, complex, and evolving socio-political actor in any national context. Vital to advancing gender equity and gendered relations in every contemporary society, the organization and mobilization of women into social movements challenges patriarchal values, behaviours, laws, and policies through collective action and contention, radically altering the direction of society over time.Twenty-First-Century Feminismos examines ten case studies from ...

Latin American women’s movements played important roles in the democratic transitions in South America during the 1980s and in Central America during the 1990s. However, very little has been written on what has become of these movements and their agendas since the return to democracy. This timely collection examines how women’s movements have responded to the dramatic political, economic, and social changes of the last twenty years. In these essays, leading scholar-activists focus on the v...

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.