Mexican New York: Transnational Lives of New Immigrants
Author: Robert Courtney Smith
Drawing on more than fifteen years of research, Mexican New York offers an intimate view of globalization as it is lived by Mexican immigrants and their children in New York and in Mexico. Robert Courtney Smith's groundbreaking study sheds new light on transnationalism, vividly illustrating how immigrants move back and forth between New York and their home village in Puebla with considerable ease, borrowing from and contributing to both communities as they forge new gender roles; new strategies of social mobility, race, and even adolescence; and new brands of politics and egalitarianism.
Smith's deeply informed narrative describes how first-generation men who have lived in New York for decades become important political leaders in their home villages in Mexico. Smith explains how relations between immigrant men and women and their U.S.-born children are renegotiated in the context of migration to New York and temporary return visits to Mexico. He illustrates how U.S.-born youth keep their attachments to Mexico, and how changes in migration and assimilation have combined to transnationalize both U.S.-born adolescents and Mexican gangs between New York and Puebla. Mexican New York profoundly deepens our knowledge of immigration as a social process, convincingly showing how some immigrants live and function in two worlds at the same time and how transnationalization and assimilation are not opposing, but related, phenomena.
Table of Contents:
| 1 | Transnational life in ethnographic perspective | 1 |
| 2 | Dual contexts for transnational life | 18 |
| 3 | "Los ausentes siempre presentes" : making a local-level transnational political community | 53 |
| 4 | The defeat of Don Victorio : transnationalization, democratization, and political change | 76 |
| 5 | Gender strategies, settlement, and transnational life in the first generation | 94 |
| 6 | "In Ticuani, he goes crazy" : the second generation renegotiates gender | 123 |
| 7 | "Padre Jesus, protect me" : adolescence, religion, and social location | 147 |
| 8 | "I'll go back next year" : transnational life across the life course | 186 |
| 9 | Defending your name : the roots and transnationalization of Mexican gangs | 207 |
| 10 | Returning to a changed Ticuani | 242 |
| Conclusions and recommendations | 277 | |
| Coda : the Mexican educational foundation of New York | 293 |
Look this: Governing the White House or Accounting Principles
Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories
Author: Katha Pollitt
Celebrated for her award-winning political columns, criticism, and poetry, Katha Pollitt offers something new in this poignant, hilarious, and sometimes outrageous collection of stories drawn from her own life. With deep feeling and sharp insight, she writes about love, sex, betrayal, heartbreak, and much more: what she learned about her parents from reading their FBI files, the joy and loneliness of new motherhood, the curious mental effects of a post-college stint proofreading pornographic novels, and the decline and fall of practically everything, including herself. Unafraid to say what others only think and acknowledge what others won’t admit, Katha Pollitt surprises and entertains on every page.
Praise for Learning to Drive
“The kind of book you want to look up from at points so you can read aloud certain passages to a friend or lover.”
–Chicago Tribune
“A powerful personal narrative . . . full of insight and charm . . . [Katha] Pollitt is her own Jane Austen character . . . haughty and modest, moral and irresponsible, sensible and, happily for us, lost in sensibility.”
–The New York Review of Books
“With . . . bracing self-honesty, Pollitt takes us through the maddening swirl of contradictions at the heart of being fifty-something: the sense of slowing down, of urgency, of wisdom, of ignorance, of strength, of helplessness, of breakdown, of renewal.”
–Sunday Seattle Times
“Essays of breathtaking candor and razor-sharp humor . . . [Pollitt] has outdone herself. . . . [Her] observations are acute and her confessionstonic. Forget face-lifts; Pollitt’s essays elevate the spirit.”
–Booklist (starred review)
“Candid, confessional prose . . . But even at her most intimate, [Pollitt] manages to infuse her tales of dissatisfaction and heartbreak with levity and humor.”
–San Francisco Chronicle
“Pitch perfect . . . painfully hilarious to read.”
–The Boston Globe
The New York Times - Toni Bentley
Her three previous essay collections gathered brilliant commentary on welfare, abortion, surrogate motherhood, Iraq, gay marriage and health care, mostly from the pages of The Nation. But with Learning to Drive, she gets personal, and shameless. She has decided to wave her dirty laundry (among which she found unidentified striped panties) and confesses to "Webstalking" her longtime, live-in, womanizing former boyfriend…It's hard to tell if she's coming into her own, trying to sell more books or has lost it entirely. Or perhaps she's giving up her dignity in a generous motion of solidarity toward the rest of us who have already blown our cover? Whatever the reason, she's entitled.
Publishers Weekly
This collection of reflections by the Nationessayist and poet Pollitt (Reasonable Creatures) ranges in subject from her philandering boyfriend to a general late-midlife sense of loss. The title essay is the zippiest and most successful, fashioning a canny metaphor about the importance of observation both in learning to drive for the first time at age 52 and in recognizing that her lover of seven years was cheating on her from the get-go. Pollitt plays the conflicted modern woman par excellence, both feminist and feminine; she writes of unabashedly joining a Marxist study group at the behest of her guru-like boyfriend, who padded the meetings with past and present lovers ("In the Study Group"), then wonders with wistful anticipation what kind of life it will be when she has outlived all the men who find her desirable ("After the Men Are Dead"). Familiarity seems to breed weariness, however, and her essays about motherhood ("Beautiful Screamer") and women's tenacious collusion in men's superiority ("Sisterhood") have the feel of oft-tread ground. (Sept. 4)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationStacy Russo - Library Journal
Pollitt (Virginity or Death!) is unconcerned with making friends: some of her comments, particularly on the subjects of abortion and religion, will anger members of the conservative right. But a close reading of these 11 nonfiction pieces executed with fiercely poetic language and brilliantly placed sarcasm reveals a highly inquisitive and independent voice. Pollitt divvies out clever observations of American culture along with honest moments of self-examination. In "Webstalker," she frankly and humorously describes her voyeuristic obsession with her former partner. Another comical yet endearing essay, "In the Study Group," portrays various members of a Marxist study group. Pollitt writes movingly of her father in "Good-bye, Lenin" and of her mother in "Mrs. Razzmatazz." In the final entry, "I Let Myself Go," she questions how some feminists equate plastic surgery with women's freedom. In one of the collection's most poignant moments, Pollitt describes a black-and-white photograph of writer Iris Murdoch's wonderfully wrinkled and asymmetrical face. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries. [The New Yorkerwill feature the first serial.-Ed.]
Kirkus Reviews
A collection of savvy, witty essays, more personal than political, from a feminist known for her social and cultural commentary. In the title essay, Pollitt (Virginity or Death!: And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time, 2006, etc.), a long-time columnist for The Nation, has lost her man and consequently must learn to drive a car, a task fraught with difficulties for a woman in late middle age. In the second piece, "Webstalker," the loss of her man turns her into an Internet addict who compulsively Googles him and anyone connected to him. These two essays, both previously published in the New Yorker, are laced with self-deprecating humor, as is "Memoir of a Shy Pornographer," about her stint as a young, shy freelance copyeditor and proofreader of pornography. There is a darker tone to her wry essay on belonging to a Marxist study group, led by a charismatic leader who was also her philandering boyfriend, and in the several pieces on feminism. A measure of poignancy marks her recollections of her Communist father ("Good-Bye, Lenin"), on whom the FBI kept error-filled files, and of her alcoholic mother ("Mrs. Razzmatazz"), who hid bottles in the kitchen cabinets. Resignation fills "End Of," her meditative piece on a vanishing landscape near her Connecticut home. Love, sex, marriage, mothering, aging, keeping up appearances-all come under her sharp scrutiny. A sardonic observer of human behavior, especially the relations between men and women, Pollitt leaves no doubt about her opinions. She writes that " the stories women tell each other about themselves emphasize the comical, the improbable, the vaguely malevolent but always entertaining twists and turns of fate," acharacterization that fits much of her work here. Thoroughly enjoyable reading for anyone, feminist or not, who likes bright, funny, opinionated writing. Agent: Melanie Jackson/Melanie Jackson Agency
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