Shrimpers who fish the shallow coastal waters of Texas fight a constant battle for survival--contending with shrimpers who fish the deeper gulf waters, competing with weekend sportsmen, wrangling with government regulations, and dodging environmentalists' incriminations. Add competition from the international market, an ominous threat frequently overlooked by bay fishermen, and the shrimpers; chances of winning--at least with their current lifestyle intact--are slim.

In The Bay Shrimpers of Texas, Lee Maril explores the successes and failures of the shrimpers who prowl remote bays,...

In this groundbreaking work, Robert Lee Maril describes the nature of poverty in contemporary Oklahoma. Based on a four-year comprehensive study, Maril's work focuses on the lives of twelve families from 1995 to 1999. Relying on statistical analysis to sift fact from rumor about the poor and the reasons why they are poor, Maril defines the real cause of poverty: Oklahoma's reliance on low-wage labor.

In interviews with fishhouse and dock workers; boat owners and marine agents; wives, friends, and neighbors of shrimpers; and the shrimpers themselves, Robert Lee Maril reveals the web of social and economic relationships that bind Texas shrimpers to their difficult and often dangerous work. This book is about shrimping as an industry, but it is also about the work, the families, the dreams, and the frustrations of the men who catch the shrimp.

A third book in the series is scheduled for publication this fall." CANNIBALS AND "
Robert Lee Maril, a professor at Texas Southmost College, has recently written a book that explores the Texas coast and the diverse people who call it home considering the many ways Texans have altered these lands. In Cannibals and Condos: Texans and Texas along the Gulf Coast Maril talks with rich, poor, and in between to show how today's decisions will affect future lives.
For eons the Texas Gulf Coast stretched undisturbed for nearly four hundred miles of quiet wetlands and long beaches. The...

On the southern edge of America a diverse group of people lead ordinary lives in rather extraordinary circumstances. Mexican Americans, Anglos, and Mexican nationals meet there, in the subtropical beauty of the Rio Grande Valley and amid conditions of extreme poverty and social inequality, and create a distinctive blend of cultures, languages, and attitudes toward life. The stories that emerge are stories of individual victories, daily standoffs, and brutalizing defeats.
Writer-sociologist Robert Lee Maril tells some of these stories, observed and absorbed during the thirteen years he...

As the residents of McAllen, Texas, sleep soundly, a small number of agents of the U.S. Border Patrol wait in dark shadows on the northern bank of the Rio Grande. Those few, thinly spread watchers are the first line of defense against a chaotic tide of undocumented workers and determined drug smugglers with only one goal in mind: to cross the river to el Norte.Patrolling Chaos is based on extensive ethnographic field work focusing on one station of three hundred Border Patrol agents over a two-year period. Following twelve typical agents, men and women, as they go about their regular ten-hour...

To the American public it s a 2,000-mile-long project to keep illegal immigrants, narcotics, and terrorists on the other side of the U.S. Mexico border. In the deserts of Arizona, it s a virtual fence of high-tech electronic sensors, cameras, and radar. In some border stretches it s a huge concrete-and-steel wall; in others it s a series of solitary posts designed to stop drug runners; in still others it s rusted barbed-wire cattle fences. For two-thirds of the international boundary it s nonexistent. Just what is this entity known as the fence ? And more important, is it working? Through...