Offering a critical ethnography of education at the U.S.-Mexico border, Pledging Allegiance explores how public schools teach cultural and national values explicitly and implicitly. Susan J. Rippberger and Kathleen A. Staudt illuminate the complex overlays of culture and learning through the eyes of students, teachers, and administrators in U.S. and Mexican schools. This book examines nationalism and civic ritual, bilingualism, technology, and classroom organization to discover how educators along the border impart senses of national and cultural identity to their students.

They are known as cundinas or tandas in Mexico, and for many people these local savings-and-loan operations play an indispensable role in the struggle to succeed in today's transborder economy. With this extensively researched book, Carlos Velez-Ibanez updates and expands upon his major 1983 study of rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs), incorporating new data that reflect the explosion of Mexican-origin populations in the United States. Much more than a study of one economic phenomenon though, the book examines the way in which these practices are part of greater transnational...