From the Revolution to the Maquiladoras is a major contribution to the study of globalization, labor, and women s movements. Jennifer Bickham Mendez presents a detailed ethnographic account of the Nicaraguan Working and Unemployed Women s Movement, Maria Elena Cuadra (mec), which emerged as an autonomous organization in 1994. Most of its efforts revolve around organizing women workers in Nicaragua s free trade zones and working to improve conditions in maquiladora factories. Mendez examines the structural and cultural elements of mec in order to demonstrate how globalization...

Michel Gobat deftly interweaves political, economic, cultural, and diplomatic history to analyze the reactions of Nicaraguans to U.S. intervention in their country from the heyday of Manifest Destiny in the mid-nineteenth century through the U.S. occupation of 1912-33. Drawing on extensive research in Nicaraguan and U.S. archives, Gobat accounts for two seeming paradoxes that have long eluded historians of Latin America: that Nicaraguans so strongly embraced U.S. political, economic, and cultural forms to defend their own nationality against U.S. imposition and that the country's wealthiest...

During the twentieth century the Mexican government invested in the creation and promotion of a national culture more aggressively than any other state in the western hemisphere. Fragments of a Golden Age provides a comprehensive cultural history of the vibrant Mexico that emerged after 1940. Agreeing that the politics of culture and its production, dissemination, and reception constitute one of the keys to understanding this period of Mexican history, the volume s contributors historians, popular writers, anthropologists, artists, and cultural critics weigh in on a wealth of topics...

In this special issue of the "Hispanic American Historical Review," the editors stepped outside the sometimes narrow confines of technical academic writing. They sought contributors who were willing to dive into an honest, open discussion of Mexico s cultural history. The result is a vigorous, complex, innovative, and occasionally humorous discussion of the pros and cons of a new cultural historical approach to Mexican history.
All the contributors to this issue agree on the importance and relevance of a historical study of culture in its most inclusive sense. But there is much less...

Everyday Forms of State Formation is the first book to systematically examine the relationship between popular cultures and state formation in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Mexico. While most accounts have emphasized either the role of peasants and peasant rebellions or that of state formation in Mexico's past, these original essays reveal the state's day-to-day engagement with grassroots society by examining popular cultures and forms of the state simultaneously and in relation to one another.
Structured in the form of a dialogue between a distinguished array of...