Through extensive interviewing, the author collects a vivid array of oral histories that examine the impact of NAFTA and attest to how neo-liberal reform has relentlessly impoverished Mexico's peasants and working class while decimating a fragile ecosystem.

Slurs such as spic, slut, wetback, and whore are linguistic expressions that are primarily understood to derogate certain group members on the basis of their descriptive attributes and expressions of this kind have been considered to pack some of the nastiest punches natural language affords. Although prior scholarship on slurs has uncovered several important facts concerning their meaning and use –including that slurs are potentially offensive, are felicitously applied towards some targets yet not others, and are often flexibly used not (...) only derogatorily to convey offense towards out-group members but also non-derogatorily to convey affiliation with in-group members– the literature remains largely focused on slurs that typically target African Americans, male homosexuals, and sexually active females. Since no account of slurs that typically target Hispanics or Mexican-Americans has so far been proposed, here I offer the first systematic and empirically informed analysis of these that accounts for both their derogatory and appropriative use. Importantly, this article reviews over a dozen Spanish stereotypes and slurs and explains how the descriptive attributes involved in a stereotype associated with a slur can contribute to the predication of certain content in the application of that slur toward its target in context. This article further explains how the psychological effects of stereotype threat and stereotype lift can be initiated through the application of a relevant slur towards its target in context as well. -/- ----- -/- Las expresiones peyorativas tales como spic (‘spic’), slut (‘zorra’), wetback (‘espalda mojada’) y whore (‘puta’) son expresiones lingüísticas que se entienden principalmente para minusvalorar ciertos miembros de un grupo sobre la base de sus atributos descriptivos (como la raza o el sexo). Se ha considerado que las expresiones de este tipo conllevan algunos de los puñetazos más desagradables que el lenguaje natural puede proporcionar. Aunque la literatura especializada sobre expresiones peyorativas ha descubierto varios hechos importantes en cuanto a significado y uso –entre los que se incluyen que tales expresiones son potencialmente ofensivas, apuntan efectivamente hacia unos objetivos pero no hacia otros, y con frecuencia se utilizan con flexibilidad no sólo despectivamente para ofender a miembros por fuera de un grupo, sino que también de forma no despectiva para afiliar con miembros dentro de un mismo grupo–, tal literatura sigue centrada en gran medida en las expresiones peyorativas que típicamente apuntan contra los afroamericanos (nigger ‘negro’), los homosexuales varones (fagot ‘maricón’), y las mujeres sexualmente activas (slut ‘zorra’). En tanto que no se ha propuesto al momento dar cuenta de expresiones peyorativas dirigidas contra hispanos o mexicano-americanos, en este trabajo se ofrece el primer análisis sistemático y empíricamente informado de tales expresiones, tanto en sus usos despectivos y de apropiación. Es importante destacar que en este artículo se revisan más de una docena de estereotipos y expresiones peyorativas en español, además de explicar cómo los atributos descriptivos que participan de un estereotipo asociado con una difamación pueden contribuir a la predicación de determinados contenidos en la aplicación de esa expresión hacia su objetivo en contexto. Asimismo, en este artículo se explica cómo comienzan los efectos psicológicos de la amenaza estereotipada y el realce estereotipado cuando se emplea una expresión peyorativa relevante contra un objetivo en contexto. (shrink)

Research indicates that positive relationships with fellow church members are associated with better mental health. However, far less research has focused on the relationship between negative interaction with fellow church members and mental health outcomes. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between church-based negative interaction and depressive symptoms with data from a nationwide sample of older Mexican Americans. Statistically significant findings were found for the following core relationships in our study model: older Mexican (...) Americans who encounter negative interaction with fellow church members experience more doubts about their faith; older Mexican Americans who experience more doubts about their faith are more likely to expect transgressors to perform acts of contrition ; and older Mexican Americans who require transgressors to perform acts of contrition are more likely to experience symptoms of depression. Subsequent empirical analyses provide support for each of these relationships. (shrink)

It has been said that all philosophy begins with a set of concerns and a set of intuitions. With this idea in mind, we ask: Would it be helpful to understand Mexican-American philosophy as a kind of philosophy that begins with the concerns and intuitions of the Mexican-American community? On this view, what distinguishes Mexican-American philosophy is the orientation from which the philosophical investigation proceeds. Such an orientation is shaped by the experiences and relationships that are characteristic (...) of those who identify as Mexican-American. We offer a list of concerns and intuitions that we suggest are widely held by the Mexican-American community. Focusing on questions surrounding linguistic assimilation in the U.S., we illustrate how beginning from these particular starting points might alter the way we think about philosophical issues. (shrink)

Este artículo aborda la prominencia de las actitudes colonialistas en tradiciones anti-coloniales, observando la capacidad del racismo sexista para adaptarse en la filosofía política Mexicano-Estadounidense. Señalo un paralelo entre el uso de universales culturales en el pensamiento hermenéutico y la continuación de mecanismos interpretativos colonialies en los debates centrales de la filosofía política Mexicano-Estadounidense. Basándome en pensamiento comparativo indígena de resistencia anticolonial, advierto contra tales tendencias excluyentes y mimetismas en un momento tan crítico de la formación de campo, mientras resaltando (...) la existencia de una larga tradición teórica producida por mujeres Mexicanas-Estadounidenses. (shrink)

Thought and Social Engagement in the Mexican-American Philosophy of John H. Haddox : A Collection of Critical Appreciations.

While most high school students will obtain future social class positions consistent with their class backgrounds, a handful of students are exceptions to this rule, being either upwardly mobile working-class students or downwardly mobile middle-class students. Highlighting predominant patterns, research typically ignores such students precisely because they are exceptions to the rule. This article, based on ethnographic research among white and Mexican American high school girls in California's Central Valley, foregrounds the experience of upwardly mobile working-class students showing how (...) race/ethnicity, class, and gender intersect in the lives of these young women, shaping their educational mobility. Using a comparative approach, this article examines the similarities and differences between white and Mexican American working-class girls' experiences of mobility. The article first describes the various contingencies leading to the girls' mobility, then explores their subjective experience of mobility, in both cases noting the girls' different experiences according to their race/ethnicity. (shrink)

This article examines the role of gender in the culture of conjunto music, a Mexican American musical genre. It describes how gender is articulated with factors of ethnicity and class in the context of the conjunto setting and performance. The authors examine the structure of gender relations, socialization, and resistance, and they attempt to identify the effects within patriarchy on the forms of adaptation and power available to women in conjunto settings. Conjunto is an arena in which conventional gender (...) identity and gender inequality are reproduced, reinforced, and contested. (shrink)

Previous studies support the link of parental acculturation to their children’s academic achievement, identity, and family relations. Prior research also suggests that parental language proficiency is associated with children’s vocabulary knowledge. However, few studies have examined the links of parental acculturation to young children’s oral language abilities. As preschool oral language skills have been shown to predict future academic achievement, it is critical to understand the relations between parental acculturation and bilingual abilities with young immigrant children. Furthermore, few studies have (...) examined the links between parental acculturation and children’s bilingual ability among different immigrant groups who live in the same areas to understand possible similarities and differences. To address these gaps, this study examines these relations in two of the largest and fastest-growing immigrant populations in the United States, Chinese American and Mexican American families. A total of 119 dual language learners enrolled in Head Start programs in Northern California were recruited. DLLs were assessed on oral language measures in both their heritage language and English. Parental interviews were conducted to obtain parental acculturation and language proficiency. Results showed no significant group differences between Chinese American and Mexican American parents on the majority of their acculturation dimensions. Furthermore, there were no significant group differences in the bilingual abilities between Chinese American and Mexican American DLLs. Cluster analysis identified four groups of DLLs based on their bilingual ability: high language ability in both English and HL, low language ability in both, English-dominant, and HL-dominant. Results suggest that parental acculturation levels are more similar than different among the four groups. On average, parents in all four groups had stronger ties to their heritage culture and HL than to the American culture. Results also showed links between parental cultural identities and children’s language dominance. Parents of English-dominant children had significantly higher levels of American identity than the parents of children with high ability in both languages. Implications are discussed. (shrink)

Slurs such as spic, slut, wetback, and whore are linguistic expressions that are primarily understood to derogate certain group members on the basis of their descriptive attributes (such as their race or sex) and expressions of this kind have been considered to pack some of the nastiest punches natural language affords. Although prior scholarship on slurs has uncovered several important facts concerning their meaning and use –including that slurs are potentially offensive, are felicitously applied towards some targets yet not others, (...) and are often flexibly used not only derogatorily to convey offense towards out-group members but also non-derogatorily to convey affiliation with in-group members– the literature remains largely focused on slurs that typically target African Americans (nigger), male homosexuals (faggot), and sexually active females (slut). Since no account of slurs that typically target Hispanics or Mexican-Americans has so far been proposed, here I offer the first systematic and empirically informed analysis of these that accounts for both their derogatory and appropriative use. Importantly, this article reviews over a dozen Spanish stereotypes and slurs and explains how the descriptive attributes involved in a stereotype associated with a slur can contribute to the predication of certain content in the application of that slur toward its target in context. This article further explains how the psychological effects of stereotype threat and stereotype lift can be initiated through the application of a relevant slur towards its target in context as well. (shrink)

Two aspects of mothering—using drugs during pregnancy and giving up the rearing of one's children—are the focus of this analysis of 58 addicted Chicana mothers who spent their adolescent years in barrio gangs. From a traditional stance, such women were doubly deviant, since they violated gender-role prescriptions by joining a barrio gang and by becoming involved in heroin and street life. Half of these women added to this deviance by using heroin during pregnancy, and 40 percent relinquished at least one (...) of their children. This article explores what distinguishes these classically “bad mothers” from addicts who maintain some degree of conventionality in their mothering. We found that Mexican gender-role traditionalism is not the only influence on these women. Many came from cholo or underclass families with a tradition of street involvement. In addition, their involvement in gang and heroin worlds may influence their behavior as mothers. We found that women who used drugs during pregnancy were more likely than abstainers to be cholas and to reject traditional gender-role values. However, those who gave up their children were more likely than those who kept their children to be from traditional families. We discuss the implications of these findings for research on deviance and the underclass among Hispanic women. (shrink)

A major shift has taken place since the 1960s concerning disclosure to patients that they have a diagnosis of cancer and that their disease is considered terminal. Full disclosure is now considered the patient's right in the United States. However, there remain many countries in which nondisclosure is still the norm. When patients from those countries are diagnosed with cancer in America, differences in attitudes and expectations can cause conflict and misunderstanding.

Engaging existentialism: transformative possibilities and local agendas -- The Mexican existentialist ethos -- The seminal Mexican existentialism of Rodolfo Usigli's theater -- Excavating Comala: the existentialist Juan Rulfo, the Grupo Hiperión, and lo mexicano in Pedro Páramo -- "Christs for all passions": José Revuelta's El luto humano [Human mourning] -- Rosario Castellanos's freedom.

This article examines Gloria Anzaldúa’s critical appropriation of Mexican philosophical sources, especially in the writing of Borderlands/La Frontera. We argue that Anzaldúa effectively contributed to la filosofía de lo mexicano by developing an Inter-American Philosophy of Mexicanness. More specifically, we recover “La Mexicana en la Chicana” by paying careful attention to Anzaldúa’s Mexican sources, both those she explicitly cites and those we have discovered while conducting archival research using the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers at the Benson Latin American (...) Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. The eight Mexican philosophical sources we examine and discuss here are: José Vasconcelos (1882-1959), Miguel León-Portilla (1926-2019), Juana Armanda Alegría (1938- ), Octavio Paz (1914-1998), Samuel Ramos (1897-1959), Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974), Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz (1648-1695), and Jorge Carrión (1913-2005). (shrink)

In this paper we explore how some of the largest US-newspapers linguistically frame immigrants to the USA in articles about Mexican and Central American immigrants. Specifically, it is a corpus-assisted discourse study which examines the frequency of different semantic predicate-types with migrant subjects and migrant by-agents in the quest for underlying positive or negative biases. We wish to ascertain what activities migrants are presented as taking part in, principally as agents. The analysis shows that more than half of the (...) migrant/predicate-pairings reflect the dictionary definitions of migrant. However, immigrants are described as illegal 66% of the times that their location is mentioned with an immigrant/predicate-pairing. The non-definition-confirming pairings also show evidence of a negative framing of immigrants, but not of migrants. Furthermore, immigrants are more often than migrants cast as agents of activities that do not simply reiterate their status as migrants. Finally, we found evidence of the Negation Bias in the immigrant/predicate-pairings. (shrink)

Strategic managers today are faced with five critical judgment calls when formulating strategies for their companies: (1) Approaching strategy as an art or as a science, (2) publicizing the strategy or maintaining its secrecy, (3) seeking strategic consistency over the long term or maintaining flexibility, (4) embracing strategic risk or avoiding it, and (5) adopting a top-down or a bottom-up approach to strategic planning. This paper compares American and Mexican managers along these five areas. Findings suggest that conventional wisdom (...) on differences between American and Mexican managers in strategy formulation may not be true. Future research directions are also provided. (shrink)

This essay examines Gloria Anzaldúa’s critical appropriation of two Mexican philosophers in the writing of Borderlands/La Frontera: Samuel Ramos and Octavio Paz. We argue that although neither of these authors is cited in her seminal work, Anzaldúa had them both in mind through the writing process and that their ideas are present in the text itself. Through a genealogical reading of Borderlands/La Frontera, and aided by archival research, we demonstrate how Anzaldúa’s philosophical vision of the “new mestiza” is a (...) critical continuation of the broader tradition known as la filosofía de lo mexicano, which flourished during a golden age of Mexican philosophy (1910–1960). Our aim is to open new directions in Latinx and Latin American philosophy by presenting Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera as a profound scholarly encounter with two classic works of Mexican philosophy, Ramos’ Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico and Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude. (shrink)

Mexican thinkers in recent generations have sought a philosophy emphasizing the ends of human activity as contrasted with one stressing means or techniques. According to Professor Weinstein's interpretation, an integrated perspective toward all aspects of the human condition characterizes Mexican philosophy and social thought, incorporating close attention to the aesthetic dimension of human experience and the tensions of human existence. The distinctive Mexican world-view provides a needed supplement to the analytical approach of North American philosophy and Marxist (...) determinism. (shrink)

Subjunctive Aesthetics argues for the importance of ecocritical approaches within Mexican Studies. This monograph engages with established and up-and-coming Latin American ecocritical scholars who argue that Latin America offers an important corrective to Anglocentric approaches to the Anthropocene by foregrounding colonialism and empire.

There is a Mexican, as well as a Canadian version of the American Dream. What drives political idealism in Mexico is less the idea of individual right, or respect for the rights of communities, than it is the 'indigenous' right of an historically oppressed people to a political culture and life wholly their own.

Nativism is a forgotten ideology which nevertheless operates in the current era as illustrated by the resurgence of anti-immigrant sentiment and restrictionistic policies in response to growing Latino/a immigration. This response to Latino/a immigration recalls a historic era from the early 1900s known as the Americanization period which was also characterized by a strong nativist agenda and harsh restrictionistic policies. Developments from the Americanization period continue to influence immigration and education policies in the current era and are visible in the (...) attacks against bilingual education, in mandated English-only laws, in locating struggles over national identity in the schools, and in the narrow focus on the acquisition of English in immigrant education. Identifying nativist themes from the Americanization era that have been reinvigorated in today's anti-immigrant climate makes visible a type of discrimination directed at immigrants that is not often recognized as discrimination due to a Black and White view of prejudice termed racial dualism. In addition to identifying the influence of the nativist legacy of the Americanization period in the current era, the implications of the conflict of legacies between the Civil Rights and Americanization eras for the education of immigrant students are discussed. (shrink)

The paper presents Josefina Niggli, an American mid-twentieth-century writer who was born and grew up in Mexico, and her novel Mexican Village. A connoisseur of Mexican culture and tradition, and at the same time conscious of the stereotypical perceptions of Mexico in the United States, Niggli saw it as her literary goal to “reveal” the “true” Mexico as she remembered it to her American readers. Somewhat forgotten for several decades, Niggli, preoccupied with issues of marginalization, hybridization, and ambiguity, (...) is now becoming of interest to literary critics as a forerunner of Chicano/a literature. In her novel Mexican Village, set in the times of the Mexican Revolution, she creates a prototypical bicultural and bilingual Chicano protagonist, who becomes witness to the rise of Mexico’s modern national identity. (shrink)

A great quantity of American plants traveled with the precious metals that arrived in Europe from New Spain after ‘1492. Some were brought over intentionally, perhaps in the hands of some Spanish Indian (Spaniards who had travelled to the New World to make their fortunes and had returned were called “Indians”) who had become accustomed to new tastes in America. Others arrived by neither will nor invitation, hidden in the nooks and crannies of the ships or mixed in with the (...) ballast that the galleons carried on their return trip to the Old World. (shrink)

In Latin America there are two models of constitutions - the liberal and the most stable Constitution of the Argentine Nation, drafted in 1853, (which was discussed in our previous article) and one of the most radical, comprehensive and unstable – the Constitution of the United Mexican States of 1917. Although both of them were constructed under the model of the US constitution with the influence of Spanish and French constitutionalism and local national traditions, the Argentine constitutionalism has developed (...) on the grounds of the American legal system, as the Mexican one still could not break with the civil law tradition. (shrink)

Our paper examines Gloria Anzaldúa’s critical appropriation of Mexican philosophical sources, especially in the writing of Borderlands/La Frontera. We demonstrate how Anzaldúa developed a transnational Philosophy of Mexicanness, effectively contributing to what has been recently characterized as the “multi-generational project to pursue philosophy from and about Mexican circumstances” (Vargas). More specifically, we recover “La Mexicana en la Chicana” by paying careful attention to Anzaldúa’s Mexican sources, both those she explicitly cites and those we have discovered while conducting (...) archival research using the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers from the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. The three sections of our paper: 1) define the terms Mexican and philosophy in conversation with Anzaldúa’s work, 2) examine the Mexican philosophical sources that Anzaldúa cites in Borderlands/La Frontera, and 3) present the other major Mexican philosophical influences on Anzaldúa that we have found in her archive. The eight Mexican philosophical sources we discuss here include: José Vasconcelos (1882-1959), Miguel León-Portilla (1926-2019), Juana Armanda Alegría (1938- ), Octavio Paz (1914-1998), Samuel Ramos (1897-1959), Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974), Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz (1648-1695), and Jorge Carrión (1913-2005). (shrink)

Providing the first English translation of Análisis del ser del mexicano, this book features a full biography of Uranga, a detailed overview of the translated text, and discussion of Uranga's relevance to contemporary debates in the phenomenology of culture, the philosophy of liberation, Latin American philosophy and phenomenology itself. Reading Uranga's brilliant words expertly translated and introduced by Carlos Alberto Sánchez finally allows us to understand why this Mexican philosopher is considered one of the most fearless and original thinkers (...) of the 20th century. (shrink)

This article reports on the methodology for setting the Mexican User Satisfaction Index for Social Programs as tested in seven national social programs. The evaluation is based on Structural Equation Modeling. How satisfaction takes the central place of the SEM, which postulates its causes and effects, contributes to the increased validity and reliability of satisfaction indicators that allow benchmarking between social programs. The MUSI model is an adaptation of the American Customer Satisfaction Index model. The MUSI methodology includes qualitative (...) and quantitative techniques. The estimation model is by the Partial Least Squares. In each of the seven social programs, no statistical evidence was found to reject the main relationships postulated by the ACSI’s model: that Perceived Quality impacts Satisfaction, and Satisfaction impacts Trust. The improvement opportunity areas were also identified for each program. These results give valid and reliable feedback to public policies. (shrink)

A worthy product of the growing interest on the part of North Americans in Ibero-American philosophy is Patrick Romanell's Making of the Mexican Mind: A Study in Recent Mexican Thought. This is the first book published in English, or, for that matter, in any language, on twentieth-century Mexican philosophy. The fact that Romanell's book was translated into Spanish and published in Mexico soon after the appearance of the American edition is clear proof that it is not (...) a mere expository work written primarily for home consumption. Besides, the volume is not restricted, as its subtitle might suggest, to a study of contemporary Mexican philosophy. It aims at something more than that: to discover the essence of the Mexican way of life and thus to uncover the Latin-American soul. (shrink)

The book presents insights from a mixed methodology study that examines recent mobility patterns exhibited by the middle classes. Its major contributions are two-fold: theoretically, it advances the conceptualisation of middle class migration; empirically, it analyses the migratory motivations of a relatively new Latin-American group in Australia. The accelerated insertion of the Mexican society into globalisation processes is strongly linked not only to the growing participation in migration phenomena but also to people's outflow to new destinations. Although studies of (...) Mexican emigration are vast, research on Mexican skilled migration is scarce, and research that focuses on mobility to non-USA destinations is even scarcer. Mexicans are a relatively new addition to Australia's multicultural society, and little is known about this group's profile and why they choose to migrate to Australia. Employing a mixed methodology approach, the book provides a comprehensive portrait of migration in a new group. (shrink)

It is regrettable that of all the wealth of available philosophical materials from the Spanish American area, publishers select for translation and diffusion in the U.S. only works of specialized interest. The change of the title of this book from the original Spanish one: Studies in the History of Mexican Philosophy, into the English Major Trends in Mexican Philosophy, is unjustified. This group of studies, which was given untranslated to the participants in the XIII International Congress of Philosophy (...) at Mexico City, constitutes a basic sample, by no means exhaustive, of what could be a collection of erudite sources for the study of Mexican philosophy. Because of the makeshift nature of a work thus conceived, the reader should not expect the periodization of historical trends to be adequate; it only reflects the specialized areas of the contributors. The study of pre-Colombian thought makes no use of modern methods of symbol interpretation and the parallel between thought structures and type of civilization. Also, research about post-scholastic logic, so intimately related to present logical work, is not reported. The best study deals with ideological trends of the independence period, and is a perfect illustration of the fecundity of historical states of collective puzzlement. The beautiful portraits that graced the Spanish edition have been removed.—A. M. (shrink)

Between December 14 and 20, 1965, the World Health Organization Scientific Group on Haemoglobinopathies and Allied Disorders metatthe Geneva agency's headquarters. The group comprised eight well-known physicians including Tulio Arends, a leading Latin American human geneticist from the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Investigations. Others came from North America, Northern and Southern Europe, the Middle East and South East Asia, an array that reflected the delicate geopolitical equilibriums of postwar international health programs, but also the development of highly specialized biomedical research (...) around the globe. They elected Herman Lehmann, from the Abnormal Haemoglobin Research Unit of the Medical Research... (shrink)

Through a close examination of philosopher Leopoldo Zea's historicist phenomenology, Mario Saenz offers fresh insights into the role of Mexican intellectuals in the creation of a Latin American "philosophy of liberation". While this philosophy of liberation has been widely recognized as the most intellectual political ideology to emerge from Latin America this century, few scholars have specifically explored the Mexican roots of this intellectual movement. Saenz redresses this imbalance by placing Zea and his contemporary intellectuals firmly within the (...) context of post-revolutionary Mexico, a political and social landscape that fostered criticisms of colonial and neo-colonial structures of dependence. Saenz demonstrates how Zea's philosophy was informed by a sense of Mexico's distinctive social and cultural identity. (shrink)