Author: Christian Zlolniski
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520246411
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 528
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Book Description
This book exposes the underbelly of California's Silicon Valley, the most successful high-technology region in the world, in a vivid ethnographic study of Mexican immigrants employed in Silicon Valley's low-wage jobs. The author demonstrates how global forces have incorporated these workers as an integral part of the economy through subcontracting and other flexible labor practices and explores how these labor practices have in turn affected working conditions and workers' daily lives. These immigrants do not emerge merely as victims of a harsh economy; despite the obstacles they face, they are transforming labor and community politics, infusing new blood into labor unions, and challenging exclusionary notions of civic and political membership.
Author: Christian Zlolniski
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520971930
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
Much of the produce that Americans eat is grown in the Mexican state of Baja California, the site of a multibillion-dollar export agricultural boom that has generated jobs and purportedly reduced poverty and labor migration to the United States. But how has this growth affected those living in Baja? Based on a decade of ethnographic fieldwork, Made in Baja examines the unforeseen consequences for residents in the region of San Quintín. The ramifications include the tripling of the region’s population, mushrooming precarious colonia communities lacking basic infrastructure and services, and turbulent struggles for labor, civic, and political rights. Anthropologist Christian Zlolniski reveals the outcomes of growers structuring the industry around an insatiable demand for fresh fruits and vegetables. He also investigates the ecological damage—"watercide”—and the social side effects of exploiting natural resources for agricultural production. Weaving together stories from both farmworkers and growers, Made in Baja provides an eye-opening look at the dynamic economy developing south of the border.
Author: Kristina Graaff
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782388354
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 261
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Book Description
Examining street vending as a global, urban, and informalized practice found both in the Global North and Global South, this volume presents contributions from international scholars working in cities as diverse as Berlin, Dhaka, New York City, Los Angeles, Calcutta, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City. The aim of this global approach is to repudiate the assumption that street vending is usually carried out in the Southern hemisphere and to reveal how it also represents an essential—and constantly growing—economic practice in urban centers of the Global North. Although street vending activities vary due to local specificities, this anthology illustrates how these urban practices can also reveal global ties and developments.
Author: Margaret O'Mara
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0399562206
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 514
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Book Description
One of New York Magazine's best books on Silicon Valley! The true, behind-the-scenes history of the people who built Silicon Valley and shaped Big Tech in America Long before Margaret O'Mara became one of our most consequential historians of the American-led digital revolution, she worked in the White House of Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the earliest days of the commercial Internet. There she saw firsthand how deeply intertwined Silicon Valley was with the federal government--and always had been--and how shallow the common understanding of the secrets of the Valley's success actually was. Now, after almost five years of pioneering research, O'Mara has produced the definitive history of Silicon Valley for our time, the story of mavericks and visionaries, but also of powerful institutions creating the framework for innovation, from the Pentagon to Stanford University. It is also a story of a community that started off remarkably homogeneous and tight-knit and stayed that way, and whose belief in its own mythology has deepened into a collective hubris that has led to astonishing triumphs as well as devastating second-order effects. Deploying a wonderfully rich and diverse cast of protagonists, from the justly famous to the unjustly obscure, across four generations of explosive growth in the Valley, from the forties to the present, O'Mara has wrestled one of the most fateful developments in modern American history into magnificent narrative form. She is on the ground with all of the key tech companies, chronicling the evolution in their offerings through each successive era, and she has a profound fingertip feel for the politics of the sector and its relation to the larger cultural narrative about tech as it has evolved over the years. Perhaps most impressive, O'Mara has penetrated the inner kingdom of tech venture capital firms, the insular and still remarkably old-boy world that became the cockpit of American capitalism and the crucible for bringing technological innovation to market, or not. The transformation of big tech into the engine room of the American economy and the nexus of so many of our hopes and dreams--and, increasingly, our nightmares--can be understood, in Margaret O'Mara's masterful hands, as the story of one California valley. As her majestic history makes clear, its fate is the fate of us all.
Author: Patricia Zavella
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822350351
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351
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Book Description
DIVStudies poor and working-class Mexicans in the USA, showing how migration influences the creation of identity, family, and community and how it affects even those who don't themselves actually migrate./div
Author: Alejandro I. Canales
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900440922X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275
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Book Description
In Migration, Reproduction and Society, Alejandro I. Canales offers a theoretical model for understanding the dilemmas presented by migration in the transformation of contemporary society. Aging and changing demographics in advanced societies make economic and social reproduction dependent upon the contributions made by immigration. However, these same demographic processes are conducive to ethnic transformations. The political dilemma facing advanced societies is that immigration is required to ensure their reproduction, but this entails becoming multicultural societies where the political hegemony of ethnic and demographic majorities becomes radically subverted. This paves the way to a pervasive political conflict already evident in the current immigration crisis in Europe just as in the revival of racism and xenophobia in the United States. En Migration, Reproduction and Society, Alejandro I. Canales propone un modelo teórico para el entendimiento del dilema político y social concerniente al papel de las migraciones en la transformación de la sociedad contemporánea. El envejecimiento y decline demográfico en las sociedades avanzadas hacen que la dinámica económica y la reproducción social de la población dependan directamente de los aportes que hace la inmigración. Sin embargo, estos mismos procesos demográficos propician una transformación étnica de sus actuales equilibrios sociales y demográficos. El dilema político que enfrentan las sociedades avanzadas es que para asegurar su reproducción debe necesariamente abrirse a la inmigración, pero ello conlleva la posibilidad de constituirse en sociedades multiculturales en donde la hegemonía política de las actuales mayorías étnicas y demográficas se trastocaría radicalmente. Es la base de un conflicto político cuyos indicios ya se advierten en la actual crisis migratoria en Europa, así como en el renacer del racismo y xenofobia en los Estados Unidos.
Author: Elizabeth Emma Ferry
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253009480
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
“A jewel to those interested in ore mining, mineral collecting and mineralogy, or the anthropology of value.” —American Ethnologist Anthropologist Elizabeth Emma Ferry traces the movement of minerals as they circulate from Mexican mines to markets, museums, and private collections on both sides of the United States-Mexico border. She describes how and why these byproducts of ore mining come to be valued by people in various walks of life as scientific specimens, religious offerings, works of art, and luxury collectibles. The story of mineral exploration and trade defines a variegated transnational space, shedding new light on the complex relationship between these two countries—and on the process of making value itself. “A novel contribution to the anthropology of natural resources.” —Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology “Highly recommended.” —Choice
Author: Mark Dennis Robinson
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262536870
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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Book Description
A critical examination of translational medicine, when private risk is transferred to the public sector and university research teams become tech startups for global investors. A global shift has secretly transformed science and medicine. Starting in 2003, biomedical research in the West has been reshaped by the emergence of translational science and medicine—the idea that the aim of research is to translate findings as quickly as possible into medical products. In The Market in Mind, Mark Dennis Robinson charts this shift, arguing that the new research paradigm has turned university research teams into small biotechnology startups and their industry partners into early-stage investment firms. There is also a larger, surprising consequence from this shift: according to Robinson, translational science and medicine enable biopharmaceutical firms, as part of a broader financial strategy, to outsource the riskiest parts of research to nonprofit universities. Robinson examines the implications of this new configuration. What happens, for example, when universities absorb unknown levels of risk? Robinson argues that in the years since the global financial crisis translational science and medicine has brought about “the financialization of health.” Robinson explores such topics as shareholder anxiety and industry retreat from Alzheimer's and depression research; how laboratory research is understood as health innovation even when there is no product; the emergence of investor networking events as crucial for viewing science in a market context; and the place of patients in research decisions. Although translational medicine justifies itself by the goal of relieving patients' suffering, Robinson finds patients' voices largely marginalized in translational neuroscience.
Author: James Ciment
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317477162
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 2592
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Book Description
Thoroughly revised and expanded, this is the definitive reference on American immigration from both historic and contemporary perspectives. It traces the scope and sweep of U.S. immigration from the earliest settlements to the present, providing a comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach to all aspects of this critically important subject. Every major immigrant group and every era in U.S. history are fully documented and examined through detailed analysis of social, legal, political, economic, and demographic factors. Hot-topic issues and controversies - from Amnesty to the U.S.-Mexican Border - are covered in-depth. Archival and contemporary photographs and illustrations further illuminate the information provided. And dozens of charts and tables provide valuable statistics and comparative data, both historic and current. A special feature of this edition is the inclusion of more than 80 full-text primary documents from 1787 to 2013 - laws and treaties, referenda, Supreme Court cases, historical articles, and letters.
Author: Ramon A. Gutierrez
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520284844
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 669
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Book Description
The New Latino Studies Reader is designed as a contemporary, updated, multifaceted collection of writings that bring to force the exciting, necessary scholarship of the last decades. Its aim is to introduce a new generation of students to a wide-ranging set of essays that helps them gain a truer understanding of what it’s like to be a Latino in the United States. With the reader, students explore the sociohistorical formation of Latinos as a distinct panethnic group in the United States, delving into issues of class formation; social stratification; racial, gender, and sexual identities; and politics and cultural production. And while other readers now in print may discuss Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans and Central Americans as distinct groups with unique experiences, this text explores both the commonalities and the differences that structure the experiences of Latino Americans. Timely, thorough, and thought-provoking, The New Latino Studies Reader provides a genuine view of the Latino experience as a whole.
