Author: George W. Grayson
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 1412815517
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 357
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Book Description
* Mexico was named an Outstanding Academic Title of 2010 by Choice Magazine. Bloodshed connected with Mexican drug cartels, how they emerged, and their impact on the United States is the subject of this frightening book. Savage narcotics-related decapitations, castrations, and other murders have destroyed tourism in many Mexican communities and such savagery is now cascading across the border into the United States. Grayson explores how this spiral of violence emerged in Mexico, its impact on the country and its northern neighbor, and the prospects for managing it. Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) ruled in Tammany Hall fashion for seventy-nine years before losing the presidency in 2000 to the center-right National Action Party (PAN). Grayson focuses on drug wars, prohibition, corruption, and other antecedents that occurred during the PRI's hegemony. He illuminates the diaspora of drug cartels and their fragmentation, analyzes the emergence of new gangs, sets forth President Felipe Calder�n's strategy against vicious criminal organizations, and assesses its relative success. Grayson reviews the effect of narcotics-focused issues in U.S.-Mexican relations. He considers the possibility that Mexico may become a failed state, as feared by opinion-leaders, even as it pursues an aggressive but thus far unsuccessful crusade against the importation, processing, and sale of illegal substances. Becoming a "failed state" involves two dimensions of state power: its scope, or the different functions and goals taken on by governments, and its strength, or the government's ability to plan and execute policies. The Mexican state boasts an extensive scope evidenced by its monopoly over the petroleum industry, its role as the major supplier of electricity, its financing of public education, its numerous retirement and health-care programs, its control of public universities, and its dominance over the armed forces. The state has not yet taken control of drug trafficking, and its strength is steadily diminishing. This explosive book is thus a study of drug cartels, but also state disintegration.
Author: Anabel Hernández
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1781685460
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 404
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Book Description
The product of five years of investigative reporting, the subject of intense national controversy, and the source of death threats that forced the National Human Rights Commission to assign two full-time bodyguards to Anabel Hernndez, The Lords of el Narco has been a publishing and political sensation in Mexico.The definitive history and anatomy of the drug cartels and the "war on drugs" that has cost more than 50,000 lives in just five years, the book explains in riveting detail how Mexico became a base for the mega-cartels of Latin America and one of the most violent places on the planet. Hernndez reveals the complicity of Mexico's government and business elite. At every turn, she names names-not just the narcos and their immediate accomplices, but also the politicians, policemen, functionaries, judges and entrepreneurs who have collaborated with them. Hernndez became a journalist after her father was kidnapped and killed and the police refused to investigate without a bribe. She gained national prominence in 2001 with her exposure of pharaonic spending on housekeeping at the presidential palace. All her previous books have also focused on corruption at the summit of power, under presidents Vicente Fox and Felipe Caldern.
Author: Rubén Hernández-León
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520942462
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
Challenging many common perceptions, this is the first book fully dedicated to understanding a major new phenomenon—the large numbers of skilled urban workers who are now coming across the border from Mexico's cities. Based on a ten-year, on-the-ground study of one working-class neighborhood in Monterrey, Mexico's industrial powerhouse and third-largest city, Metropolitan Migrants explores the ways in which Mexico's economic restructuring and the industrial modernization of the past three decades have pushed a new flow of migrants toward cities such as Houston, Texas, the global capital of the oil industry. Weaving together rich details of everyday life with a lucid analysis of Mexico's political economy, Rubén Hernández-León deftly traces the effects of restructuring on the lives of the working class, from the national level to the kitchen table.
Author: Julián Cardona
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477325034
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231
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Book Description
Southwest Book Awards, Border Regional Library Association (BRLA) Uses key words and striking images to explore violence and everyday life in Juárez, Mexico. Juárez, Mexico, is known for violence. The femicides of the 1990s, and the cartel mayhem that followed, made it one of the world's most dangerous cities. Along with the violence came a new lexicon that traveled from person to person, across rivers and borders—wherever it was needed to explain the horrors taking place. From personal interviews, media accounts, and conversations on the street, Julián Cardona and Alice Leora Briggs have collected the words and slang that make up the brutal language of Juárez, creating a glossary that serves as a linguistic portrait of the city and its violence. Organized alphabetically, the entries consist of Spanish and Spanglish, accompanied by short English definitions. Some also feature a longer narrative drawn from interviews—stories that put the terms in context and provide a personal counterpoint to media reports of the same events. Letters, and many of the entries, are supplemented with Briggs’s evocative illustrations, which are reminiscent of Hans Holbein’s famous Alphabet of Death. Together, the words, drawings, and descriptions in ABCedario de Juárez both document and interpret the everyday violence of this vital border city.
Author: Javier Valdez Cárdenas
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806158875
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
A massive wave of violence has rippled across Mexico over the past decade. In the western state of Sinaloa, the birthplace of modern drug trafficking, ordinary citizens live in constant fear of being “taken”—kidnapped or held against their will by armed men, whether criminals, police, or both. This remarkable collection of firsthand accounts by prize-winning journalist Javier Valdez Cárdenas provides a uniquely human perspective on life in Sinaloa during the drug war. The reality of the Mexican drug war, a conflict fueled by uncertainty and fear, is far more complex than the images conjured in popular imagination. Often missing from news reports is the perspective of ordinary people—migrant workers, schoolteachers, single mothers, businessmen, teenagers, petty criminals, police officers, and local journalists—people whose worlds center not on drugs or illegal activity but on survival and resilience, truth and reconciliation. Building on a rich tradition of testimonial literature, Valdez Cárdenas recounts in gripping detail how people deal not only with the constant threat of physical violence but also with the fear, uncertainty, and guilt that afflict survivors and witnesses. Mexican journalists who dare expose the drug war’s inconvenient political and social realities are censored and smeared, murdered, and “disappeared.” This is precisely why we need to hear from seasoned local reporters like Valdez Cárdenas who write about the places where they live, rely on a network of trusted sources built over decades, and tell the stories behind the headline-grabbing massacres and scandals. In his informative introduction to the volume, translator Everard Meade orients the reader to the broader armed conflict in Mexico and explains the unique role of Sinaloa as its epicenter. Reports on border politics and infamous drug traffickers may obscure the victims’ suffering. The Taken helps ensure that their stories will not be forgotten or suppressed.
Author: John Holmes McDowell
Publisher: UNM Press
ISBN: 0826337449
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 454
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Book Description
The present compilation of ballads from the Mexican states of Guerrero and Oaxaca documents one of the world’s great traditions of heroic song, a tradition that has thrived continuously for the last hundred years. The 107 corridos presented here, gathered during ethnographic research over a period of twenty-five years in settlements on Mexico’s Costa Chica and Costa Grande, offer a window into the ethos of heroism among the cultures of Mexico's southwestern coast, a region that has been plagued by recurrent cycles of violence. John Holmes McDowell presents a richly annotated field collection of corridos, accompanied by musical scores and transcriptions and translations of lyrics. In addition to his interpretation of the corridos’ depiction of violence and masculinity, McDowell situates the songs in historical and performance contexts, illuminating the Afro-mestizo influence in this distinctive population.
Author: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Publisher: Del Rey
ISBN: 0593356837
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
GOOD MORNING AMERICA BUZZ PICK • From the New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic comes a simmering historical noir about a daydreaming secretary, a lonesome enforcer, and the mystery of the missing woman they’re both desperate to find. ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, New York Public Library, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, BookPage, She Reads, Library Journal • “An adrenalized, darkly romantic journey.”—The Washington Post Mexico in the 1970s is a dangerous country, even for Maite, a secretary who spends her life seeking the romance found in cheap comic books and ignoring the activists protesting around the city. When her next-door neighbor, the beautiful art student Leonora, disappears under suspicious circumstances, Maite finds herself searching for the missing woman—and journeying deeper into Leonora’s secret life of student radicals and dissidents. Mexico in the 1970s is a politically fraught land, even for Elvis, a goon with a passion for rock ’n’ roll who knows more about kidney-smashing than intrigue. When Elvis is assigned to find Leonora, he begins a blood-soaked search for the woman—and his soul. Swirling in parallel trajectories, Maite and Elvis attempt to discover the truth behind Leonora’s disappearance, encountering hitmen, government agents, and Russian spies. Because Mexico in the 1970s is a noir, where life is cheap and the price of truth is high.
Author: James H. Creechan
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816544255
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 393
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Book Description
The popular history of narco-Mexico has long been narrowly framed by the U.S. “War on Drugs.” Stereotypes overemphasize the criminal agency of celebrity drug lords. Common understanding of the narco world is rooted in mythology and misunderstanding, and the public narrative has consistently downplayed links to respected individuals and legitimate society. In Drug Wars and Covert Netherworlds sociologist and criminologist James H. Creechan draws on decades of research to paint a much more nuanced picture of the transformation of Mexico’s narco cartels. Creechan details narco cartel history, focusing on the decades since Richard Nixon declared the War on Drugs. With sobering detail, Creechan unravels a web of government dependence, legitimate enterprises, covert connections, and violent infighting. He details how drug smuggling organizations have grown into powerful criminal mafias with the complicit involvement of powerful figures in civil society to create covert netherworlds. Mexico is at a moment of change—a country on the verge of transition or perdition. It can only move forward by examining its history of narco-connections spun and re-spun over the last fifty years.
Author: Rudy Ruiz
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 283
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Book Description
The Border Between Us is a poignant coming-of-age novel from one of the most exciting voices in fiction. Ramón López was born along the US–Mexico border but is determined to get out and embrace the American dream—and he’s not sure whether his complicated family is a help or a hindrance. As the son of immigrants, as Ramón grows, his admiration for his entrepreneurial father sours as he watches his dad’s dreams of success wither on the vine. Ramón’s mother is constantly preoccupied with his younger brother, who struggles with intellectual disabilities. And the outside world is rife with danger and temptations threatening to distract Ramón from his dreams of making it to New York and succeeding as an artist. As dreams clash with reality and values conflict with desires, Ramón finds the American dream within his reach—but will it demand too big a sacrifice? Award-winning author Rudy Ruiz brilliantly captures the beauty and the danger of border life as Ramón struggles to understand his home and his place in the world. The Border Between Us is a stunning, compassionate story about a son’s fraught relationship with his father, the challenges of pursuing a creative life when you come from humble beginnings, and the power of embracing the whole of who you are.
Author: M. Wilkes Karraker
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137296968
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
This book offers an interdisciplinary and accessible approach to issues of global migration in the twenty-first century in 13 essays plus an appendix written by scholars and practitioners in the field.
