Showing titles in Latin America

At 15, Victor Rios found himself a human target - flat on his ass amid a hail of shotgun fire, desperate for money and a place on the street. Faced with the choice of escalating a drug turf war or eking out a living elsewhere, he turned to a teacher, who mentored him and helped him find a job at an auto shop. That job would alter the course of his whole life - putting him on the road to college and eventually a PhD.

Combining on-the-ground reporting and in-depth discussions with people on the frontlines of Mexico's drug war, To Die in Mexico tells behind-the-scenes stories that address the causes and consequences of Mexico's multibillion dollar drug trafficking business. John Gibler looks beyond the myths that pervade government and media portrayals of the unprecedented wave of violence now pushing Mexico to the breaking point.

Around the world, certain drinks - especially those of the intoxicating kind - are synonymous with their peoples and cultures. For Mexico, this drink is tequila. For many, tequila can conjure up scenes of body shots on Cancún bars and coolly garnished margaritas on sandy beaches. Its power is equally strong within Mexico, though there the drink is more often sipped rather than shot, enjoyed casually among friends, and used to commemorate occasions from the everyday to the sacred.

José “Pepe” Mujica es un ex guerrillero que llegó a ser presidente de su país, Uruguay, haciéndose mundialmente conocido por sus propuestas políticas transformadoras y su estilo campechano. Integrante de Tupamaros en los ´60 y ´70, Mujica se fugó con sus compañeros en dos oportunidades de la cárcel. La dictadura militar volvió a capturarlo y lo mantuvo en prisión bajo duras condiciones. Ya en democracia se volvió uno de los exponentes más queridos del Frente Amplio, la coalición de centroizquierda que ganó las elecciones en 2004, cortando con una larga historia de alternancia conservadora en Uruguay.

El 5 de febrero de 1970, un hombre de 28 años intentó matar a Gustavo Díaz Ordaz. Falló. Pero el Estado reaccionó con saña maquiavélica y no falló en su intento de matarlo en vida. Después del atentado, Carlos Castañeda fue detenido y torturado. Sin embargo, eso no fue lo peor: una jueza lo declaró «jurídicamente incapaz» y ordenó refundirlo en el manicomio. Lo dejaron ahí 23 años, desecho, ignorado, enloquecido. Cuando al fin fue liberado, en 1993, ya era un hombre sin nombre, sin identidad ni historia. Vagó por las calles hasta su muerte.

Gardening at the Margins tells the remarkable story of a diverse group of neighbors working together to grow food and community in the Santa Clara Valley in California. Based on four years of deeply engaged ethnographic field research via a Participatory Action Research project with the people and ecosystems of La Mesa Verde home garden program, Gabriel R. Valle develops a theory of convivial labor to describe how the acts of care among the diverse gardeners are powerful, complex acts of resistance.

Following the 1808 French invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, an unprecedented political crisis threw the Spanish Monarchy into turmoil. On the Caribbean coast of modern-day Colombia, the important port town of Cartagena rejected Spanish authority, finally declaring independence in 1811. Based on handwritten and printed sources in Spanish, English, and French, this book tells the story of Cartagena's multinational and multicultural seafarers, revealing the Trans-Atlantic and maritime dimensions of South American independence.

Discover the remarkable history of the Maya Civilization...For more than one thousand years, the Maya people dominated areas of Central America and modern-day Mexico and made important advances in architecture, astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. Then, after the Spanish occupation in the 16th century, Maya culture and thinking were deliberately suppressed. Only in the 20th century did scientists appreciate just how advanced these people had been and how important they were in the history of Mesoamerica.

Raised in Miami and the daughter of Cuban refugees, Crucet examines the political and personal contours of American identity and the physical places where those contours find themselves smashed: be it a rodeo town in Nebraska, a university campus in upstate New York, or Disney World in Florida. Crucet illuminates how she came to see her exclusion from aspects of the theoretical American Dream, despite her family's attempts to fit in with white American culture - beginning with their ill-fated plan to name her after the winner of the Miss America pageant.

The Way That Leads Among the Lost reveals a hidden place where care and violence are impossible to separate: the anexos of Mexico City. The prizewinning anthropologist Angela Garcia takes us deep into the world of these small rooms, informal treatment centers for alcoholism, addiction, and mental illness, spread across Mexico City’s tenements and reaching into the United States.

El valor, como el miedo, son contagiosos. De uno y otro lado los defensores y los atacantes realizan hazañas sorprendentes. Si, en el caso del ejército francés, su notable disciplina les da ventaja, en el caso mexicano los oficiales y suboficiales que combaten en la primera línea dan una consistencia enorme a la defensa. González Ortega añade: “Los vi serenos en medio de los fuegos, a unos a pecho descubierto y a otros en los muros que se les habían enco - mendado, esperando el empuje del invasor”.

Dodger Stadium is an American icon. But the story of how it came to be goes far beyond baseball. The hills that cradle the stadium were once home to three vibrant Mexican American communities. In the early 1950s, those communities were condemned to make way for a utopian public housing project. Then, in a remarkable turn, public housing in the city was defeated amidst a Red Scare conspiracy.

This guide to Mexico takes you to the heart of Mexican society. It describes how people socialize and meet members of the opposite sex, the dynamics of daily life, the central importance of family, and the annual cycle of Catholic feasts and fiestas. For business travelers, there are key sections on the economy and vital insights into the general business culture. The third-largest country in Latin America, Mexico is hugely diverse, having both rural areas, where time seems to have stood still, and manic urban centers like Mexico City, one of the most exciting cities in the world.

Bishop Juan Gerardi, Guatemala's leading human rights activist, was bludgeoned to death in his garage on a Sunday night in 1998, two days after the presentation of a groundbreaking church-sponsored report implicating the military in the murders and disappearances of some 200,000 civilians.

Rooted in two vastly different cultures, a young man struggles to understand himself, find his place in the world, and reconnect with his mother - and her remote tribe in the deepest jungles of the Amazon rainforest - in this powerful memoir that combines adventure, history, and anthropology.

American Civil Wars takes listeners beyond the battlefields and sectional divides of the US Civil War to view the conflict from outside the national arena of the United States. Contributors position the American conflict squarely in the context of a wider transnational crisis across the Atlantic world, marked by a multitude of civil wars, European invasions and occupations, revolutionary independence movements, and slave uprisings - all taking place in the tumultuous decade of the 1860s.

A generation of Americans came of age boycotting grapes, swept up in a movement that vanquished California's most powerful industry and accomplished the unthinkable: dignity and contracts for farm workers. Four decades later, Cesar Chavez's likeness graces postage stamps, and dozens of schools and streets have been renamed in his honor. But the real story of Chavez's farm workers' movement - both its historic triumphs and its tragic disintegration - has remained buried beneath the hagiography.

Esta es la versión completa en audio del clásico de la literatura Colombiana, María. Ambientada en el Valle del Cauca, en el siglo IXX, María es una historia romántica sobre el amor de dos jóvenes, y los problemas que deben afrontar para estar juntos.

La mitología de la civilización azteca, que gobernó el centro de México en los años 1400 y principios de 1500, representaba una unión de grandeza y pavor. El mundo fue creado y destruido en el mito, y los dioses magníficos lucharon entre sí. todos los dias artículo: color, número, deidad, día de el calendario adquirió un significado particular ya que cada uno estaba vinculado con una deidad. La vida religiosa azteca varió desde manteniendo estatuillas de arcilla del dios en el hogar a asistir a elaboradas ceremonias públicas que involucran sacrificios humanos.

Los aztecas creían que las ofrendas de sangre y vidas humanas eran necesarias para el continuo funcionamiento del universo.