Search results for ""university of texas press""

Director Michael Curtiz was the mastermind behind some of the most iconic films of classical Hollywood—Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy, The Sea Hawk, White Christmas, and Mildred Pierce, to name only a few. The most prolific and consistently successful Hollywood generalist with an all-embracing interest in different forms of narrative and spectacle, Curtiz made around a hundred films in an astonishing range of genres: action, biopics, melodramas/film noir, musicals, and westerns. But his important contributions to the history of American film have been overlooked because his broadly varied oeuvre does not present the unified vision of filmmaking that canonical criticism demands for the category of “auteur.”Exploring his films and artistic practice from a variety of angles, including politics, gender, and genre, The Many Cinemas of Michael Curtiz sheds new light on this underappreciated cinematic genius. Leading film studies scholars offer fresh appraisals of many of Curtiz’s most popular films, while also paying attention to neglected releases of substantial historical interest, such as Noah’s Ark , Night and Day, Virginia City, Black Fury, Mystery of the Wax Museum, and Female. Because Curtiz worked for so long and in so many genres, this analysis of his work becomes more than an author study of a notable director. Instead, The Many Cinemas of Michael Curtiz effectively adds a major chapter to the history of Hollywood’s studio era, including its internationalism and the significant contributions of European émigrés.

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As part of the larger, ongoing movement throughout Latin America to reclaim non-Hispanic cultural heritages and identities, indigenous writers in Mexico are reappropriating the written word in their ancestral tongues and in Spanish. As a result, the long-marginalized, innermost feelings, needs, and worldviews of Mexico's ten to twenty million indigenous peoples are now being widely revealed to the Western societies with which these peoples coexist. To contribute to this process and serve as a bridge of intercultural communication and understanding, this groundbreaking, three-volume anthology gathers works by the leading generation of writers in thirteen Mexican indigenous languages: Nahuatl, Maya, Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Tojolabal, Tabasco Chontal, Purepecha, Sierra Zapoteco, Isthmus Zapoteco, Mazateco, Ñahñu, Totonaco, and Huichol.Volume Three contains plays by six Mexican indigenous writers. Their plays appear first in their native language, followed by English and Spanish translations. Montemayor and Frischmann have abundantly annotated the Spanish, English, and indigenous-language texts and added glossaries and essays that introduce the work of each playwright and discuss the role of theater within indigenous communities. These supporting materials make the anthology especially accessible and interesting for nonspecialist readers seeking a greater understanding of Mexico's indigenous peoples.

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Austin’s thriving film culture, renowned for international events such as SXSW and the Austin Film Festival, extends back to the early 1970s when students in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin ran a film programming unit that screened movies for students and the public. Dubbed CinemaTexas, the program offered viewers a wide variety of films—old and new, mainstream, classic, and cult—at a time when finding and watching films after their first run was very difficult and prohibitively expensive. For each film, RTF graduate students wrote program notes that included production details, a sampling of critical reactions, and an original essay that placed the film and its director within context and explained the movie’s historical significance. Over time, CinemaTexas Program Notes became more ambitious and were distributed around the world, including to luminaries such as film critic Pauline Kael.This anthology gathers a sampling of CinemaTexas Program Notes, organized into four sections: “USA Film History,” “Hollywood Auteurs,” “Cinema-Fist: Renegade Talents,” and “America’s Shadow Cinema.” Many of the note writers have become prominent film studies scholars, as well as leading figures in the film, TV, music, and video game industries. As a collection, CinemaTexas Notes strongly contradicts the notion of an effortlessly formed American film canon, showing instead how local film cultures—whether in Austin, New York, or Europe—have forwarded the development of film studies as a discipline.

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When Lieutenant Uhura took her place on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise on Star Trek, the actress Nichelle Nichols went where no African American woman had ever gone before. Yet several decades passed before many other black women began playing significant roles in speculative (i.e., science fiction, fantasy, and horror) film and television—a troubling omission, given that these genres offer significant opportunities for reinventing social constructs such as race, gender, and class. Challenging cinema’s history of stereotyping or erasing black women on-screen, Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before showcases twenty-first-century examples that portray them as central figures of action and agency.Writing for fans as well as scholars, Diana Adesola Mafe looks at representations of black womanhood and girlhood in American and British speculative film and television, including 28 Days Later, AVP: Alien vs. Predator, Children of Men, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Firefly, and Doctor Who: Series 3. Each of these has a subversive black female character in its main cast, and Mafe draws on critical race, postcolonial, and gender theories to explore each film and show, placing the black female characters at the center of the analysis and demonstrating their agency. The first full study of black female characters in speculative film and television, Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before shows why heroines such as Lex in AVP and Zoë in Firefly are inspiring a generation of fans, just as Uhura did.

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In The Senses of Democracy, Francine R. Masiello traces a history of perceptions expressed in literature, the visual arts, politics, and history from the start of the nineteenth century to the present day. A wide transnational landscape frames the book along with an original and provocative thesis: when the discourse on democracy is altered—when nations fall into crisis or the increased weight of modernity tests minds and nerves—the representation of our sensing bodies plays a crucial role in explaining order and rebellion, cultural innovation, and social change.Taking a wide arc of materials—periodicals, memoirs, political proclamations, and travel logs, along with art installations and fiction—and focusing on the technologies that supplement and enhance human perception, Masiello looks at the evolution of what she calls “sense work” in cultural texts, mainly from Latin America, that wend from the heights of romantic thought to the startling innovations of modernism in the early twentieth century and then to times of posthuman experience when cyber bodies hurtle through globalized space and human senses are reproduced by machines. Tracing the shifting debates on perceptions, The Senses of Democracy offers a new paradigm with which to speak of Latin American cultural history and launches a field for the comparative study of bodies, experience, pleasure, and pain over the continental divide. In the end, sense work helps us to understand how culture finds its location.

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In The Senses of Democracy, Francine R. Masiello traces a history of perceptions expressed in literature, the visual arts, politics, and history from the start of the nineteenth century to the present day. A wide transnational landscape frames the book along with an original and provocative thesis: when the discourse on democracy is altered—when nations fall into crisis or the increased weight of modernity tests minds and nerves—the representation of our sensing bodies plays a crucial role in explaining order and rebellion, cultural innovation, and social change.Taking a wide arc of materials—periodicals, memoirs, political proclamations, and travel logs, along with art installations and fiction—and focusing on the technologies that supplement and enhance human perception, Masiello looks at the evolution of what she calls “sense work” in cultural texts, mainly from Latin America, that wend from the heights of romantic thought to the startling innovations of modernism in the early twentieth century and then to times of posthuman experience when cyber bodies hurtle through globalized space and human senses are reproduced by machines. Tracing the shifting debates on perceptions, The Senses of Democracy offers a new paradigm with which to speak of Latin American cultural history and launches a field for the comparative study of bodies, experience, pleasure, and pain over the continental divide. In the end, sense work helps us to understand how culture finds its location.

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In the decades following World War II, the creation and expansion of massive domestic markets and relatively stable economies allowed for mass consumption on an unprecedented scale, giving rise to the consumer society that exists today. Many avant-garde artists explored the nexus between consumption and aesthetics, questioning how consumerism affects how we perceive the world, place ourselves in it, and make sense of it via perception and emotion.Delirious Consumption focuses on the two largest cultural economies in Latin America, Mexico and Brazil, and analyzes how their artists and writers both embraced and resisted the spirit of development and progress that defines the consumer moment in late capitalism. Sergio Delgado Moya looks specifically at the work of David Alfaro Siqueiros, the Brazilian concrete poets, Octavio Paz, and Lygia Clark to determine how each of them arrived at forms of aesthetic production balanced between high modernism and consumer culture. He finds in their works a provocative positioning vis-à-vis urban commodity capitalism, an ambivalent position that takes an assured but flexible stance against commodification, alienation, and the politics of domination and inequality that defines market economies. In Delgado Moya’s view, these poets and artists appeal to uselessness, nonutility, and noncommunication—all markers of the aesthetic—while drawing on the terms proper to a world of consumption and consumer culture.

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Jews have always played an important role in the generation of culture in Latin America, despite their relatively small numbers in the overall population. In the early days of cinema, they served as directors, producers, screenwriters, composers, and broadcasters. As Latin American societies became more religiously open in the later twentieth century, Jewish characters and themes began appearing in Latin American films and eventually achieved full inclusion. Landmark films by Jewish directors in Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil, which are home to the largest and most influential Jewish communities in Latin America, have enjoyed critical and popular acclaim.Evolving Images is the first volume devoted to Jewish Latin American cinema, with fifteen critical essays by leading scholars from Latin America, the United States, Europe, and Israel. The contributors address transnational and transcultural issues of Jewish life in Latin America, such as assimilation, integration, identity, and other aspects of life in the Diaspora. Their discussions of films with Jewish themes and characters show the rich diversity of Jewish cultures in Latin America, as well as how Jews, both real and fictional, interact among themselves and with other groups, raising the question of how much their ethnicity may be adulterated when adopting a combined identity as Jewish and Latin American. The book closes with a groundbreaking section on the affinities between Jewish themes in Hollywood and Latin American films, as well as a comprehensive filmography.

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As Puerto Rico rapidly industrialized from the late 1940s until the 1970s, the social, political, and economic landscape changed profoundly. In the realm of heath care, the development of medical education, new medical technologies, and a new faith in science radically redefined childbirth and its practice. What had traditionally been a home-based, family-oriented process, assisted by women and midwives and “accomplished” by mothers, became a medicalized, hospital-based procedure, “accomplished” and directed by biomedical, predominantly male, practitioners, and, ultimately reconfigured, after the 1980s, into a technocratic model of childbirth, driven by doctors’ fears of malpractice suits and hospitals’ corporate concerns.Pushing in Silence charts the medicalization of childbirth in Puerto Rico and demonstrates how biomedicine is culturally constructed within regional and historical contexts. Prior to 1950, registered midwives on the island outnumbered registered doctors by two to one, and they attended well over half of all deliveries. Isabel M. Córdova traces how, over the next quarter-century, midwifery almost completely disappeared as state programs led by scientifically trained experts and organized by bureaucratic institutions restructured and formalized birthing practices. Only after cesarean rates skyrocketed in the 1980s and 1990s did midwifery make a modest return through the practices of five newly trained midwives. This history, which mirrors similar patterns in the United States and elsewhere, adds an important new chapter to the development of medicine and technology in Latin America.

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Natural disasters, the effects of climate change, and political upheavals and war have driven tens of millions of people from their homes and spurred intense debates about how governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) should respond with long-term resettlement strategies. Many resettlement efforts have focused primarily on providing infrastructure and have done little to help displaced people and communities rebuild social structure, which has led to resettlement failures throughout the world. So what does it take to transform a resettlement into a successful community?This book offers the first long-term comparative study of social outcomes through a case study of two Honduran resettlements built for survivors of Hurricane Mitch (1998) by two different NGOs. Although residents of each arrived from the same affected neighborhoods and have similar demographics, twelve years later one resettlement wrestles with high crime, low participation, and low social capital, while the other maintains low crime, a high degree of social cohesion, participation, and general social health. Using a multi-method approach of household surveys, interviews, ethnography, and analysis of NGO and community documents, Ryan Alaniz demonstrates that these divergent resettlement trajectories can be traced back to the type and quality of support provided by external organizations and the creation of a healthy, cohesive community culture. His findings offer important lessons and strategies that can be utilized in other places and in future resettlement policy to achieve the most effective and positive results.

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When Hiram Bingham, a historian from Yale University, first saw Machu Picchu in 1911, it was a ruin obscured by overgrowth whose terraces were farmed a by few families. A century later, Machu Picchu is a UNESCO world heritage site visited by more than a million tourists annually. This remarkable transformation began with the photographs that accompanied Bingham’s article published in National Geographic magazine, which depicted Machu Picchu as a lost city discovered. Focusing on the practices, technologies, and materializations of Bingham’s three expeditions to Peru (1911, 1912, 1914–1915), this book makes a convincing case that visualization, particularly through the camera, played a decisive role in positioning Machu Picchu as both a scientific discovery and a Peruvian heritage site. Amy Cox Hall argues that while Bingham’s expeditions relied on the labor, knowledge, and support of Peruvian elites, intellectuals, and peasants, the practice of scientific witnessing, and photography specifically, converted Machu Picchu into a cultural artifact fashioned from a distinct way of seeing. Drawing on science and technology studies, she situates letter writing, artifact collecting, and photography as important expeditionary practices that helped shape the way we understand Machu Picchu today. Cox Hall also demonstrates that the photographic evidence was unstable, and, as images circulated worldwide, the “lost city” took on different meanings, especially in Peru, which came to view the site as one of national patrimony in need of protection from expeditions such as Bingham’s.

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Latinas/os and Asians are rewriting the meaning and history of race in the American South by complicating the black/white binary that has frequently defined the region since before the Civil War. Arriving in southern communities as migrants or refugees, Latinas/os and Asians have experienced both begrudging acceptance and prejudice as their presence confronts and troubles local understandings of race and difference—understandings that have deep roots in each community’s particular racial history, as well as in national fears and anxieties about race.Nuevo South offers the first comparative study showing how Latinas/os and Asians are transforming race and place in the contemporary South. Integrating political, economic, and social analysis, Perla M. Guerrero examines the reception of Vietnamese, Cubans, and Mexicans in northwestern Arkansas communities that were almost completely white until the mid-1970s. She shows how reactions to these refugees and immigrants ranged from reluctant acceptance of Vietnamese as former US allies to rejection of Cubans as communists, criminals, and homosexuals and Mexicans as “illegal aliens” who were perceived as invaders when they began to establish roots and became more visible in public spaces. Guerrero’s research clarifies how social relations are constituted in the labor sphere, particularly the poultry industry, and reveals the legacies of regional history, especially anti-Black violence and racial cleansing. Nuevo South thus helps us to better understand what constitutes the so-called Nuevo South and how historical legacies shape the reception of new people in the region.

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As Puerto Rico rapidly industrialized from the late 1940s until the 1970s, the social, political, and economic landscape changed profoundly. In the realm of heath care, the development of medical education, new medical technologies, and a new faith in science radically redefined childbirth and its practice. What had traditionally been a home-based, family-oriented process, assisted by women and midwives and “accomplished” by mothers, became a medicalized, hospital-based procedure, “accomplished” and directed by biomedical, predominantly male, practitioners, and, ultimately reconfigured, after the 1980s, into a technocratic model of childbirth, driven by doctors’ fears of malpractice suits and hospitals’ corporate concerns.Pushing in Silence charts the medicalization of childbirth in Puerto Rico and demonstrates how biomedicine is culturally constructed within regional and historical contexts. Prior to 1950, registered midwives on the island outnumbered registered doctors by two to one, and they attended well over half of all deliveries. Isabel M. Córdova traces how, over the next quarter-century, midwifery almost completely disappeared as state programs led by scientifically trained experts and organized by bureaucratic institutions restructured and formalized birthing practices. Only after cesarean rates skyrocketed in the 1980s and 1990s did midwifery make a modest return through the practices of five newly trained midwives. This history, which mirrors similar patterns in the United States and elsewhere, adds an important new chapter to the development of medicine and technology in Latin America.

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Arvey Foundation Book Award, Association for Latin American Art, 2019Quito, Ecuador, was one of colonial South America’s most important artistic centers. Yet the literature on painting in colonial Quito largely ignores the first century of activity, reducing it to a “handful of names,” writes Susan Verdi Webster. In this major new work based on extensive and largely unpublished archival documentation, Webster identifies and traces the lives of more than fifty painters who plied their trade in the city between 1550 and 1650, revealing their mastery of languages and literacies and the circumstances in which they worked in early colonial Quito.Overturning many traditional assumptions about early Quiteño artists, Webster establishes that these artists—most of whom were Andean—functioned as visual intermediaries and multifaceted cultural translators who harnessed a wealth of specialized knowledge to shape graphic, pictorial worlds for colonial audiences. Operating in an urban mediascape of layered languages and empires—a colonial Spanish realm of alphabetic script and mimetic imagery and a colonial Andean world of discursive graphic, material, and chromatic forms—Quiteño painters dominated both the pen and the brush. Webster demonstrates that the Quiteño artists enjoyed fluency in several areas, ranging from alphabetic literacy and sophisticated scribal conventions to specialized knowledge of pictorial languages: the materials, technologies, and chemistry of painting, in addition to perspective, proportion, and iconography. This mastery enabled artists to deploy languages and literacies—alphabetic, pictorial, graphic, chromatic, and material—to obtain power and status in early colonial Quito.

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Winner, Humanities Book Prize, Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies Association, 2018Many scholars believe that the modern concentration camp was born during the Cuban war for independence when Spanish authorities ordered civilians living in rural areas to report to the nearest city with a garrison of Spanish troops. But the practice of spatial concentration—gathering people and things in specific ways, at specific places, and for specific purposes—has a history in Latin America that reaches back to the conquest. In this paradigm-setting book, Daniel Nemser argues that concentration projects, often tied to urbanization, laid an enduring, material groundwork, or infrastructure, for the emergence and consolidation of new forms of racial identity and theories of race.Infrastructures of Race traces the use of concentration as a technique for colonial governance by examining four case studies from Mexico under Spanish rule: centralized towns, disciplinary institutions, segregated neighborhoods, and general collections. Nemser shows how the colonial state used concentration in its attempts to build a new spatial and social order, and he explains why the technique flourished in the colonies. Although the designs for concentration were sometimes contested and short-lived, Nemser demonstrates that they provided a material foundation for ongoing processes of racialization. This finding, which challenges conventional histories of race and mestizaje (racial mixing), promises to deepen our understanding of the way race emerges from spatial politics and techniques of population management.

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Winner, Wayland D. Hand Prize, American Folklore Society, 2018Originating in a homicide in St. Louis in 1899, the ballad of “Frankie and Johnny” became one of America’s most familiar songs during the first half of the twentieth century. It crossed lines of race, class, and artistic genres, taking form in such varied expressions as a folk song performed by Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly); a ballet choreographed by Ruth Page and Bentley Stone under New Deal sponsorship; a mural in the Missouri State Capitol by Thomas Hart Benton; a play by John Huston; a motion picture, She Done Him Wrong, that made Mae West a national celebrity; and an anti-lynching poem by Sterling Brown.In this innovative book, Stacy I. Morgan explores why African American folklore—and “Frankie and Johnny” in particular—became prized source material for artists of diverse political and aesthetic sensibilities. He looks at a confluence of factors, including the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, and resurgent nationalism, that led those creators to engage with this ubiquitous song. Morgan’s research uncovers the wide range of work that artists called upon African American folklore to perform in the 1930s, as it alternately reinforced and challenged norms of race, gender, and appropriate subjects for artistic expression. He demonstrates that the folklorists and creative artists of that generation forged a new national culture in which African American folk songs featured centrally not only in folk and popular culture but in the fine arts as well.

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Best-known for Saigon Execution, his Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph that forever shaped how the world views the horrors of war, Eddie Adams was a renowned American photojournalist who won more than five hundred awards, including the George Polk Award for News Photography three times and the Robert Capa Gold Medal. During his fifty-year career, he worked as a staff photographer for the Associated Press, Time, and Parade, and his photos appeared on more than 350 magazine covers. Adams is also famous and deeply respected for founding the Eddie Adams Workshop, an intensive photography seminar whose graduates include twelve Pulitzer Prize–winners and many others who have achieved illustrious careers in journalism, commercial photography, and media.Eddie Adams presents a career-spanning selection of the photographer’s finest work from the 1950s through the early 2000s, drawn from the Eddie Adams Photographic Archive at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. In addition to his much-praised Vietnam War photography, the book includes images that uncannily reflect world and domestic issues of today, including immigration, conflict in the Middle East, and the refugee crisis. All of them attest to Adams’s overwhelming desire to tell people’s stories. As he once observed, “I actually become the person I am taking a picture of. If you are starving, I am starving, too.” Accompanying the images are an essay by internationally acclaimed photography curator Anne Wilkes Tucker, a personal remembrance by Adams’s widow Alyssa Adams, a foreword by Briscoe Center director Don Carleton, who provides a concise history of Adams’s career, and a timeline.

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Celebrity culture today teems with stars who challenge long-held ideas about a “normal” body. Plus-size and older actresses are rebelling against the cultural obsession with slender bodies and youth. Physically disabled actors and actresses are moving beyond the stock roles and stereotypes that once constrained their opportunities. Stars of various races and ethnicities are crafting new narratives about cultural belonging, while transgender performers are challenging our culture’s assumptions about gender and identity. But do these new players in contemporary entertainment media truly signal a new acceptance of body diversity in popular culture?Focusing on six key examples—Melissa McCarthy, Gabourey Sidibe, Peter Dinklage, Danny Trejo, Betty White, and Laverne Cox—Rebellious Bodies examines the new body politics of stardom, situating each star against a prominent cultural anxiety about bodies and inclusion, evoking issues ranging from the obesity epidemic and the rise of postracial rhetoric to disability rights, Latino/a immigration, an aging population, and transgender activism. Using a wide variety of sources featuring these celebrities—films, TV shows, entertainment journalism, and more—to analyze each one’s media persona, Russell Meeuf demonstrates that while these stars are promoted as examples of a supposedly more inclusive industry, the reality is far more complex. Revealing how their bodies have become sites for negotiating the still-contested boundaries of cultural citizenship, he uncovers the stark limitations of inclusion in a deeply unequal world.

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After World War II, the concept of borders became unsettled, especially after the rise of subaltern and multicultural studies in the 1980s. Art at the U.S.-Mexico border came to a turning point at the beginning of that decade with the election of U.S. President Ronald Reagan. Beginning with a political history of the border, with an emphasis on the Chicano movement and its art production, Ila Sheren explores the forces behind the shift in thinking about the border in the late twentieth century.Particularly in the world of visual art, borders have come to represent a space of performance rather than a geographical boundary, a cultural terrain meant to be negotiated rather than a physical line. From 1980 forward, Sheren argues, the border became portable through performance and conceptual work. This dematerialization of the physical border after the 1980s worked in two opposite directions—the movement of border thinking to the rest of the world, as well as the importation of ideas to the border itself. Beginning with site-specific conceptual artwork of the 1980s, particularly the performances of the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, Sheren shows how these works reconfigured the border as an active site. Sheren moves on to examine artists such as Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Coco Fusco, and Marcos Ramirez “ERRE.” Although Sheren places emphasis on the Chicano movement and its art production, this groundbreaking book suggests possibilities for the expansion of the concept of portability to contemporary art projects beyond the region.

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The Space Age began just as the struggle for civil rights forced Americans to confront the long and bitter legacy of slavery, discrimination, and violence against African Americans. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson utilized the space program as an agent for social change, using federal equal employment opportunity laws to open workplaces at NASA and NASA contractors to African Americans while creating thousands of research and technology jobs in the Deep South to ameliorate poverty. We Could Not Fail tells the inspiring, largely unknown story of how shooting for the stars helped to overcome segregation on earth.Richard Paul and Steven Moss profile ten pioneer African American space workers whose stories illustrate the role NASA and the space program played in promoting civil rights. They recount how these technicians, mathematicians, engineers, and an astronaut candidate surmounted barriers to move, in some cases literally, from the cotton fields to the launching pad. The authors vividly describe what it was like to be the sole African American in a NASA work group and how these brave and determined men also helped to transform Southern society by integrating colleges, patenting new inventions, holding elective office, and reviving and governing defunct towns. Adding new names to the roster of civil rights heroes and a new chapter to the story of space exploration, We Could Not Fail demonstrates how African Americans broke the color barrier by competing successfully at the highest level of American intellectual and technological achievement.

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Mainstream narratives of the graphic novel’s development describe the form’s “coming of age,” its maturation from pulp infancy to literary adulthood. In Arresting Development, Christopher Pizzino questions these established narratives, arguing that the medium’s history of censorship and marginalization endures in the minds of its present-day readers and, crucially, its authors. Comics and their writers remain burdened by the stigma of literary illegitimacy and the struggles for status that marked their earlier history.Many graphic novelists are intensely aware of both the medium’s troubled past and their own tenuous status in contemporary culture. Arresting Development presents case studies of four key works—Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Charles Burns’s Black Hole, and Gilbert Hernandez’s Love and Rockets—exploring how their authors engage the problem of comics’ cultural standing. Pizzino illuminates the separation of high and low culture, art and pulp, and sophisticated appreciation and vulgar consumption as continual influences that determine the limits of literature, the status of readers, and the value of the very act of reading.

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William Goyen was a writer of startling originality and deep artistic commitment whose work attracted an international audience and the praise of such luminaries as Northrop Frye, Truman Capote, Gaston Bachelard, and Joyce Carol Oates. His subject was the land and language of his native East Texas; his desire, to preserve the narrative music through which he came to know his world. Goyen sought to transform the cherished details of his lost boyhood landscape into lasting, mythic forms. Cut off from his native soil and considering himself an “orphan,” Goyen brought modernist alienation and experimentation to Texas materials. The result was a body of work both sophisticated and handmade—and a voice at once inimitable and unmistakable.It Starts with Trouble is the first complete account of Goyen’s life and work. It uncovers the sources of his personal and artistic development, from his early years in Trinity, Texas, through his adolescence and college experience in Houston; his Navy service during World War II; and the subsequent growth of his writing career, which saw the publication of five novels, including The House of Breath, nonfiction works such as A Book of Jesus, several short story collections and plays, and a book of poetry. It explores Goyen’s relationships with such legendary figures as Frieda Lawrence, Katherine Anne Porter, Stephen Spender, Anaïs Nin, and Carson McCullers. No other twentieth-century writer attempted so intimate a connection with his readers, and no other writer of his era worked so passionately to recover the spiritual in an age of disabling irony. Goyen’s life and work are a testament to the redemptive power of storytelling and the absolute necessity of narrative art.

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Winner, Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2017Americans are living longer and reinventing both work and retirement, but Hollywood movies barely hint at this reality of contemporary society. In many popular films, older characters fade into irrelevance, inactivity, or absurdity, or else they stay in the background as wise elders while younger characters provide the action. Most American films do not attempt to portray the rich variety of experiences or the sensitive aging issues that people confront in the years beyond fifty.Fade to Gray offers one of the first extended studies of the portrayal of older people in American cinema from the silent era to the present. Writing in an accessible style for both general audiences and scholars, Timothy Shary and Nancy McVittie examine social attitudes toward aging through an analysis of hundreds of individual films, including such classics as You Can’t Take It With You (1938), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Grumpy Old Men (1993), and Nebraska (2013). They show how representations of the aging process and depictions of older people embracing or enduring the various experiences of longer lives have evolved over the past century, as well as how film industry practices have both reflected and influenced perceptions of aging in American society. Exposing the social and political motivations for negative cinematic portrayals of the elderly, Fade to Gray also gives visibility to films that provide opportunities for better understanding and appreciation of the aged and the aging process.

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Thousands of ordinary people in Israel and Palestine have engaged in a dazzling array of daring and visionary joint nonviolent initiatives for more than a century. They have endured despite condemnation by their own societies, repetitive failures of diplomacy, harsh inequalities, and endemic cycles of violence.Connecting with the Enemy presents the first comprehensive history of unprecedented grassroots efforts to forge nonviolent alternatives to the lethal collision of the two national movements. Bringing to light the work of over five hundred groups, Sheila H. Katz describes how Arabs and Jews, children and elders, artists and activists, educators and students, garage mechanics and physicists, and lawyers and prisoners have spoken truth to power, protected the environment, demonstrated peacefully, mourned together, stood in resistance and solidarity, and advocated for justice and security. She also critiques and assesses the significance of their work and explores why these good-will efforts have not yet managed to end the conflict or occupation. This previously untold story of Palestinian-Israeli joint nonviolence will challenge the mainstream narratives of terror and despair, monsters and heroes, that help to perpetuate the conflict. It will also inspire and encourage anyone grappling with social change, peace and war, oppression and inequality, and grassroots activism anywhere in the world.

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Part travelogue, part cookbook, Mercados takes us on a tour of Mexico’s most colorful destinations—its markets—led by an award-winning, preeminent guide whose passion for Mexican food attracted followers from around the globe. Just as David Sterling’s Yucatán earned him praise for his “meticulously researched knowledge” (Saveur) and for producing “a labor of love that well documents place, people and, yes, food” (Booklist), Mercados now invites readers to learn about local ingredients, meet vendors and cooks, and taste dishes that reflect Mexico’s distinctive regional cuisine.Serving up more than one hundred recipes, Mercados presents unique versions of Oaxaca’s legendary moles and Michoacan’s carnitas, as well as little-known specialties such as the charcuterie of Chiapas, the wild anise of Pátzcuaro, and the seafood soups of Veracruz. Sumptuous color photographs transport us to the enormous forty-acre, 10,000-merchant Central de Abastos in Oaxaca as well as tiny tianguises in Tabasco. Blending immersive research and passionate appreciation, David Sterling’s final opus is at once a must-have cookbook and a literary feast for the gastronome.

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Recent critically and commercially acclaimed Latin American films such as XXY, Contracorriente, and Plan B create an affective and bodily connection with viewers that elicits in them an emotive and empathic relationship with queer identities. Referring to these films as New Maricón Cinema, Vinodh Venkatesh argues that they represent a distinct break from what he terms Maricón Cinema, or a cinema that deals with sex and gender difference through an ethically and visually disaffected position, exemplified in films such as Fresa y chocolate, No se lo digas a nadie, and El lugar sin límites.Covering feature films from Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, the United States, and Venezuela, New Maricón Cinema is the first study to contextualize and analyze recent homo-/trans-/intersexed-themed cinema in Latin America within a broader historical and aesthetic genealogy. Working with theories of affect, circulation, and orientations, Venkatesh examines key scenes in the work of auteurs such as Marco Berger, Javier Fuentes-León, and Julia Solomonoff and in films including Antes que anochezca and Y tu mamá también to show how their use of an affective poetics situates and regenerates viewers in an ethically productive cinematic space. He further demonstrates that New Maricón Cinema has encouraged the production of “gay friendly” commercial films for popular audiences, which reflects wider sociocultural changes regarding gender difference and civil rights that are occurring in Latin America.

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The issue of immigration is one of the most hotly debated topics in the national arena, with everyone from right-wing pundits like Sarah Palin to alternative rockers like Zack de la Rocha offering their opinion. The traditional immigrant narrative that gained popularity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries continues to be used today in describing the process of the “Americanization” of immigrants. Yet rather than acting as an accurate representation of immigrant experiences, this common narrative of the “American Dream” attempts to ideologically contain those experiences within a story line that promotes the idea of achieving success through hard work and perseverance.In Domestic Disturbances, Irene Mata dispels the myth of the “shining city on the hill” and reveals the central truth of hidden exploitation that underlies the great majority of Chicana/Latina immigrant stories. Influenced by the works of Latina cultural producers and the growing interdisciplinary field of scholarship on gender, immigration, and labor, Domestic Disturbances suggests a new framework for looking at these immigrant and migrant stories, not as a continuation of a literary tradition, but instead as a specific Latina genealogy of immigrant narratives that more closely engage with the contemporary conditions of immigration. Through examination of multiple genres including film, theatre, and art, as well as current civil rights movements such as the mobilization around the DREAM Act, Mata illustrates the prevalence of the immigrant narrative in popular culture and the oppositional possibilities of alternative stories.

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Without a map, navigate by the stars. Susan Tweit began learning this lesson as a young woman diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that was predicted to take her life in two to five years. Offered no clear direction for getting well through conventional medicine, Tweit turned to the natural world that was both her solace and her field of study as a plant ecologist. Drawing intuitive connections between the natural processes and cycles she observed and the functions of her body, Tweit not only learned healthier ways of living but also discovered a great truth—love can heal. In this beautifully written, moving memoir, she describes how love of the natural world, of her husband and family, and of life itself literally transformed and saved her own life.In tracing the arc of her life from young womanhood to middle age, Tweit tells stories about what silence and sagebrush, bird bones and sheep dogs, comets, death, and one crazy Englishman have to teach us about living. She celebrates making healthy choices, the inner voices she learned to hear on days alone in the wilderness, the joys of growing and eating an organic kitchen garden, and the surprising redemption in restoring a once-blighted neighborhood creek. Linking her life lessons to the stories she learned in childhood about the constellations, Tweit shows how qualities such as courage, compassion, and inspiration draw us together and bind us into the community of the land and of all living things.

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From the influential work of Los Bros Hernandez in Love & Rockets, to comic strips and political cartoons, to traditional superheroes made nontraditional by means of racial and sexual identity (e.g., Miles Morales/Spider-Man), comics have become a vibrant medium to express Latino identity and culture. Indeed, Latino fiction and nonfiction narratives are rapidly proliferating in graphic media as diverse and varied in form and content as is the whole of Latino culture today.Graphic Borders presents the most thorough exploration of comics by and about Latinos currently available. Thirteen essays and one interview by eminent and rising scholars of comics bring to life this exciting graphic genre that conveys the distinctive and wide-ranging experiences of Latinos in the United States. The contributors’ exhilarating excavations delve into the following areas: comics created by Latinos that push the boundaries of generic conventions; Latino comic book author-artists who complicate issues of race and gender through their careful reconfigurations of the body; comic strips; Latino superheroes in mainstream comics; and the complex ways that Latino superheroes are created and consumed within larger popular cultural trends. Taken as a whole, the book unveils the resplendent riches of comics by and about Latinos and proves that there are no limits to the ways in which Latinos can be represented and imagined in the world of comics.

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Numbering between 25 and 35 million worldwide, the Kurds are among the largest culturally and ethnically distinct people to remain stateless. A People Without a State offers an in-depth survey of an identity that has often been ignored in mainstream historiographies of the Middle East and brings to life the historical, social, and political developments in Kurdistani society over the past millennium.Michael Eppel begins with the myths and realities of the origins of the Kurds, describes the effect upon them of medieval Muslim states under Arab, Persian, and Turkish dominance, and recounts the emergence of tribal-feudal dynasties. He explores in detail the subsequent rise of Kurdish emirates, as well as this people’s literary and linguistic developments, particularly the flourishing of poetry. The turning tides of the nineteenth century, including Ottoman reforms and fluctuating Russian influence after the Crimean War, set in motion an early Kurdish nationalism that further expressed a distinct cultural identity. Stateless, but rooted in the region, the Kurds never achieved independence because of geopolitical conditions, tribal rivalries, and obstacles on the way to modernization. A People Without a State captures the developments that nonetheless forged a vast sociopolitical system.

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Emerging as a discipline in the first half of the twentieth century, the information sciences study how people, groups, organizations, and governments create, share, disseminate, manage, search, access, evaluate, and protect information, as well as how different technologies and policies can facilitate and constrain these activities. Given the broad span of the information sciences, it is perhaps not surprising that there is no consensus regarding its underlying theory—the purposes of it, the types of it, or how one goes about developing new theories to talk about new research questions.Diane H. Sonnenwald and the contributors to this volume seek to shed light on these issues by sharing reflections on the theory-development process. These reflections are not meant to revolve around data collection and analysis; rather, they focus on the struggles, challenges, successes, and excitement of developing theories. The particular theories that the contributors explore in their essays range widely, from theories of literacy and reading to theories of design and digital search. Several chapters engage with theories of the behavior of individuals and groups; some deal with processes of evaluation; others reflect on questions of design; and the rest treat cultural and scientific heritage. The ultimate goal, Sonnenwald writes in her introduction, is to “encourage, inspire, and assist individuals striving to develop and/or teach theory development.”

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What should be done with minors who kill, maim, defile, and destroy the lives of others? The state of Texas deals with some of its most serious and violent youthful offenders through “determinate sentencing,” a unique sentencing structure that blends parts of the juvenile and adult justice systems. Once adjudicated via determinate sentencing, offenders are first incarcerated in the Texas Youth Commission (TYC). As they approach age eighteen, they are either transferred to the Texas prison system to serve the remainder of their original determinate sentence or released from TYC into Texas’s communities.The first long-term study of determinate sentencing in Texas, Lost Causes examines the social and delinquent histories, institutionalization experiences, and release and recidivism outcomes of more than 3,000 serious and violent juvenile offenders who received such sentences between 1987 and 2011. The authors seek to understand the process, outcomes, and consequences of determinate sentencing, which gave serious and violent juvenile offenders one more chance to redeem themselves or to solidify their place as the next generation of adult prisoners in Texas. The book’s findings—that about 70 percent of offenders are released to the community during their most crime-prone years instead of being transferred to the Texas prison system and that about half of those released continue to reoffend for serious crimes—make Lost Causes crucial reading for all students and practitioners of juvenile and criminal justice.

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From the mid-1930s to the late 1950s, Mexican cinema became the most successful Latin American cinema and the leading Spanish-language film industry in the world. Many Cine de Oro (Golden Age cinema) films adhered to the dominant Hollywood model, but a small yet formidable filmmaking faction rejected Hollywood’s paradigm outright. Directors Fernando de Fuentes, Emilio Fernández, Luis Buñuel, Juan Bustillo Oro, Adolfo Best Maugard, and Julio Bracho sought to create a unique national cinema that, through the stories it told and the ways it told them, was wholly Mexican. The Classical Mexican Cinema traces the emergence and evolution of this Mexican cinematic aesthetic, a distinctive film form designed to express lo mexicano.Charles Ramírez Berg begins by locating the classical style’s pre-cinematic roots in the work of popular Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada at the turn of the twentieth century. He also looks at the dawning of Mexican classicism in the poetics of Enrique Rosas’ El Automóvil Gris, the crowning achievement of Mexico’s silent filmmaking era and the film that set the stage for the Golden Age films. Berg then analyzes mature examples of classical Mexican filmmaking by the predominant Golden Age auteurs of three successive decades. Drawing on neoformalism and neoauteurism within a cultural studies framework, he brilliantly reveals how the poetics of Classical Mexican Cinema deviated from the formal norms of the Golden Age to express a uniquely Mexican sensibility thematically, stylistically, and ideologically.

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Texas has a large and diverse turtle population, with forms that are found nowhere else (Cagle’s Map Turtle and the Texas Map Turtle) and wide-ranging species that barely touch the state, including the Painted Turtles and the Rough-footed Mud Turtle. From the Sabine River to El Paso, and from the Rio Grande to the Panhandle, thirty-one native and established exotic turtle species are definitely known in Texas, along with one crocodilian, the American Alligator.Texas Turtles & Crocodilians is the first complete identification guide to all the state’s turtles and to its single alligator. It offers detailed species accounts, range maps, and excellent color photographs to aid in field identification. The authors, two of the state’s most knowledgeable herpetologists, open the book with a broad overview of turtle natural history, conservation biology, observation, and captive maintenance before providing a key to Texas turtles and accounts of the various turtle families and species. Appendices provide brief accounts of species that occurred prehistorically in Texas and non-established exotic species, as well as a table of Texas’ major watersheds and the turtle diversity in each one. Informational resources on Texas turtles and alligators, a map of Texas counties, a glossary, a bibliography, and indexes of common and scientific names complete the volume.

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Rodrigo Moya is a prominent Mexican documentary photographer who began as a photojournalist in 1955. He covered the convulsive period that shook Latin America during the 1950s and 1960s, including the guerrilla movement in Guatemala, the invasion of Santo Domingo, and the Cuban Revolution, producing the iconic images “Guerillas in the Mist” and “Melancholy Che.” Since the 1960s, Moya’s work has broadened to encompass more of Mexico and Latin America—the land and sea, people both famous and anonymous, religious processions, the streets of Mexico, laborers, and cultural events involving theatre and dance. Moya’s photography is receiving renewed attention and acclaim in the twenty-first century, including the Espejo de Luz for his photographic career at the VI Bienal Mexicana de Fotoperiodismo and the Medal of Photography Merit from the Sistema Nacional de Fototecas (Instituto Nacional de Antropología y Historia).Rodrigo Moya: Photography and Conscience/Fotografía y conciencia is the first English-Spanish bilingual retrospective of the photographer’s career. It presents over one hundred striking images grouped into seven thematic suites, each briefly introduced by Moya. Distinguished historian Ariel Arnal provides an essay describing Moya’s impact as a documentary photographer, while Moya writes about his journey to become a photographer in the volume’s introduction, “El nacimiento de las imágenes/The Origin of the Images.” Including photographs that have never been published before, Rodrigo Moya adds an important new chapter to the history of twentieth-century Mexican photography.

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In the months leading up to the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico City, students took to the streets, calling for greater democratization and decrying crackdowns on political resistance by the ruling PRI party. During a mass meeting held at the Plaza of the Three Cultures in the Tlatelolco neighborhood, paramilitary forces opened fire on the gathering. The death toll from the massacre remains a contested number, ranging from an official count in the dozens to estimates in the hundreds by journalists and scholars. Rereading the legacy of this tragedy through diverse artistic-political interventions across the decades, Photopoetics at Tlatelolco explores the state’s dual repression—both the massacre’s crushing effects on the movement and the manipulation of cultural discourse and political thought in the aftermath.Examining artifacts ranging from documentary photography and testimony to poetry, essays, chronicles, cinema, literary texts, video, and performance, Samuel Steinberg considers the broad photographic and photopoetic nature of modern witnessing as well as the specific elements of light (gunfire, flares, camera flashes) that ultimately defined the massacre. Steinberg also demonstrates the ways in which the labels of “massacre” and “sacrifice” inform contemporary perceptions of the state’s blatant and violent repression of unrest. With implications for similar processes throughout the rest of Latin America from the 1960s to the present day, Photopoetics at Tlatelolco provides a powerful new model for understanding the intersection of political history and cultural memory.

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This volume, the fifth in the Handbook of Middle American Indians, presents a summary of work accomplished since the Spanish conquest in the contemporary description and historical reconstruction of the indigenous languages and language families of Mexico and Central America. The essays include the following: “Inventory of Descriptive Materials” by William Bright; “Inventory of Classificatory Materials” by Maria Teresa Fernández de Miranda, “Lexicostatistic Classification” by Morris Swadesh, “Systemic Comparison and Reconstruction” by Robert Longacre, and “Environmental Correlational Studies” by Sarah C. Gudschinsky. Sketches of Classical Nahuatl by Stanley Newman, Classical Yucatec Maya by Norman A. McQuown, and Classical Quiché by Munro S. Edmonson provide working tools for tackling the voluminous early postconquest texts in these languages of late preconquest empires (Aztec, Maya, Quiché). Further sketches of Sierra Popoluca by Benjamin F. Elson, of Isthmus Zapotec by Velma B. Pickett, of Huautla de Jiménez Mazatec by Eunice V. Pike, of Jiliapan Pame by Leonardo Manrique C., and of Huamelultec Chontal by Viola Waterhouse—together with those of Nahuatl, Maya, and Quiché—provide not only descriptive outlines of as many different linguistic structures but also linguistic representatives of seven structurally different families of Middle American languages. Miguel Léon-Portilla presents an outline of the relations between language and the culture of which it is a part and provides examples of some of these relations as revealed by contemporary research in indigenous Middle America. The volume editor, Norman A. McQuown (1914–2005), was Professor of Anthropology at The University of Chicago. He formerly taught at Hunter College and served with the Mexican Department of Indian Affairs. He carried out fieldwork with Totonac, Huastec, Tzeltal-Tzotzil, Mame, and other tribes. The Handbook of Middle American Indians was assembled and edited at the Middle American Research Institute of Tulane University with the assistance of grants from the National Science Foundation and under the sponsorship of the National Research Council Committee on Latin American Anthropology.

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The Martínez del Río family was a vigorous contestant in the highly politicized economy of early national Mexico. David Walker’s case study of its successes and failures provides a unique insider’s view of the trials and tribulations of doing business in a hostile environment. The family’s ordeal in Mexico—a series of personal dislocations and traumas—mirrored the painful contractions of an old society reluctantly giving birth to a new nation.Using previously undiscovered primary source materials (including the private correspondence and business records of the family, public notary documents, transcripts of judicial proceedings, and the archives of Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Relations and the British Foreign Office), Walker employs family history to analyze problems relating more generally to the development of state and society in newly independent Mexico.The processes of socioeconomic formation in Mexico differed from those of Western Europe and the United States; accordingly, entrepreneurial activity had markedly contrasting implications for economic development and class formation. In the downwardly spiraling economy of nineteenth-century Mexico, economic activity was a zero-sum game. No new wealth was being created; most sectors remained stagnant and unproductive. To make their fortunes, empresarios, the Mexican capitalists, could not rely on income generated from authentic economic growth. Instead, they exploited the arbitrary acts of the interventionist Mexican state, which proscribed the free movement of factors within the marketplace. Speculation in the public debt took the place of more substantive undertakings. Coercive state power was diverted to create artificial environments in which otherwise inefficient and unproductive enterprises could flourish. But however well the empresarios might imitate the outward forms of industrial capitalism, they could not unlock the productive capacity of the Mexican economy. Instead, they and their allies and rivals engaged in destructive struggles to manipulate the state for personal gain, to the detriment of class interests, economic growth, and political stability.

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“Here, Mr. Split-Foot, do as I do!” exclaimed the child, and the spirits obeyed her command. Thus, in 1848, thirteen-year-old Margaret Fox inaugurated the age of spiritualism. Those early spirit manifestations in a humble New York farmhouse were “but the beginning of a grand seance which for the next half century was to see persons returned from the dead walking upon the earth, mingling freely with mortal Americans. Ceremonies were performed which united in wedlock the living and the dead; ghostly schoolboys returned from the land of the spirits to revisit their old schoolhouses, upsetting the dignity of earthly classrooms . . . Drivers of owl horsecars . . . were intrigued by beautiful female spirits who rode their cars at night and promptly vanished if approached for a fare.” The colorful career of Margaret Fox, the most famous medium of the era and the “fountainhead” of the cult of spiritualism, attracted the attention of the most prominent public figures of the day. For P. T. Barnum, this phenomenon was another novelty to present to the American public. Horace Greeley took a personal interest in Margaret and her sister; he gave the movement extensive publicity. Lincoln often invited Margaret Fox and other mediums to the White House for seances, during which attempts were made to invoke the spirit of the Lincolns’ dead son. Members of Congress, judges, and intellectuals of the day were well acquainted with her and with the spiritualist movement. The course of this spirit invasion and the many and varied means by which men communicated with dwellers of the other world are the subjects of this volume. With Margaret Fox the spirits spoke by rapping on floor and furniture. With others they communicated by writing on slates, by touching with ghostly hands, by moving furniture (one medium was so popular that his furniture followed him about like a pack of dogs). Some spirits spoke directly through the mouths of entranced mediums. And some were so bold—or so talented—that they were able to materialize in the flesh before properly receptive groups of people—and happy indeed was the devotee who received a warm embrace from a lovely young spirit lady or a handsome ghostly gentleman during such a materialization. The spirits who thus displayed their interest in this mortal world soon came to have a considerable influence over whole segments of the American population. For some, spiritualism was a comforting means of maintaining contact with loved ones now departed. For others it was a religion, a blessed aid on the road to salvation. For still others it provided practical assistance with more earthly problems. Many found in it intriguing puzzles for scientific investigation. And for the whole country it provided a constant source of excitement, interest, and entertainment. Written in spritely prose and permeated with a grave humor, this account of nineteenth-century spiritualism will be equally satisfying to the casual reader interested in a good story, and to the scholar seeking serious social history.

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Long before “Cesar Chávez” and “Chicano” became commonly known, the word “bracero” had established itself in the language of American politics. The Mexican Farm Labor Program—or bracero program as it came to be known—was from its inception in 1942 a highly controversial issue. At international, national, and subnational levels, it remained the focal point of an intense interest-group struggle. This struggle and its group combatants provide the central concern of this study. In the early 1940’s agribusiness interests had sought to contract Mexican laborers (“braceros”) for work on United States farms. With the entry of the United States into World War II, legislation was passed for contracting braceros on a large scale. What was originally a wartime measure soon became an institution. During twenty-two years, 4.2 million braceros were contracted. The United States, at the insistence of the Mexican government, became a partner in the program, ensuring that the braceros were provided housing, set wages, and other benefits. The program was, however, detrimental to one group in the United States: the native farmworker. Not only was the bracero provided guarantees that the native could not demand, but the bracero also got the native’s job. During the late forties and fifties, organized labor gathered its forces in Congress to oppose the program. Finally, an administration favorable to the native farmworker threw its support behind the native laborer, and through the Department of labor measures were passed that made it less attractive to hire foreign labor. In the end, the anti-bracero forces won out in Congress and defeated extension of the Mexican Farm Labor program. At the same time, the United States government, by setting the working standards for foreign workers, brought about an improvement in the working conditions and wages of native farm laborers. Besides the conflicts between domestic interests, Craig examines the international conflicts and issues involved, as well as the international agreements that were the basis of bracero contracting. He discusses with perception the program’s immediate and long-range effects on Mexico. His study analyzes and clarifies one of the most controversial domestic and international programs of the twentieth century.

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The aim of this anthology is to present a selection of plays that are representative of a fresh spirit and of societal pressures and changes in Spanish American culture. The plays shun the earlier realistic, sentimental, and melodramatic conventions of Spanish American theater. Instead, they reflect the tenor of the dramatic imagination of the mid-to-late twentieth century—an imagination that sought new forms and ways of expressing a new awareness of the Spanish American dilemma. In selecting these plays, William I. Oliver looked for more than mere illustrations of these changes. As a practicing director and playwright, he sought works that are effective on the stage as well as on the page. As an editor and translator, he sought works “that could be translated culturally as well as linguistically.” The six plays in this varied and vigorous anthology are the measure of his success. The plays included are The Day They Let the Lions Loose, by Emilio Carballido (Mexico); The Camp, by Griselda Gambaro (Argentina); The Library, by Carlos Maggi (Uruguay); In the Right Hand of God the Father, by Enrique Buenaventura (Colombia); The Mulatto’s Orgy, by Luisa Josefina Hernández (Mexico); and Viña: Three Beach Plays, by Sergio Vodánovic (Chile).

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In 1982, a century after the laying of the cornerstone of its first building, the University of Texas was ranked by the New York Times among the best in the nation. No one had more to do with that extraordinary achievement than Harry Huntt Ransom. From 1935 to his death in 1976, he served the University in positions ranging from instructor in English to chancellor of The University of Texas System. In the fifties, sixties, and seventies, he held a succession of administrative posts requiring him to face a myriad of perplexing problems. Among the critical issues calling for analysis and decision in those years were the post-Sputnik pressure for greater emphasis on science and technology, the student revolts during the 1960s, and the defection of growing numbers of university faculty to industry and government. Harry Huntt Ransom did not merely respond to the problems of the times. He had his own large ambitions for the University of Texas, in particular the improvement of student programs, the development of a vigorous faculty, and—the achievement for which he is best remembered—the building of a world-renowned library. He was concerned with the role of the university in society, what the university should do and do well, and what it should not do. Always he viewed these matters in broad perspective, and his approach to them was far-sighted and deeply philosophical. As dean, vice-president, president, and chancellor, Ransom wrote and spoke often on these and other important subjects. Aside from the books that he wrote and edited, he left a prodigious amount of material, some of which had been published in various journals and some of which had been delivered as lectures and addresses and never made available in printed form. For the last twenty-five years of Ransom's life his wife, Hazel, was his closest companion and confidant. At the urging of Harry's friends, colleagues, and admirers, she undertook the task of sifting through her late husband's papers in an effort to organize and preserve some of the important contributions he had made to the thought and planning that were so instrumental in shaping the University of Texas and higher education in general. In these essays we see the force of reasoning and grace of style for which Ransom was so widely admired. It was he who reminded us that books last longer than buildings. This is a book of lasting importance that Harry Ransom himself might have given us had he lived longer.

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The Little Orange Book captures reflections and tips on teaching and learning from the sixteen members of the University of Texas System Academy of Distinguished Teachers. Its many vignettes span a wide range of topics and teaching interests, from establishing a safe learning space to classroom silences, from curriculum development to modeling the best teachers, and from giving thanks to those teachers who came before us to leaving our own legacies. The Little Orange Book is the perfect text for first-time college instructors who are just getting started on their instructional careers, as well as longtime faculty who have many experiences in the college-level classroom. This book is written exclusively by members of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers for the UT System. This program of recognition for teaching excellence started in 2013, and there are now a total of seventeen faculty members from across the UT System in the academy. To the editors' knowledge, this is the only system-wide academy of teaching excellence in the entire nation.

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San Antonio native, military veteran, merchant, and mayor pro tem José Antonio Menchaca (1800–1879) was one of only a few Tejano leaders to leave behind an extensive manuscript of recollections. Portions of the document were published in 1907, followed by a “corrected” edition in 1937, but the complete work could not be published without painstaking reconstruction. At last available in its entirety, Menchaca’s book of reminiscences captures the social life, people, and events that shaped the history of Texas’s tumultuous transformation during his lifetime. Highlighting not only Menchaca’s acclaimed military service but also his vigorous defense of Tejanos’ rights, dignity, and heritage, Recollections of a Tejano Life charts a remarkable legacy while incorporating scholarly commentary to separate fact from fiction.Revealing how Tejanos perceived themselves and the revolutionary events that defined them, this wonderfully edited volume presents Menchaca’s remembrances of such diverse figures as Antonio López de Santa Anna, Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, Sam Houston, General Adrián Woll, Comanche chief “Casamiro,” and Texas Ranger Jack Hays. Menchaca and his fellow Tejanos were actively engaged in local struggles as Mexico won her independence from Spain; later many joined the fight to establish the Republic of Texas, only to see it annexed to the United States nine years after the Battle of San Jacinto. This first-person account corrects important misconceptions and brings previously unspoken truths vividly to life.

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From reviews of the Spanish edition: “Meyer’s perceptive commentary on Mexican power politics presents new insights into the petroleum lobbies in Mexico City and Washington. With unbiased empathy he shows the validity of Mexico’s complaints about foreigners’ deriving an overabundance of profit from a nonrenewable natural resource. He understands United States history and never abuses his license to criticize.” —Hispanic American Historical Review “This useful addition to the literature on twentieth-century Mexican–United States diplomatic relations is a scholarly work, worthy of consideration by all students of the subject.”—American Historical ReviewMexico and the United States in the Oil Controversy, 1917–1942 explores the relationship between the United States and Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century, with special attention to the Mexican nationalization of the oil industry. Relying on Mexican archival material never before analyzed, the author presents a unique perspective on the period following the Mexican Revolution and Mexico’s efforts to diminish its economic dependency on the United States. This work not only describes the political and economic struggle between the Mexican government and the U.S. oil companies but also serves to illustrate in general the nature of dependency between Latin American countries and the United States. It will be of interest not only to Mexican specialists but also to diplomatic and economic historians.

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From the New York Times review of the Dallas Opera's performance of Orlando furioso and the international symposium on Baroque opera: ". . . it was a serious, thoughtful, consistent and imaginative realization of a beautiful, long-neglected work, one that fully deserved all the loving attention it received. As such, the production and its attendant symposium made a positive contribution to the cause of Baroque opera . . . . " Baroque opera experienced a revival in the late twentieth century. Its popularity, however, has given rise to a number of perplexing and exciting questions regarding literary sources, librettos, theater design, set design, stage movement, and costumes—even the editing of the operas. In 1980, the Dallas Opera produced the American premier of Vivaldi's Orlando furioso, which met with much acclaim. Concurrently an international symposium on the subject of Baroque opera was held at Southern Methodist University. Authorities from around the world met to discuss the operatic works of Vivaldi, Handel, and other Baroque composers as well as the characteristics of the genre. Michael Collins and Elise Kirk, deputy chair and chair of the symposium, edited the papers to produce this groundbreaking study, which will be of great interest to music scholars and opera lovers throughout the world. Contributors to Opera and Vivaldi include Shirley Wynne, John Walter Hill, Andrew Porter, Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Howard Mayer Brown, William Holmes, Ellen Rosand, and the editors.

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Steven Spielberg once said, "I like ideas, especially movie ideas, that you can hold in your hand. If a person can tell me the idea in twenty-five words or less, it's going to make a pretty good movie." Spielberg's comment embodies the essence of the high concept film, which can be condensed into one simple sentence that inspires marketing campaigns, lures audiences, and separates success from failure at the box office.This pioneering study explores the development and dominance of the high concept movie within commercial Hollywood filmmaking since the late 1970s. Justin Wyatt describes how box office success, always important in Hollywood, became paramount in the era in which major film studios passed into the hands of media conglomerates concerned more with the economics of filmmaking than aesthetics. In particular, he shows how high concept films became fully integrated with their marketing, so that a single phrase ("Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...") could sell the movie to studio executives and provide copy for massive advertising campaigns; a single image or a theme song could instantly remind potential audience members of the movie, and tie-in merchandise could generate millions of dollars in additional income.

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Gone with the Wind has generated interest in every aspect of its production. Yet one crucial aspect has never been fully understood or appreciated—the vital shaping role played by executive producer David O. Selznick.In this book, Alan David Vertrees challenges the popular image of Selznick as a megalomaniacal meddler whose hiring and firing of directors and screenwriters created a patchwork film that succeeded despite his interference. Drawing on ten years of research in the Selznick archives, and examining the screenplay's successive drafts, dramatic continuity designs and "storyboard" sketches (many of which are reproduced here), and production correspondence and memoranda, Vertrees interprets the producer's actions as manipulation, not indecision, establishing Selznick's "vision" as the guiding intelligence behind the film's success.In his drive to create a cinematic monument, Selznick also reformed many key facets of studio filmmaking, inventing jobs such as "production designer" (inaugurated by William Cameron Menzies), which persist today. This book thus adds an important chapter to the story of classical Hollywood cinema and the making of the film that has been lauded variously as the "Sistine Chapel of movies" and the "single most beloved entertainment ever produced."

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