Suchergebnisse

"In late nineteenth-century Mexico the Mexican populace was fascinated with the country's booming railroad network. Newspapers and periodicals were filled with art, poetry, literature, and social commentaries exploring the symbolic power of the railroad. As a symbol of economic, political, and industrial modernization, the locomotive served to demarcate a nation's status in the world. However, the dangers of locomotive travel, complicated by the fact that Mexico's railroads were foreign owned and operated, meant that the railroad could also symbolize disorder, death, and foreign domination. In The Civilizing Machine, Michael Matthews explores the ideological and cultural milieu that shaped the Mexican people's understanding of technology. Intrinsically tied to the Porfiriato, the thirty-five-year dictatorship of General Porfirio Díaz, the booming railroad network represented material progress in a country seeking its place in the modern world. Matthews discloses how the railroad's development represented the crowning achievement of the regime and the material incarnation of its mantra, "order and progress." The Porfirian administration evoked the railroad in legitimizing and justifying its own reign, while political opponents employed the same rhetorical themes embodied by the railroads to challenge the manner in which that regime achieved economic development and modernization. As Matthews illustrates, the multiple symbols of the locomotive reflected deepening social divisions and foreshadowed the conflicts that eventually brought about the Mexican Revolution."--

"In late nineteenth-century Mexico the Mexican populace was fascinated with the country's booming railroad network. Newspapers and periodicals were filled with art, poetry, literature, and social commentaries exploring the symbolic power of the railroad. As a symbol of economic, political, and industrial modernization, the locomotive served to demarcate a nation's status in the world. However, the dangers of locomotive travel, complicated by the fact that Mexico's railroads were foreign owned and operated, meant that the railroad could also symbolize disorder, death, and foreign domination. In The Civilizing Machine, Michael Matthews explores the ideological and cultural milieu that shaped the Mexican people's understanding of technology. Intrinsically tied to the Porfiriato, the thirty-five-year dictatorship of General Porfirio Díaz, the booming railroad network represented material progress in a country seeking its place in the modern world. Matthews discloses how the railroad's development represented the crowning achievement of the regime and the material incarnation of its mantra, "order and progress." The Porfirian administration evoked the railroad in legitimizing and justifying its own reign, while political opponents employed the same rhetorical themes embodied by the railroads to challenge the manner in which that regime achieved economic development and modernization. As Matthews illustrates, the multiple symbols of the locomotive reflected deepening social divisions and foreshadowed the conflicts that eventually brought about the Mexican Revolution."--

Introduction to sociological and anthropological topics -- Overview of Mexican American psychology -- Mexican American history -- Contemporary Mexican American society -- Undocumented immigration and Mexican Americans -- Assimilation and acculturation of Mexican Americans -- Language, communication, and Mexican Americans -- Introduction to clinical topics -- Mexican Americans and mental health -- The clinical interview -- Counseling Mexican Americans -- Psychological assessments and evaluations for Mexican Americans -- Crisis interventions -- Future considerations.

The controversial Mexican literary periodical Contemporáneos (1928-1931) has recently received considerable attention from literary critics who view it as a significant document in the history of twentieth-century Mexican belles lettres. The journal was not, however, exclusively a literary review but, as the subtitle (Revista de Cultura Mexicana) clearly indicates, a magazine of varied cultural pursuits as well. It contained a number of important essays in which the members of Mexico's post-revolutionary intelligentsia attempted to define and interpret national problems. It will be the purpose of this essay to discuss the role played by the journal in Mexican intellectual history.In June 1928 the first issue of Contemporáneos appeared in the bookshops of Mexico City. The events leading up to its publication and the reasons for its sudden cessation in December 1931 can be traced to the activities of a group of young Mexican intellectuals later to be classified by the title of this their most significant literary review.

This is a piece of comparative history, not an exercise in folkloric whimsy. It does not attempt to probe the secrets oflo mexicano, la mexicanidad, or any of the other quasi-metaphysical concepts which litter the field of Mexican cultural history.1Nor does it pay too much attention to those more positivistic analyses which try to encapsulate Mexican (political) culture in terms of statistical comparisons.2Rather, it offers some comparative generalisations about Mexican history in the national period, stressing both broad patterns of socio-economic development and specific politico-cultural factors. Thus – for better or worse – its model is Barrington Moore rather than, say, Octavio Paz or Gabriel Almond. It also draws inspiration – and borrows its title – from the work of E. P. Thompson, which in turn has been developed by Eley and Blackbourn in the German context, Corrigan and Sayer in the English.3Its purpose is to offer some explanations of the distinctiveness (as well as the commonality) of Mexico's history, compared to the history of Latin America, in the national period.4Let us begin at the end. In the last fifty years, Mexico has experienced relatively rapid economic growth coupled with relative political and social stability.5The achievements of the 'stabilised development' of the 1950s and 1960s are well known: a solid regime, rapid growth rates, low inflation, rising per capita income.6And, while the 1980s were a decade of relative stagnation, Mexico's relative position within Latin America has not deteriorated.7Furthermore, the prospects for future development – of a capitalist kind, with all that that entails – look better now than they did in the late 1980s; all the more if the Free Trade Agreement with the U.S.A. is concluded, as now seems probable.