Lynn Stephen

Women and Social Movements in Latin America covers a wide array of issues, from the progression of feminist politics in Latin America to the country specific conditions which give rise to diverse women's organisations.

Power from Below

Women and Social Movements in Latin America

Generation, Gender, and Historical Consciousness in the Reception of Ejido Reform in Oaxaca

Viva Zapata!

Shannon Speed

Indigenous Women and Violence offers an intimate view of how settler colonialism and other structural forms of power and inequality created accumulated violences in the lives of Indigenous women. The chapters in this book are engaged, feminist, collaborative, and activism focused, conveying powerful messages about the resilience of Indigenous women in the face of violence and systemic oppression.

Feminist Activist Research in Heightened States of Injustice

Indigenous Women and Violence

Lynn Stephen’s innovative ethnography follows indigenous Mexicans from two towns in the state of Oaxaca—the Mixtec community of San Agustín Atenango and the Zapotec community of Teotitlán del Valle—who periodically leave their homes in Mexico for extended periods of work in California and Oregon. Demonstrating that the line separating Mexico and the United States is only one among the many borders that these migrants repeatedly cross (including national, regional, cultural, ethnic, and class borders and divisions), Stephen advocates an ethnographic framework focused on transborder, rather than transnational, lives. Yet she does not disregard the state: She assesses the impact migration has had on local systems of government in both Mexico and the United States as well as the abilities of states to police and affect transborder communities. Stephen weaves the personal histories and narratives of indigenous transborder migrants together with explorations of the larger structures that affect their lives. Taking into account U.S. immigration policies and the demands of both commercial agriculture and the service sectors, she chronicles how migrants experience and remember low-wage work in agriculture, landscaping, and childcare and how gender relations in Oaxaca and the United States are reconfigured by migration. She looks at the ways that racial and ethnic hierarchies inherited from the colonial era—hierarchies that debase Mexico’s indigenous groups—are reproduced within heterogeneous Mexican populations in the United States. Stephen provides case studies of four grass-roots organizations in which Mixtec migrants are involved, and she considers specific uses of digital technology by transborder communities. Ultimately Stephen demonstrates that transborder migrants are reshaping notions of territory and politics by developing creative models of governance, education, and economic development as well as ways of maintaining their cultures and languages across geographic distances.

Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, California, and Oregon

Transborder Lives

María Teresa Tula

Following in the footsteps of Rigoberto Menchu, Maria Teresa Tula describes her childhood, marriage, and growing family as well as her political consciousness, activism, imprisonment and torture. The human side of the civil war in El Salvador and decades of repression come to the fore in this woman's tale of extraordinary courage and ordinary labor.

Este es mi testimonio

From covering the massacre of students at Tlatelolco in 1968 and the 1985 earthquake to the Zapatista rebellion in 1994 and the disappearance of forty-three students in 2014, Elena Poniatowska has been one of the most important chroniclers of Mexican social, cultural, and political life. In Stories That Make History, Lynn Stephen examines Poniatowska's writing, activism, and political participation, using them as a lens through which to understand critical moments in contemporary Mexican history. In her crónicas—narrative journalism written in a literary style featuring firsthand testimonies—Poniatowska told the stories of Mexico's most marginalized people. Throughout, Stephen shows how Poniatowska helped shape Mexican politics and forge a multigenerational political community committed to social justice. In so doing, she presents a biographical and intellectual history of one of Mexico's most cherished writers and a unique history of modern Mexico.

Mexico through Elena Poniatowska’s Crónicas

Stories That Make History

Patricia Zavella

Mathew C. Gutmann

Félix V. Rodríguez

Perspectives on Las Américas: A Reader in Culture, History, and Representation charts new territory by demonstrating the limits of neatly demarcating the regions of ‘Latin America’ and the ‘United States’. This landmark volume presents key readings that collectively examine the historical, cultural, economic, and political integration of Latina/os across the Americas, thereby challenging the barriers between Latina/o Studies and Latin American/Caribbean Studies. Brings together key readings that collectively examine the historical, cultural, economic, and political integration of Latina/os across the Americas. Charts new territory by demonstrating the limits of neatly demarcating the regions of 'Latin America' and the 'United States'. Challenges the barriers between Latina/o Studies and Latin American/Caribbean Studies as approached by anthropologists, historians, and other scholars. Offers instructors, students, and interested readers both the theoretical tools and case studies necessary to rethink transnational realities and identities.

A Reader in Culture, History, and Representation

Perspectives on Las Américas

This richly detailed study chronicles recent political events in southern Mexico, up to and including the July 2000 election of Vicente Fox. Lynn Stephen focuses on the meaning that Emiliano Zapata, the great symbol of land reform and human rights, has had and now has for rural Mexicans. Stephen documents the rise of the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas and shows how this rebellion was understood in other parts of Mexico, particularly in Oaxaca, giving a vivid sense of rural life in southern Mexico. Illuminating the cultural dimensions of these political events, she shows how indigenous Mexicans and others fashioned their own responses to neoliberal economic policy, which ended land reform, encouraged privatization, and has resulted in increasing socioeconomic stratification in Mexico. Mixing original ethnographic material drawn from years of fieldwork in Mexico with historical material from a variety of sources, Stephen shows how activists have appropriated symbols of the revolution to build the contemporary political movement. Her wide-ranging narrative touches on the history of land tenure, racism, gender issues in the Zapatista movement, local political culture, the Zapatista uprising of the 1990s and its aftermath, and more. A significant addition to our knowledge of social change in contemporary Mexico, Zapata Lives! also offers readers a model for engaged, activist anthropology.

Lynn Stephen

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