Along the U.S.–Mexico frontier, where border crossings are a daily occurrence for many people, reinforcing borders is also a common activity. Not only does the U.S. Border Patrol strive to hold the ...line against illegal immigrants, but many residents on both sides of the border seek to define and bound themselves apart from groups they perceive as others. This pathfinding ethnography charts the social categories, metaphors, and narratives that inhabitants of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez use to define their group identity and distinguish themselves from others. Pablo Vila draws on over 200 group interviews with more than 900 area residents to describe how Mexican nationals, Mexican immigrants, Mexican Americans, African Americans, and Anglos make sense of themselves and perceive their differences from others. This research uncovers the regionalism by which many northern Mexicans construct their sense of identity, the nationalism that often divides Mexican Americans from Mexican nationals, and the role of ethnicity in setting boundaries among Anglos, Mexicans, and African Americans. Vila also looks at how gender, age, religion, and class intertwine with these factors. He concludes with fascinating excerpts from re-interviews with several informants, who modified their views of other groups when confronted by the author with the narrative character of their identities.
Despite the recognized importance of seasonality for tourism businesses, there has been a distinct lack of studies undertaken in the past that discuss the impact of seasonality on alpine ...accommodation resorts, and more specifically that focus on an Australian location. The main purpose of this study was to examine whether or not the Australian alpine accommodation providers and ski operations have been significantly impacted by the issue of seasonality and to determine more specifically, had there been industry pressure placed on them to become all season operations? For this study, a total of 15 semi-structured interviews were conducted with managers of hospitality businesses located in the sub-alpine region of Jindabyne, and nearby alpine areas of Perisher and Thredbo in New South Wales, Australia. Study results indicated that the majority of managers acknowledged the fact that there has been an increase in the number of summer visitors each year which has pressured them to make changes to their operations. They conceded that such activity has served to reinforce a ‘stand alone’ mindset which was still prevalent amongst the majority of the managers in the region.
Troubling Gender Pablo Vila, Pablo Seman, Eloisa Martin, Maria Julia Carozzi
01/2011
eBook
Cumbia villera-literally, cumbia from the shantytowns- is a musical genre quite popular with Argentine youth who frequent urban dance halls. Its songs are known for having highly sexualized lyrics- ...about girls dancing provocatively or experiencing erotic pleasure. The songs exhibit the tensions at play in the different ways people relate to this musical genre.
InTroubling Gender, noted sociologists Pablo Vila and Pablo Semán scrutinize the music's lyrics and the singers' and dancers' performances. At the same time, the authors conduct in-depth interviews to examine the ways males construct and appropriate cumbia's lyrics, and how females identify, appropriate, and playfully and critically manipulate the same misogynistic songs.
Addressing the relationship between this form of music and the wider social, political, and economic changes that influence the lives of urban youth,Troubling Genderargues that the music both reflects and influences the ways in which women's and men's roles are changing in Argentine society.
From poets to sociologists, many people who write about life on the U.S.-Mexico border use terms such as “border crossing” and “hybridity” which suggest that a unified culture—neither Mexican nor ...American, but an amalgamation of both—has arisen in the borderlands. But talking to people who actually live on either side of the border reveals no single commonly shared sense of identity, as Pablo Vila demonstrated in his book Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders: Social Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Frontier. Instead, people living near the border, like people everywhere, base their sense of identity on a constellation of interacting factors that includes regional identity, but also nationality, ethnicity, and race. In this book, Vila continues the exploration of identities he began in Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders by looking at how religion, gender, and class also affect people’s identifications of self and “others” among Mexican nationals, Mexican immigrants, Mexican Americans, Anglos, and African Americans in the Cuidad Juárez–El Paso area. Among the many fascinating issues he raises are how the perception that “all Mexicans are Catholic” affects Mexican Protestants and Pentecostals; how the discourse about proper gender roles may feed the violence against women that has made Juárez the “women’s murder capital of the world”; and why class consciousness is paradoxically absent in a region with great disparities of wealth. His research underscores the complexity of the process of social identification and confirms that the idealized notion of “hybridity” is only partially adequate to define people’s identity on the U.S.-Mexico border.
This book tries to demystify commonsense assumptions about youth culture in Latin America. The musical manifestations that young people listen to in most Latin American countries are not only much ...more varied than the commercially successful ones that have entered the American and European markets, but also do not have much in common with the American and European commonsense image of the young people who listen to and dance to them. Music and Youth Culture in Latin America is an initial attempt to overcome this deficit. In this collection of essays, we examine the ways in which music is used to advance identity claims in several Latin American countries and among Latinos in the United States. From young Latin American musicians who want to participate in the vibrant jazz scene of New York without losing their cultural roots, to Peruvian rockers who sing in their native language (Quechua) for the same reasons, passing through the experience of young Cubans who use music to construct a post-communist social identification, the book sheds a new light on the complex ways in which music occupies center stage in many processes of identification in Latin America.
In this paper we focus on the role institutions and structural parameters play in macroeconomic policy design and test the differential effects of tax policies on two structural parameters: the ...degree of international capital mobility and the rules of wage indexation practiced in the economy. We evaluate counterfactual changes in taxation in the Argentine economy using a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) Model with unemployment, calibrated with 2006 data, showing that policy mistakes (diagnosis failures) are costlier when the degree of capital mobility is greater and the rules to determine salaries could amplify the losses. Among other taxes, we evaluate the choice of export taxation, historically one of the preferred revenue sources of Argentine governments. We discuss the choice of taxes that an optimistic and a pessimistic policymaker will make under Knightian uncertainty and find that, in the case of our CGE, an optimistic policymaker prefers to tax export goods, while a more pessimistic one tends to tax imports or non-tradable goods.
To date, the use of positive reinforcement techniques to study locomotion in non-human primates remains poorly developed. However, using cooperative animals that can freely move in experimental setup ...allows us to collect valuable and relevant data and makes these repeatable and comparable between species. Based on the current knowledge and our experience, we present an experimental approach that aims at reaching the standards of the study of human movement in a non-human primate, the olive baboon, Papio anubis, thanks to the use of positive reinforcement techniques. This report documents the training protocol that we set up at the Primatology station of the CNRS (France). We further elaborate on the importance of conducting such experiments for a better and finer understanding of the bipedal behaviour in non-human primates. Experimental studies including cooperative animals that can freely move are likely to represent valuable experimental tools to fill important gaps of knowledge in the study of locomotion in general, and in the study of the acquisition of habitual bipedal walking in hominins.
Obtaining quantitative information about the recovery of fire-affected ecosystems is of utmost importance from the management and decision-making point of view. Nowadays the concern about natural ...environment protection and recovery is much greater than in the past. However, the resources and tools available for its management are still not sufficient. Thus, attention and precision is needed when decisions must be taken. Quantitative estimates on how the vegetation is recovering after a fire can be of help for evaluating the necessity of human intervention on the fire-affected ecosystem, and their importance will grow as the problem of forest fires, climate change and desertification increases.
This article performs a comparison of methods to extract quantitative estimates of vegetation cover regrowth with Landsat TM and ETM+ data in an area that burned during the summer of 1998 in the Liguria region (Italy). In order to eliminate possible sources of error, a thorough pre-processing was carried out, including a careful geometric correction (reaching RMSE lower than 0.3
pixels), a topographic correction by means of a constrained Minnaert model and a combination of absolute and relative atmospheric correction methods. Pseudo Invariant Features (PIF) were identified by implementing an automated selection method based in temporal Principal Component Analysis (PCA), which has been called multi-Temporal n-Dimensional Principal Component Analysis (mT-nD-PCA).
Spectral Mixture Analysis (SMA) was compared against quantitative vegetation indices which are based on well known traditional vegetation indices like Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Modified Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index (MSAVI). Accuracy assessment was performed by regressing vegetation cover results obtained with each method against field data gathered during the fieldwork campaign carried out in the study area. Results obtained showed how vegetation cover fractions extracted from the NDVI based quantitative index were the most accurate, being superior to the rest of the techniques applied, including SMA.
En la primera parte del siglo XX el tango funcionó como un importante artefacto cultural en defensa de la integración a la nación de los nuevos inmigrantes europeos. Hasta que logró su hegemonía a ...finales de la década de 1930, el tango compartió popularidad con la llamada “canción criolla”, la cual compitió comercialmente con gran éxito hasta mediados de los años treinta. Este tipo de música era la música tradicional del gaucho, que, si bien estaba desapareciendo físicamente del campo, fue simbólicamente reinstalado como núcleo de la nacionalidad argentina por el movimiento “criollista”, promovido por la élite argentina. En esos años el tango mezclaba constantemente, y de manera muy compleja, lo que, hoy en día (pero no necesariamente en los veinte y los treinta), definiríamos como música citadina y música campera, que era la canción popular en la ciudad de Buenos Aires y en la provincia del mismo nombre, que para la época estaban, culturalmente y desde el punto de vista identitario, mucho más relacionadas que lo que están hoy día. El artículo propone una imagen bastante distante de cierta interpretacion popular que plantea una especie de evolución lineal que va de lo criollo al tango entre el diez y el veinte.palavras-chave: tango; música criolla; identidad porteña.
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