The year 1996 in Italian politics was a year rich in novelty. After the "stalled transition" of 1995, the political atmosphere had begun to change. Most obvious was the end of Dini's unelected government of technocrats, supported by a heterogeneous group in Parliament, and its replacement with Romano Prodi's government, a coalition of the parties that had won the general election on April 21, 1996. But an even more important change and one more likely to be remembered was a new climate of dialogue amongst the main political forces that emerged from this period of transition between two republics. In 1996, despite the general elections, cooperation again became part of the political game.
In the wake of the Mexican-American War, competing narratives of religious conquest and re-conquest were employed by Anglo American and ethnic Mexican Californians to make sense of their place in North America. These "invented traditions" had a profound impact on North American religious and ethnic relations, serving to bring elements of Catholic history within the Protestant fold of the United States' national history as well as playing an integral role in the emergence of the early Chicano/a movement. Many Protestant Anglo Americans understood their settlement in the far Southwest as following in the footsteps of the colonial project begun by Catholic Spanish missionaries. In contrast, Californios—Mexican-Americans and Chicana/os—stressed deep connections to a pre-Columbian past over to their own Spanish heritage. Thus, as Anglo Americans fashioned themselves as the spiritual heirs to the Spanish frontier, many ethnic Mexicans came to see themselves as the spiritual heirs to a southwestern Aztec homeland.
"Millions of Americans have lost their homes since the start of the recession initiated by the financial crisis of 2008–09. But is the dream of homeownership for America's working families obsolete, an aspiration from a bygone era? Regaining the Dream rejects that notion and proposes a way to strengthen the financial system while simultaneously promoting an equitable and viable American homeownership policy.For the first time, the authors of Regaining the Dream offer data-driven evidence on how the mortgage industry can serve working families in the United States, pointing the way to a pragmatic housing policy that promotes the opportunity for sustainable homeownership.Taking the reader step by step through the lending crisis and what caused it, the authors include useful and clear definitions of terms heard almost daily in news coverage. And they give a fair account of the history behind Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the new Dodd-Frank law, explaining what remains to be done to uphold one of the defining characteristics of the American dream."
Poet Roberto Tejada uses lyrical poems to explore and give a voice to the troubles of global citizenship, US-Mexico relations, Latino identity, and the political emotion of queer sexualities. His collection provides a holistic ground-level view of pivotal world events from the mid 1990s to a more recent present. Tejada's innovative work dramatically widens the scope of Latina/o literature, showing us exactly what it can accomplish. The poems move very much like a three-act play, in which the first act is one of origins; the second, a staging of desire; and the third, a symbiosis. These acts magnify one another when unified. Each poem within the collection positions itself within the avant-garde, in which the artful use of language aims to dazzle, surprise, and enliven. The poems dance by, preserving a tension between hurry and delay, momentum and stasis, and every line is like a newly launched firecracker, sending out startling patterns of spark and flare. Tejada's exuberant language stretches the limits of selfhood and the way it is represented in poetry. He illuminates the tangled webs that are woven when identities are linked to sexuality, nationality, privilege, and temporality. The concerns and obsessions voiced here turn the construction of desire on its head, forcing us to ask ourselves what is worthy of our attentions.
If you want to know who you are and where you come from, follow the maíz."" That was the advice given to author Roberto Cintli Rodriguez when he was investigating the origins and migrations of Mexican peoples in the Four Corners region of the United States.Follow it he did, and his book Our Sacred Maíz Is Our Mother changes the way we look at Mexican Americans. Not so much peoples created as a result of war or invasion, they are people of the corn, connected through a seven-thousand-year old maíz culture to other Indigenous inhabitants of the continent. Using corn as the framework for discussing broader issues of knowledge production and history of belonging, the author looks at how corn was included in codices and Mayan texts, how it was discussed by elders, and how it is represented in theater and stories as a way of illustrating that Mexicans and Mexican Americans share a common culture.Rodriguez brings together scholarly and traditional (elder) knowledge about the long history of maíz/corn cultivation and culture, its roots in Mesoamerica, and its living relationship to Indigenous peoples throughout the continent, including Mexicans and Central Americans now living in the United States. The author argues that, given the restrictive immigration policies and popular resentment toward migrants, a continued connection to maíz culture challenges the social exclusion and discrimination that frames migrants as outsiders and gives them a sense of belonging not encapsulated in the idea of citizenship. The ""hidden transcripts"" of corn in everyday culture—art, song, stories, dance, and cuisine (maíz-based foods like the tortilla)—have nurtured, even across centuries of colonialism, the living maíz culture of ancient knowledge.
In Nahuatl yolqui is the idea of a warrior brought back from the dead. For author and activist Roberto Cinctli Rodríquez, it describes his own experience one night in March 1979 after a brutal beating at the hands of L.A. sheriffs. Framed by Rodríguez's personal testimony of police violence, this book offers a historia profunda of the culture of extralegal violence against Red-Black-Brown communities in the United States. In addition to Rodríguez's story, this book includes several short essays from victims and survivors that bring together personal accounts of police brutality and state-sponsored violence. This wide-ranging work touches on historical and current events, including the Watts rebellion, the Zoot Suit Riots, Operation Streamline, Standing Rock, and much more. From the eyewitness accounts of Bartolomé de las Casas to the protestors and allies at Standing Rock, this book makes evident the links between colonial violence against Red-Black-Brown bodies to police violence in our communities today. Grounded in the stories of the lives of victims and survivors of police violence, Yolqui, a Warrior Summoned from the Spirit World illuminates the physical, spiritual, and epistemic depths and consequences of racialized dehumanization. Rodríguez offers us an urgent, poignant, and personal call to end violence and the philosophies that permit such violence to flourish. Like the Nahuatl yolqui, this book is intended as a means of healing, offering a footprint going back to the origins of violence, and, more important, a way forward. With contributions by Raúl Alcaraz-Ochoa, Citalli Álvarez, Tanya Alvarez, Rebekah Barber, Juvenal Caporale, David Cid, Arianna Martinez Reyna, Carlos Montes, Travis Morales, Simon Moya Smith, Cesar Noriega, Kimberly Phillips, Christian Ramirez, Michelle Rascon Canales, Carolyn Torres, Jerry Tello, Tara Trudell, and Laurie Valdez.
Roberto Fernández Retamar--poet, essayist, and professor of philology at the University of Havana--has long served as the Cuban Revolution’s primary cultural and literary voice. An erudite and widely respected hispanist, Retamar is known for his meticulous efforts to dismantle Eurocentric colonial and neocolonial thought. Since its publication in Cuba in 1971, “Caliban"--the first and longest of the five essays in this book--has become a kind of manifesto for Latin American and Caribbean writers; its central figure, the rude savage of Shakespeare’s Tempest, becomes in Retamar’s hands a powerful metaphor of their cultural situation--both its marginality and its revolutionary potential.Retamar finds the literary and historic origins of Caliban in Columbus’s Navigation Log Books, where the Carib Indian becomes a cannibal, a bestial human being situated on the margins of civilization. The concept traveled from Montaigne to Shakespeare, on down to Ernest Renan and, in the twentieth century, to Aimé Césaire and other writers who consciously worked with or against the vivid symbolic figures of Prospero, Calivan, and Ariel. Retamar draws especially upon the life and work of José Marti, who died in 1895 in Cuba’s revolutionary struggle against Spain; Marti’s Calibanesque vision of “our America” and its distinctive mestizo culture-Indian, African, and European-is an animating force in this essay and throughout the book.
Roberto Esposito is one of the most prolific and important exponents of contemporary Italian political theory. Bíos-his first book to be translated into English-builds on two decades of highly regarded thought, including his thesis that the modern individual-with all of its civil and political rights as well as its moral powers-is an attempt to attain immunity from the contagion of the extraindividual, namely, the community. In Bíos, Esposito applies such a paradigm of immunization to the analysis of the radical transformation of the political into biopolitics. Bíos discusses the origins and meanings of biopolitical discourse, demonstrates why none of the categories of modern political thought is useful for completely grasping the essence of biopolitics, and reconstructs the negative biopolitical core of Nazism. Esposito suggests that the best contemporary response to the current deadly version of biopolitics is to understand what could make up the elements of a positive biopolitics-a politics of life rather than a politics of mastery and negation of life. In his introduction, Timothy Campbell situates Esposito’s arguments within American and European thinking on biopolitics. A comprehensive, illuminating, and highly original treatment of a critically important topic, Bíos introduces an English-reading public to a philosophy that will critically impact such wide-ranging current debates as stem cell research, euthanasia, and the war on terrorism. Roberto Esposito teaches contemporary philosophy at the Italian Institute for the Human Sciences in Naples. His books include Categorie dell impolitico, Nove pensieri sulla politica, Communitas: orgine e destino della comunità, and Immunitas: protezione e negazione della vita. Timothy Campbell is associate professor of Italian studies in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University and the author of Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi (Minnesota, 2006).
In National Camera, Roberto Tejada offers a comprehensive study of Mexican photography from the early twentieth century to today, demonstrating how images have shaped identities in Mexico, the United States, and in the borderlands where the two nations and cultures intersect—a place Tejada calls the shared image environment. The “problem” of photography in Mexico, Tejada shows, reveals cross-cultural episodes that are rife with contradictions, especially in the complex terms of cultural and sexual difference. Analyzing such topics as territory, sexuality, and social and ethnic relations in image making, Tejada delves into the work of key figures including Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Marius de Zayas, and Julien Levy, as well as the Agustín Víctor Casasola Archive, the Boystown photographs, and contemporary Mexican and Latina photo-based artists. From the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920 to the U.S.–Mexico borderlands of today, Tejada traces the connective thread that photography has provided between Mexican and U.S. American intellectual and cultural production and, in doing so, defines both nations.
In National Camera, Roberto Tejada offers a comprehensive study of Mexican photography from the early twentieth century to today, demonstrating how images have shaped identities in Mexico, the United States, and in the borderlands where the two nations and cultures intersect-a place Tejada calls the shared image environment. The “problem” of photography in Mexico, Tejada shows, reveals cross-cultural episodes that are rife with contradictions, especially in the complex terms of cultural and sexual difference. Analyzing such topics as territory, sexuality, and social and ethnic relations in image making, Tejada delves into the work of key figures including Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Marius de Zayas, and Julien Levy, as well as the AgustÍn VÍctor Casasola Archive, the Boystown photographs, and contemporary Mexican and Latina photo-based artists. From the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920 to the U.S.–Mexico borderlands of today, Tejada traces the connective thread that photography has provided between Mexican and U.S. American intellectual and cultural production and, in doing so, defines both nations.
In a world increasingly dominated by the digital, the critical response to digital art generally ranges from hype to counterhype. Popular writing about specific artworks seldom goes beyond promoting a given piece and explaining how it operates, while scholars and critics remain unsure about how to interpret and evaluate them. This is where Roberto Simanowski intervenes, demonstrating how such critical work can be done. Digital Art and Meaning offers close readings of varied examples from genres of digital art such as kinetic concrete poetry, computer-generated text, interactive installation, mapping art, and information sculpture. For instance, Simanowski deciphers the complex meaning of words that not only form an image on a screen but also react to the viewer’s behavior; images that are progressively destroyed by the human gaze; text machines generating nonsense sentences out of a Kafka story; and a light show above Mexico City’s historic square, created by Internet users all over the world. Simanowski combines these illuminating explanations with a theoretical discussion that employs art philosophy and history to achieve a deeper understanding of each particular example of digital art and, ultimately, of the genre as a whole.
In a world increasingly dominated by the digital, the critical response to digital art generally ranges from hype to counterhype. Popular writing about specific artworks seldom goes beyond promoting a given piece and explaining how it operates, while scholars and critics remain unsure about how to interpret and evaluate them. This is where Roberto Simanowski intervenes, demonstrating how such critical work can be done. Digital Art and Meaning offers close readings of varied examples from genres of digital art such as kinetic concrete poetry, computer-generated text, interactive installation, mapping art, and information sculpture. For instance, Simanowski deciphers the complex meaning of words that not only form an image on a screen but also react to the viewer’s behavior; images that are progressively destroyed by the human gaze; text machines generating nonsense sentences out of a Kafka story; and a light show above Mexico City’s historic square, created by Internet users all over the world. Simanowski combines these illuminating explanations with a theoretical discussion that employs art philosophy and history to achieve a deeper understanding of each particular example of digital art and, ultimately, of the genre as a whole.
This workbook provides glimpses of modern Italian culture through an approach to language learning which is both innovative and highly structured. Develops and refines Italian language students' written and oral skills while, at the same time, assisting them to review grammatical, structural and stylistic features of contemporary Italian. Includes a short Italian-English vocabulary list. Of interest to Italian language students and scholars.
This book surveys and evaluates Indian revolts in northern New Spain during the years 1680-1786 in terms of specific Indian revolts, Spanish Indian policy over time, and relations between Spaniards, mestizo frontiersmen, and Indians. In this study, northern New Spain refers to what is now the Mexican North and the southwestern United States. This northern frontier came to encompass the provinces of Nueva Vizcaya, New Mexico, Sonora, Coahuila, Texas, Sinaloa, and the two Californias. This territory eventually became a separate, distinct administrative unit of colonial Spanish America. Contents: Settlement of Northern New Spain; Times of Trouble: Rise of the Tepehuan and Tarahumara Barrier; The Pueblo and Tarahumara Revolts; Missionaries and Bureaucrats: A Chaotic Arrangement; Frontier Warfare: A Legacy of Revolt 1724-1754; The Reorganization of Presidio Defenses; Creation of the Commandancy General and the Yuma Bid for Freedom, 1776-1782; Seri, Tarahumara, and Gileno Resist Military Defense on the Northern Frontier.
This book surveys and evaluates Indian revolts in northern New Spain during the years 1680-1786 in terms of specific Indian revolts, Spanish Indian policy over time, and relations between Spaniards, mestizo frontiersmen, and Indians. In this study, northern New Spain refers to what is now the Mexican North and the southwestern United States. This northern frontier came to encompass the provinces of Nueva Vizcaya, New Mexico, Sonora, Coahuila, Texas, Sinaloa, and the two Californias. This territory eventually became a separate, distinct administrative unit of colonial Spanish America. Contents: Settlement of Northern New Spain; Times of Trouble: Rise of the Tepehuan and Tarahumara Barrier; The Pueblo and Tarahumara Revolts; Missionaries and Bureaucrats: A Chaotic Arrangement; Frontier Warfare: A Legacy of Revolt 1724-1754; The Reorganization of Presidio Defenses; Creation of the Commandancy General and the Yuma Bid for Freedom, 1776-1782; Seri, Tarahumara, and Gileno Resist Military Defense on the Northern Frontier.
This book counters postmodernist critiques of liberation discourses by drawing on the contributions to hermeneutics made by Paul Ricoeur and J rgen Habermas. Ultimately, its defense of liberation discourses relies on the concept of transculturation as developed by Fernando Ortiz. A Study of Liberation Discourse extends this concept in the light of contributions to the theory of ideology by such authors as Valentin Volosinov, Michel Pecheux, Terry Eagleton, and Norman Fairclough.
Increasing longevity, globalized competition, and market fluidity have created a new landscape for the development of retirement products. Complete reliance on traditional social security systems and defined benefit pensions is no longer an alternative in emerging economies. The development of defined contribution pension systems during both the accumulation and the payout phases has been attracting attention from policy makers, who realize that valuable lessons can be gleaned from the experiences of countries that are ahead in the reform process.Many countries that have implemented systemic pension reforms and introduced private pension systems are now facing the challenge of organizing the payout phase for retiring workers. This effort entails introducing a well-regulated and well- supervised market for retirement products, including marketing activities, providers, and intermediaries. However, in-depth analysis of the related policy issues, constraints, and options is rare. The literature on the payout phase is narrowly focused on a few countries, mainly the United Kingdom and the United States, and it does not address in sufficient detail the institutional and regulatory issues faced by policy makers in reforming countries.Annuities and Other Retirement Products: Designing the Payout Phase aims to fill the gap in the literature. The book initially focuses on the policy issues and constraints confronting the design of the payout phase and examines risk factors for both pensioners and providers. It then scrutinizes the pension systems of five representative countries - Australia, Chile, Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland - which provide a rich variety of experiences and policy lessons applicable to other reforming countries. The five study countries have large mandatory or quasi-mandatory private pension systems operating primarily on a defined contribution basis, and they have already entered the payout phase. A comparative analysis of the similarities and differences between the systems in these countries rounds out the investigation.
This report builds on the conclusions of the Green Infrastructure Finance: Leading Initiatives and Research report and lays out a simple and elegant way in which scarce public financing can leverage market interest in ‘greening’ infrastructure, particularly in the East Asia and Pacific Region. The framework introduced in the report bridges ideas and concepts between environmental economics and project finance practices and consists largely of an analytical methodology for determining the financial viability gap of low-emission projects and an approach for assessing and strengthening the green investment climate in a given country environment. The authors argue that the solution to the financing challenge of low-emission investments lies in understanding the causes of a given project’s financial viability gap, and then investigating how specific actions, including concessional financing, strategic subsidies and other public policy interventions and reforms, can be deployed in a complementary fashion to close the gap. The approach provides suggestions for appropriately allocating risks and responsibilities to various stakeholders for financing portions of the financial viability gap and recommends using multiple instruments and tools to make green investments viable. Governments, for example, could rebalance their own policy distortions with a mix of domestic instruments such as feed-in tariffs, direct subsidies, domestic carbon taxes, and other financing and fiscal incentives. The international community could contribute international instruments for monetizing the global externality benefits of green investments through concessional financing and direct grants. Such an approach results in hybrid financing structures designed to maximize the leveraging effect of public interventions.
Published in 1499 and centered on the figure of a bawd and witch, Fernando de Rojas' dark and disturbing Celestina was destined to become the most suppressed classic in Spanish literary history. Routinely ignored in Spanish letters, the book nonetheless echoes through contemporary Spanish and Latin American literature. This is the phenomenon that Celestina's Brood explores.Roberto González Echevarría, one of the most eminent and influential critics of Hispanic literature writing today, uses Rojas' text as his starting point to offer an exploration of modernity in the Hispanic literary tradition, and of the Baroque as an expression of the modern. His analysis of Celestina reveals the relentless probing of the limits of language and morality that mark the work as the beginning of literary modernity in Spanish, and the start of a tradition distinguished by a penchant for the excesses of the Baroque. González Echevarría pursues this tradition and its meaning through the works of major figures such as Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Nicolás Guillén, and Severo Sarduy, as well as through the works of lesser-known authors.By revealing continuities of the Baroque, Celestina's Brood cuts across conventional distinctions between Spanish and Latin American literary traditions to show their profound and previously unimagined affinity.
