Fatherhood In The Borderlands

A contemplative exploration of cultural representations of Mexican American fathers in contemporary media.

A “gritty, raw, bare-knuckled” collection of stories set along the US-Mexico border from the LA Times Book Prize–winning author of In the Rogue Blood (Publishers Weekly). In this extraordinary collection of short fiction, James Carlos Blake, “one of the greatest chroniclers of the mythical American outlaw life” and author of the Wolfe Family series of border noir novels, journeys from the nineteenth-century Mexican frontier to the borderlands of today (Entertainment Weekly). Borderlands begins with Blake’s personal essay, “The Outsiders,” which recounts his own straddling of worlds and identities. In the following eight stories, we meet characters like Don Sebastián Cabrillo Mayor Cortés y Mendoza, a powerful landowner reduced to howling at the moon from behind the bars of a mental institution; an illegal immigrant in Florida who must reckon with his emotional turmoil after being robbed by a fellow Mexican; a Texas woman orphaned by disease and desertion, making her way into a violent world of men; and many more who pass through the shadows of the borderlands. Bold, honest, and humane, these pieces represent some of the best writing from one of the most original and authentic voices in contemporary fiction. “Blake writes with a fearless precision and a ruthless sensibility, his prose is spare and tough, and his descriptions detailed and cinematic. This is gritty, raw, bare-knuckled fiction, blazing with an extraordinary kind of violence, and certainly not for the faint of heart.” —Publishers Weekly

This region - which marks the meeting of China and post-Soviet Central Asia - is increasingly important militarily, economically and geographically. Yet we know little of the people that live there, beyond a romanticised 'Silk Road' sense of fraternity. In fact, relations between the people of this region are tense, and border violence is escalating - even as the identity and nationality of the people on the ground shifts to meet their new geopolitical realities. As Steven Parham shows, many of the world's Soviet borders have proved to be deeply unstable and, in the end, impermanent. Meanwhile, the looming presence of Modern China and Russia, who are funneling money and military resources into the region - partly to fight what they see as a growing Islamic activism - are adding fuel to the fire. This lyrical, intelligent book functions as part travelogue, part sociological exploration, and is based on a unique body of research - five months trekking through the checkpoints of the border regions. As China continues to grow and become more assertive, as it has been recently in Africa and in the South China Seas - as well as in Xinjiang - China's borderlands have become a battleground between the Soviet past and the Chinese future.

In the early years of the twentieth century, Herbert Eugene Bolton opened up a new area of study in American history: the Spanish Borderlands. His research took him to the archives of Mexico, where he found a wealth of unpublished, even unknown, material that shed new light on the early history of North America, particularly the American Southwest. The seventeen essays in this book, edited by John Francis Bannon, illustrate the importance of his contributions to American historiography and provide a solid foundation for students of Borderlands history.

This volume stems from the assumption that broadly-understood borderlands, as well as peripheries, provinces or uttermost ends of different kinds, are abodes of significant culture-generating forces. From the academic point of view, their undeniable appeal lies in the fact that they constitute spaces of mutual interactions and enable new cultural phenomena to surface, grow or decline, and, as such, are worth thorough and constant scrutiny. However, they also provide the setting for radical clashes between ideologies, languages, religions, customs, and, as the media report every single day, armies or guerrilla units. Living within such areas of creative dynamics and destructive friction (or visiting them, even vicariously as the contributors to the volume do) is tantamount to exposing oneself to a difference. One’s response to this difference – either in the form of rejection or, more preferably, acceptance (or a mixture of both) – is not merely an index of one’s tolerance (a platitudinised term itself that all too often hides an attitude of comfortable indifference), but an affirmation of humaneness. Borderlands are paradoxical, if not aporetic, loci. They simultaneously connote territories on either side of a border, in a literal sense, and a vague, intermediate state or region, in a metaphorical sense. Encapsulating the idea of border, the term indicates both inescapable nearness and unavoidable (or perhaps unbridgeable) separateness. The studies included in the volume focus on various aspects of borderland art and literature, on analyses of selected works, and on the peculiarities of cultural and literary representations. Thus, the borderland landscape, both literal and metaphorical, comes to be seen as a factor contributing to the emergence of new, distinct and identifiable themes and motifs, as well as theoretical frameworks.

The classic history of the Spanish frontier from Florida to California.

During the first half of the twentieth century, the French Basque province of Xiberoa was a place of refuge, conflict, and foreign occupation. With the liberation of France in 1944, many Xiberoans faced new conflicts arising from legal and civic judgments made during Vichy and German occupation. War, Judgment, and Memory in the Basque Borderlands traces the roots of their divided memories of the era to local and official interpretations of judgment, behavior, and justice during those troubled times. In order to understand how the Great War affected the Xiberoan Basques’ perceptions of themselves, Ott contrasts the experiences of people in four different communities located within a fifteen-mile radius. The author also examines how the disruption during the interwar years affected intracommunity relations during the Occupation, the Liberation, and its aftermath. This narrative reveals the diverse ways in which Basques responded to civil war, world war, and displacement, and to one another.

A map of skin etched in blood. A world under threat from the Borderlands. A young woman who must risk the shadows to save her family. When her Grandfather is murdered under mysterious circumstances, Sienna Farren inherits his map shop in the ancient city of Bath, England. She discovers that her family is bound up with the Ministry of Maps, a mysterious agency that maintains the border between this world and the Uncharted. With the help of Mila Wendell, a traveler on the canals, Sienna discovers her own magical ability and a terrifying place of blood that awaits in the world beyond. But when she discovers a truth about her past and the Borderlands begin to push through the defenses, Sienna must join the team of Mapwalkers on their mission to find the Map of Shadows – whatever the cost. In a place written out of history, a world off the edge of the map, Sienna must risk everything to find her father ... and her true path as a Mapwalker. This is book 1 of the Mapwalker fantasy adventure trilogy. Mapwalker trilogy: Map of Shadows #1 Map of Plagues #2 Map of the Impossible #3