Inside The Latin Experience

Latinos comprise the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States, and this interdisciplinary anthology gathers the scholarship of both early career and senior Latina/o scholars whose work explores the varied and unique latinidades, or Latino cultural identities, of this group.

The intricacies of living in contemporary Latin American cities include cases of both empowerment and restriction. In Lima, residents built their own homes and formed community organizations, while in Rio de Janeiro inhabitants of the favelas needed to be “pacified” in anticipation of international sporting events. Aspirations to “get ahead in life” abound in the region, but so do multiple limitations to realizing the dream of upward mobility. This volume captures the paradoxical histories and experiences of urban life in Latin America, offering new empirical and theoretical insights to scholars.

To understand the creative fabric of digital networks, scholars of literary and cultural studies must turn their attention to crowdsourced forms of production, discussion, and distribution. Digital Encounters explores the influence of an increasingly networked world on contemporary Latin American cultural production. Drawing on a spectrum of case studies, the contributors to this volume examine literature, art, and political activism as they dialogue with programming languages, social media platforms, online publishing, and geospatial metadata. Implicit within these connections are questions of power, privilege, and stratification. The book critically examines issues of inequitable access and data privacy, technology’s capacity to divide people from one another, and the digital space as a site of racialized and gendered violence. Through an expansive approach to the study of connectivity, Digital Encounters illustrates how new connections – between analog and digital, human and machine, print text and pixel – alter representations of self, Other, and world.

This book explores the workplace experiences, opportunities, and challenges that emerge from the nuances of diversity and inclusion dynamics in Latin American and Caribbean countries. While the first part of the book addresses emerging frameworks on diversity and inclusion in Latin America by examining the effects of history, traditions, and cultural differences, the second part offers case studies of country-specific actualities. The authors highlight that despite the many shared cultural aspects of the region, it is not homogeneous and there are significant differences from place to place. It follows then that a variety of cultural differences implies a variety of approaches to workplace values, and more specifically, to the understanding of diversity and inclusion. Examining topics such as gender identity, disability, and racial gaps in countries throughout the region, this book offers scholars a fresh perspective on an emerging region.

Latin America is home to 1.5 million persons of Japanese descent. Combining detailed scholarship with rich personal histories, Daniel M. Masterson, with the assistance of Sayaka Funada-Classen, presents the first comprehensive study of the patterns of Japanese migration on the continent as a whole. When the United States and Canada tightened their immigration restrictions in 1907, Japanese contract laborers began to arrive at mines and plantations in Latin America. The authors examine Japanese agricultural colonies in Latin America, as well as the subsequent cultural networks that sprang up within and among them, and the changes that occurred as the Japanese moved from wage labor to ownership of farms and small businesses. They also explore recent economic crises in Brazil, Argentina, and Peru, which, combined with a strong Japanese economy, caused at least a quarter million Latin American Japanese to migrate back to Japan. Illuminating authoritative research with extensive interviews with migrants and their families, The Japanese in Latin America tells the story of immigrants who maintained strong allegiances to their Japanese roots, even while they struggled to build lives in their new countries.

Antonio Olliz Boyd is an emeritus professor of Latin American literature at Temple University. He holds a PhD from Stanford University, an MS from Grorgetown University, and a BA from Long Island University. Dr. Olliz Boyd has published various essays on Afro Latino aesthetics in literature in volumes, such as the Dictionary of Literary Biography: Modern Latin-American Fiction Writers; Singular Like a Bird: The Art of Nancy Morejon; Imagination, Emblems and Expressions: Essays on Latin American, Caribbean, and Continental Culture and Identity; Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays among others, as well as articles on Afro Latino literary criticism in various refereed journals. --Book Jacket.

This collection explores the perpetually changing notion of Latin American identity, particularly as illustrated in literature and other forms of cultural expression. Editor Elizabeth Montes Garcés has gathered contributions from specialists who examine the effects of such major phenomena as migration, globalization, and gender on the construct of Latin American identities, and, as such, are reshaping the traditional understanding of Latin America's cultural history. The contributors to this volume are experts in Latin American literature and culture. Covering a diverse range of genres from poetry to film, their essays explore themes such as feminism, deconstruction, and postcolonial theory as they are reflected in the Latin American cultural milieu.