Women in Mexico

The Emerging Role of Women in Mexican Political Life is a collection of thirteen original essays which pulls together the expertise of well-known Mexicanist, Latin Americanist, & gender scholars from Mexico, the U.S., & Europe. The essays analyze the participation of women in different arenas of the Mexican political system: elected positions, appointed positions, grassroots leaders, voters, non-governmental organizations, unions, & so on. Altogether, the analysis includes essays on women from the various political parties, from different regions of the country, & from different levels of government (federal, state, local), making the book a truly representative sample of issues that affect the participation of women in Mexican political life.

Women' grassroots activism in Latin America combines a commitment to basic survival for women and their children with a challenge to women' subordination to men. Women activists insist that issues such as rape, battering, and reproductive control cannot be divorced from women' concerns about housing, food, land, and medical care. This innovative, comparative study explores six cases of women' grassroots activism in Mexico, El Salvador, Brazil, and Chile. Lynn Stephen communicates the ideas, experiences, and perceptions of women who participate in collective action, while she explains the structural conditions and ideological discourses that set the context within which women act and interpret their experiences. She includes revealing interviews with activists, detailed histories of organizations and movements, and a theoretical discussion of gender, collective identity, and feminist anthropology and methods.

""A Courtship After Marriage places sex and marriage at the heart of modernity's making. Hirsch's innovative study of marriage-making in transnational Mexican families offers a fascinating look at the opportunities cross-border migration provides for reconstructing gender and rediscovering pleasure. This ambitious, well-crafted book speaks to anthropologists, demographers, and public health specialists, while transcending the divides between them."--Susan Greenhalgh, author of "Under the Medical Gaze: Facts and Fictions of Chronic Pain

"Jennifer Hirsch is one of the new wave in demographic scholars that takes culture seriously. Her book is a model of engaged, policy-relevant scholarship that achieves its warrant through deep contextualization in the everyday experience of its subjects. Beautifully written, rigorously analyzed, and almost novelistic in its nuance and detail, this study of marriage, migration, and fertility puts the people back into demography and makes one of the most powerful contributions to policy-relevant social science that I have seen in a long time. A work of beauty, sensitivity, and scholarship that sets a new standard for all that follows."--Tom Fricke, author of "Himalayan Households: Tamang Demography and Domestic Processes

"In this engagingly written and keenly observed ethnography of Mexican marriages in Atlanta and in small Mexican towns, Jennifer Hirsch brings love, sex and romance to Mexican immigration scholarship, and presents a compelling case for the rise of companionate marriages and ideals of spousal intimacy. This book will appeal to anyone interested in gender studies, immigrant families and the social and cultural contexts offertility."--Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, author of "Domestica: Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence

"A groundbreaking study. Gracefully written, yet at the same time rigorously argued, this book reminds us of the poetry and dig

This fascinating examination of bigamy in colonial Mexico reveals for the first time the lives, routines, and networks of ordinary people. The author, drawing from his close reading of Inquisition files, situates these people in the web of daily life: in families as they grow up and in communities as they learn the ways of society. With vivid glimpses of courtship, loss of virginity, marriage, adultery, abusive treatment, and failed marriage, he also follows them in their private lives. In the campaign to root out bigamy, the Inquisition relied on people to denounce one another. How they went about this reveals that gossip and curiosity sustained a surer and swifter system of communications than we might have imagined. The many pieces of stories recounted here convey emotions and reactions rarely preserved from past centuries. From a young child enduring abuse and rape by relatives to the wily suitor who tricks his future father-in-law with a tale of lost loot stored in a robber's cave, throughout this volume we hear the voices of hitherto invisible people.