Laboring at the Margins: Welfare and the Regulation of Mexican Workers in Southern California

Despite sustained disciplinary interest in the social and institutional regulation of labor markets, the relations between welfare provision and work have received scant attention from geographers. This paper charts the functional and spatial interdependence of the urban welfare system and the agricultural industry in Southern California in the 1920s and 1930s. Employer groups actively constructed this interdependence and negotiated its unintended effects with strategies to discursively and physically manage the population of Mexican workers using welfare resources. These strategies, dependent on local grower control of the welfare apparatus, undergirded the racialized division of labor that concentrated Mexicans in casualized farm work.     

The Struggle for Identity: A Personal Reflection

This article explores Agamben's revisionist presentation of the anarchy of the Son and the void of power in the Trinity in his genealogy of economy and government in the West. It argues for a reading that sustains the actual self-depiction of orthodox theology on these points of doctrine in order to evaluate and critique orthodoxy's impact on politics in the West. Only after a thorough assessment of orthodoxy's doctrinal self-understanding can Agamben's reading of potential or suppressed meaning in orthodoxy be appreciated and possibly applied.     

Concealed Communities: The People at the Margins

The “concealed communities” of our title are the people archaeologists have often labeled as “marginal.” Archaeologists writing about both prehistoric and historic periods have commonly made a range of assumptions about margins and marginality, and their discussions have often categorized marginality as ecological, economic, or socio-political. Whilst it has been common to privilege one or other of these categories in order to explain how societies worked, they are rarely mutually exclusive. In addition, since marginality is relative, virtually any group might be made marginal depending on people’s perspectives in the past or present. Sometimes marginality can be imposed (economically or politically), and sometimes even actively chosen. Defining the “margin” is a complex business, and the term needs sensitive, context-orientated use to make it useful for archaeologists.     

拉丁美洲与加勒比地区的国际移民——兼论中国移民的生存发展空间

通过对拉美历史上四次国际移民历史和趋向的发展变化、非法移民及其原因、移民侨汇对国民经济的重大影响、移民跨国中小企业的形成与发展等方面的分析,探讨了拉丁美洲与加勒比地区国际移民的历史、现状以及中国移民在这一地区的生存与发展空间。     

War and Memory: Victim Identity and the Struggle for Compensation in Japan

Abstract

History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers.     

The American Geographical Society's Map of Hispanic America: Million-Scale Mapping between the Wars

ABSTRACT

The 1:1 million Map of Hispanic America, compiled at the American Geographical Society's New York headquarters between the First and Second World Wars, has been seen as a landmark in twentieth-century cartography. In this essay we re-evaluate the Hispanic Map as a technical and scholarly project and re-assess its wider significance for the history of twentieth-century topographic mapping in the light of the cultural and political factors that shaped its development. When finally completed in 1945, the Hispanic Map was rightly judged an unsurpassed scientific achievement and a major work of art. But it was already out of date, superseded by newer cartographic technologies, particularly aerial survey and reconnaissance, that had removed the need for the kind of meticulous and painstaking compilation that the Hispanic Map exemplified.     

Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous Movements in Latin America and the World

Marvin Harris. Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture. New York: Random House, 1974. 276 pp. References. $7.95 (cloth).     

History, Memory, and Identity in Modern Singapore: Testimonies from the Urban Margins

In 2006–2007, I interviewed elderly Singaporeans on theirexperiences of resettlement from an urban kampong (village)to emergency public housing after a great fire in 1961. I learnedmuch about the lives of semiautonomous dwellers in an unauthorizedsettlement and the individual and social transformation followingtheir rehousing. My informants also highlighted what the experiencesmeant to them and their identity in a modern city-state. Thispaper treats the testimonies as both source and social memoryand seeks to avoid the essentialism into which many social historians,oral history practitioners, and memory scholars have fallenin their approach toward the craft. As a source of social history,when used in conjunction with other historical sources, thereminiscences are patently useful for understanding the roleof public housing in transforming a marginal population intoan integrated citizenry. This enables the writing of a new socialhistory of postwar Singapore that departs from the discursiveofficial accounts of urban kampong life and of the 1961 inferno.At the same time, the oral history also underlines powerfulsocial and political influences on individual memory, beingmarked by nostalgia for the kampong and ambivalence toward theimagined character of younger Singaporeans. Statements on therumors of government-inspired arson in the 1961 calamity, however,constitute a significant countermyth in contemporary society,revealing a more critical side to the social memory.     

Struggle,Strength, and Survival: The Trujillo Homesteads National Historic Landmark and Hispanic American Settlement in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Historical Archaeology - The Trujillo Homesteads National Historic Landmark encompasses two 19th-century Hispanic American ranches on the western edge of the Great Sand Dunes National Park and...     

Imperial Identity in Colonial Minds: Harold Moody and the League of Coloured Peoples, 1931-50

This article examines how the League of Coloured Peoples, foundedin London in 1931 by the Jamaican Harold Moody, used its versionof a British identity to seek equal rights for Britons of colour.I argue that by invoking an imperial British identity that drewon widely accepted elements of Britishness, namely respectabilityand imperial pride, the League gained support from black colonialsand white English people in its fight for equality. This wastrue despite the fact that a major element of the League's conceptionof British identity, racial equality, challenged the dominantidea that ‘true’ Britons were, by definition, white.The article focuses on the workings of the organization's ideologyin the context of two news-making issues: the campaign to restoreBritish citizenship to ‘coloured’ seamen in Cardiffin 1936, and the parliamentary and judicial reaction to discriminationby London's Imperial Hotel against League member Learie Constantinein 1943. The story it tells indicates that British identitieswere claimed and manipulated not only by natives of the BritishIsles, but also by colonial peoples. It further suggests thatunder the conditions of empire colonial peoples could simultaneouslyidentify with the imperial power and their (potentially national)home colony.