Space and Place in the Mexican Landscape

Space and Place in the Mexican Landscape PDF

Author: Fernando Núñez

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2007-04-19

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 1585445835

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Metaphysical conceptions have always influenced how human societies create the built environment. Mexico—with its rich culture, full of symbol and myth, its beautiful cities, and its evocative ruins—is an excellent place to study the interplay of influences on space and place. In this volume, the authors consider the ideas and views that give the constructed spaces and buildings of Mexico—especially, of Querétaro—their particular ambience. They explore the ways the built world helps people find meaning and establish order for their earthly existence by mirroring their metaphysical assumptions, and they guide readers through time to see how the transformation of worldviews affects the urban evolution of a Mexican city. The authors, then, construct a “metaphysical archeology” of space and place in the built landscape of Mexico. In the process, they identify the intangible, spiritual aspects of this land. Not only scholars of architecture, but also archeologists and anthropologists—particularly those interested in Mexican backgrounds and culture—will appreciate the authors’ approach and conclusions.

Space and Place in the Mexican Landscape

Space and Place in the Mexican Landscape PDF

Author: Fernando Núñez

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2007-04-19

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 9781585445837

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Metaphysical conceptions have always influenced how human societies create the built environment. Mexico—with its rich culture, full of symbol and myth, its beautiful cities, and its evocative ruins—is an excellent place to study the interplay of influences on space and place. In this volume, the authors consider the ideas and views that give the constructed spaces and buildings of Mexico—especially, of Querétaro—their particular ambience. They explore the ways the built world helps people find meaning and establish order for their earthly existence by mirroring their metaphysical assumptions, and they guide readers through time to see how the transformation of worldviews affects the urban evolution of a Mexican city. The authors, then, construct a “metaphysical archeology” of space and place in the built landscape of Mexico. In the process, they identify the intangible, spiritual aspects of this land. Not only scholars of architecture, but also archeologists and anthropologists—particularly those interested in Mexican backgrounds and culture—will appreciate the authors’ approach and conclusions.

The Remittance Landscape

The Remittance Landscape PDF

Author: Sarah Lynn Lopez

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-01-12

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 022620295X

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Immigrants in the United States send more than $20 billion every year back to Mexico—one of the largest flows of such remittances in the world. With The Remittance Landscape, Sarah Lynn Lopez offers the first extended look at what is done with that money, and in particular how the building boom that it has generated has changed Mexican towns and villages. Lopez not only identifies a clear correspondence between the flow of remittances and the recent building boom in rural Mexico but also proposes that this construction boom itself motivates migration and changes social and cultural life for migrants and their families. At the same time, migrants are changing the landscapes of cities in the United States: for example, Chicago and Los Angeles are home to buildings explicitly created as headquarters for Mexican workers from several Mexican states such as Jalisco, Michoacán, and Zacatecas. Through careful ethnographic and architectural analysis, and fieldwork on both sides of the border, Lopez brings migrant hometowns to life and positions them within the larger debates about immigration.

The Mexican Border Cities

The Mexican Border Cities PDF

Author: Daniel D. Arreola

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 1994-02-01

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9780816514410

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From Matamoros to Tijuana, Mexican border cities have long evoked for their neighbors to the north images of cheap tourist playgrounds and, more recently, industrial satellites of American industry. These sensationalized and simplified perceptions fail to convey the complexity and diversity of urban form and function—and of cultural personality—that characterize these places. The Mexican Border Cities draws on extensive field research to examine eighteen settlements along the 2,000-mile border, ranging from towns of less than 10,000 people to dynamic metropolises of nearly a million. The authors chronicle the cities' growth and compare their urban structure, analyzing them in terms of tourist districts, commercial landscapes, residential areas, and industrial and transportation quarters. Arreola and Curtis contend that, despite their proximity to the United States, the border cities are fundamentally Mexican places, as distinguished by their cultural landscapes, including town plan, land-use pattern, and building fabric. Their study, richly illustrated with over 75 maps and photographs, offers a provocative and insightful interpretation of the geographic anatomy and personality of these fascinating—and rapidly changing—communities.

Hispanic Spaces, Latino Places

Hispanic Spaces, Latino Places PDF

Author: Daniel D. Arreola

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2009-07-21

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 029278399X

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Hispanics/Latinos are the largest ethnic minority in the United States—but they are far from being a homogenous group. Mexican Americans in the Southwest have roots that extend back four centuries, while Dominicans and Salvadorans are very recent immigrants. Cuban Americans in South Florida have very different occupational achievements, employment levels, and income from immigrant Guatemalans who work in the poultry industry in Virginia. In fact, the only characteristic shared by all Hispanics/Latinos in the United States is birth or ancestry in a Spanish-speaking country. In this book, sixteen geographers and two sociologists map the regional and cultural diversity of the Hispanic/Latino population of the United States. They report on Hispanic communities in all sections of the country, showing how factors such as people's country/culture of origin, length of time in the United States, and relations with non-Hispanic society have interacted to create a wide variety of Hispanic communities. Identifying larger trends, they also discuss the common characteristics of three types of Hispanic communities—those that have always been predominantly Hispanic, those that have become Anglo-dominated, and those in which Hispanics are just becoming a significant portion of the population.

Mapping Colonial Spanish America

Mapping Colonial Spanish America PDF

Author: Santa Arias

Publisher: Bucknell University Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9780838755099

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The essays inquire into the spatial configurations of colonial Spanish America and its inhabitants as they both relate to isues of alterity, identity, the economy of geographical representation, gender, and the construction of the colonial city. The volume indicated a variety of essays dealing with different geographical regions, including the centers of cultural production (such as Mexico and Peru) as well as marginalized colonial territories.

Border Spaces

Border Spaces PDF

Author: Katherine G. Morrissey

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2018-03-13

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0816538212

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The built environment along the U.S.-Mexico border has long been a hotbed of political and creative action. In this volume, the historically tense region and visually provocative margin—the southwestern United States and northern Mexico—take center stage. From the borderlands perspective, the symbolic importance and visual impact of border spaces resonate deeply. In Border Spaces, Katherine G. Morrissey, John-Michael H. Warner, and other essayists build on the insights of border dwellers, or fronterizos, and draw on two interrelated fields—border art history and border studies. The editors engage in a conversation on the physical landscape of the border and its representations through time, art, and architecture. The volume is divided into two linked sections—one on border histories of built environments and the second on border art histories. Each section begins with a “conversation” essay—co-authored by two leading interdisciplinary scholars in the relevant fields—that weaves together the book’s thematic questions with the ideas and essays to follow. Border Spaces is prompted by art and grounded in an academy ready to consider the connections between art, land, and people in a binational region. Contributors Maribel Alvarez Geraldo Luján Cadava Amelia Malagamba-Ansótegui Mary E. Mendoza Sarah J. Moore Katherine G. Morrissey Margaret Regan Rebecca M. Schreiber Ila N. Sheren Samuel Truett John-Michael H. Warner

Landscape and Englishness

Landscape and Englishness PDF

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2006-01-01

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 9401203601

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In the papers collected in this, the first volume of the Spatial Practices series, Englishness is reflected in the spaces it occupies or dwells in. Broadly influenced by a renewed and growing interest in questions of cultural identity, its emergence in Victorian theories and fictions of nationality, and the new cultural geography, the papers cover a rich variety of spaces and places which have been appropriated for cultural meanings: the rural countryside and farmland of the Home Counties in the early nineteenth century as Arcadian idyll in Cobbett, as the land to die for in war propaganda, and as nostalgia for a unified, organic English culture in Lawrence, Morton and Priestley’s travel writing, but also in the Shell Tourist Guides to motoring in rural England; English moorland; the sacred geographies of monuments in Hardy and others; the traditional seaside deconstructed in Martin Parr’s photography, and the sea as English Victorian imperial territory and its symbolic breezes in Froude’s travel writing. The English landscape is also a paradigm for the description of other places in D. H. Lawrence’s travel writing or for the colonial territory itself in Rushdie’s writing India, a displacement of other landscapes. This collection of papers examines the assumption that constructions of rural England provide the basis for an understanding of Englishness.

Space, Place, and Landscape in Ancient Greek Literature and Culture

Space, Place, and Landscape in Ancient Greek Literature and Culture PDF

Author: Kate Gilhuly

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-09-22

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1139992716

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This book brings together a collection of original essays that engage with cultural geography and landscape studies to produce new ways of understanding place, space, and landscape in Greek literature from the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. The authors draw on an eclectic collection of contemporary approaches to bring the study of ancient Greek literature into dialogue with the burgeoning discussion of spatial theory in the humanities. The essays in this volume treat a variety of textual spaces, from the intimate to the expansive: the bedroom, ritual space, the law courts, theatrical space, the poetics of the city, and the landscape of war. And yet, all of the contributions are united by an interest in recuperating some of the many ways in which the ancient Greeks in the archaic and classical periods invested places with meaning and in how the representation of place links texts to social practices.