Suchergebnisse

We explore how the reception of remittances affects perceptions of the bilateral relationship between Mexico and the United States. Scholars have claimed that the economic benefits of the relationship with the US prevail over imperialistic concerns as a result of the asymmetry of power between the two countries. Empirical research shows that Latin American public opinion is indeed more supportive of the US than theory indicates. However, we identify two gaps in this literature. First, scholars have explored the determinants of generic expressions of sentiment toward the US, overlooking more concrete instances of cooperation between the two countries. Second, scholars have focused on trade and investment and have ignored how the material gains of emigration shape attitudes toward the US. The present paper fills these two gaps by using novel survey data on the bilateral relationship between Mexico and the US. On one hand, we find that while the reception of remittances correlates positively with good sentiments toward the US, the recipients of remittances are consistently more opposed to cooperation with the US in the fight against drug trafficking. We argue that this finding can be explained by the different nature of the migratory phenomenon, and the connection between anti-drug trafficking policies and the close scrutiny of illegal flows of money and people.

The 'American Girl' this paper considers is Helen Wills, the top-ranked women's tennis player from 1927 to 1934. Wills was the subject of numerous narrative and visual representations as well as many self-representations in both words and images. Reading Wills in the context of Henry James's Daisy Miller and the popular magazine Gibson Girl, the paper considers the mechanisms by which national symbols are constructed. In particular, it examines the ways in which Wills's style of playing, her clothes, and even her facial expression came to signify a particular version of modern, American femininity (in contrast to that of opponents such as Suzanne Lenglen and Helen Jacobs). It also explores her identity as a white Californian, a neo-classical girl next door, who appealed to Nativists like James Phelan and Gertrude Atherton and whom Diego Rivera placed at the centre of 1931 Allegory of California. In short, Helen Wills proved both a very flexible American symbol and a global celebrity.

In this paper, we defend that euronorcentric theories of modernity which pursuit the philosophical-sociological reconstruction of the process of the Western modernization (or European, or the evolutionary-constitutive pattern of development of the contemporary industrialized societies) are characterized for a historical-sociological blindness which is marked by three basic points: (a) the understanding of the Western modernization as a self-referential, self-subsistent, self-sufficient, endogenous and autonomous process of development, so that there would be modernity as rationalization and all the rest as traditionalism, position that, on the other hand, does not prevent the theories of modernity of correlating modernity-modernization, rationalization, universalism and human evolution; (b) the separation between cultural modernity and social-economic modernization, the first as a sphere purely normative, and the second as a sphere basically instrumental, logical-technical, with the purpose of saving a normative concept of epistemological-moral universalism which is the cultural modernity itself; and (c), as condition of that philosophical-sociological reconstruction, the erasing, the deletion and the silencing about the colonialism as a consequence of the development of the Western modernization as a whole. We argue that a Latin-American decolonial praxis has in the denounce, unveiling and deconstruction of this historical-sociological blindness assumed by euronorcentric theories of modernity in their reconstruction of the process of the Western modernization its fundamental epistemological-political starting point to become itself an alternative to the modernity's normative paradigm, to ground its (Latin-American) philosophical-sociological discourse about Western modernization and its correlation with colonialism.