Fajitasand the Failure of Refrigerated Meatpacking in Mexico: Consumer Culture and Porfirian Capitalism

2004 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-429 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey M. Pilcher
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supply Chains ◽  
Standard Method ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Porfirio Diaz ◽  
Clear Plastic ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Difference

Tourists who visit a Mexican market to observe a butcher at work will readily notice the difference between the material cultures of meat in Mexico and the United States. Instead of thick, neatly cut steaks, wrapped in clear plastic, they will find butterflied strips of meat, corresponding to no known part of a cow, sawed with ragged edges but remarkable thinness, and hung on hooks and rods. Thick slabs calledsuaderomight be steak except for the checkerboards carved across the front, and seemingly random chunks ofretazocomplete the baroque display of craftsmanship. Although of little use in making Anglo-American roasts or steaks, these cuts are ideal for such delicacies ascarne asada(grilled meat) andmole de olla(chili pepper stew). Indeed, fajitas—skirt steak pounded thin and marinated, then seared quickly on a hot fire, and served with salsa and fresh tortillas— are nothing more than a Tex-Mex version of the standard method of cooking and eating beef in Mexico. Moreover, the differences between U.S. supermarket meat counters and Mexican artisanal market displays extend beyond national culinary preferences to reflect the historical growth of industrial supply chains. Indeed, meat provides a case study demonstrating the significance of consumer culture in shaping the development of Mexican capitalism during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1911).

Consensus and Crisis in American Classical Music Historiography from 1890 to 1950

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 200-231
Author(s):  
David C. Paul
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gustav Mahler ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
The Social ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Shed Light

In the late nineteenth century American publishers began to answer a burgeoning demand for histories of classical music. Although some of the authors they contracted are well-known to scholars of music in the United States—most notably Edward MacDowell and John Knowles Paine—the books themselves have been neglected. The reason is that these histories are almost exclusively concerned with the European musical past; the United States is a marginal presence in their narratives. But much can be learned about American musical culture by looking more closely at the historiographical practices employed in these histories and the changes that took place in the books that succeeded them in the first half of the twentieth century. In particular, they shed light on the shifting transatlantic connections that shaped American attitudes toward classical music. Marked at first by an Anglo-American consensus bolstered by the social evolutionary theory of prominent Victorians, American classical music histories came to be variegated, a result of the influence of Central European émigrés who fled Hitler’s Germany and settled in North America. The most dramatic part of this transformation pertains to American attitudes toward the link between music and modernity. A case study, the American reception of Gustav Mahler, reveals why Americans began to see signs of cultural decline in classical music only in the 1930s, despite the precedent set by many pessimistic fin-de-siècle European writers.

The Genesis of the Anglo-American Committee on Palestine, November 1945: a case study in the Assertion of American Hegemony

1979 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 185-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
The United States ◽  
Displaced Persons ◽  
Force Majeure ◽  
British Policy ◽  
American Hegemony ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Moment

The Anglo-American Committee, whose appointment was announced on 13 November 1945, had its origins in a purely British initiative: an ad hoc, spur-of-the-moment attempt to associate the United States responsibly with British policy in Palestine. However, this committee did not succeed, any more than had its many predecessors, in finding a solution to the Palestine problem palatable to all parties. Nor did it bring relief to the mass of refugees wasting away in displaced-persons camps in Europe. Its vigorous rejection of partition was shortly to be brushed aside by a different kind of logic, that of force majeure.

Machines are Us: Joseph Papaleo and the Literature of Sprawl

2008 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-113
Author(s):  
Dennis Barone
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Italian American ◽  
Ethnic Heritage ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Fiction Writer

This essay examines the work of Italian American fiction writer Joseph Papaleo in the context of suburbanization, globalization, and ethnic heritage and identity. In doing so I demonstrate that Papaleo's fiction provides understanding of how Italian Americans have looked at Italy as they experienced the alienation of a consumer culture. Papaleo's fiction presents a mixed nostalgia for what Italy represents and recognition that it, too, like the United States, confronts continuous auto-dependent sprawl. Papaleo adds a suburban focus to the more frequently urban-centered literature of Italian Americans and he adds an ethic perspective to the predominantly Anglo American literature of the suburbs. His 1970 novel Out of Place depicts a materially successful Italian American, Gene Santoro, who cannot fill a deeper spiritual need in either the United States or Italy.

The Mexican Revolution

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin H. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mexican Descent ◽  
Porfirio Diaz ◽  
Border City ◽  
Labor Exploitation ◽  
The Us ◽  
Anglo American

When rebels captured the border city of Juárez, Mexico, in May 1911 and forced the abdication of President Porfirio Díaz shortly thereafter, they not only overthrew the western hemisphere’s oldest regime but also inaugurated the first social revolution of the 20th century. Driven by disenchantment with an authoritarian regime that catered to foreign investment, labor exploitation, and landlessness, revolutionaries dislodged Díaz’s regime, crushed an effort to resurrect it, and then spent the rest of the decade fighting one another for control of the nation. This struggle, recognized ever since as foundational for Mexican politics and identity, also had enormous consequences for the ethnic makeup, border policing, and foreign policy of the United States. Over a million Mexicans fled north during the 1910s, perhaps tripling the country’s Mexican-descent population, most visibly in places such as Los Angeles that had become overwhelmingly Anglo-American. US forces occupied Mexican territory twice, nearly bringing the two nations to outright warfare for the first time since the US–Mexican War of 1846–1848. Moreover, revolutionary violence and radicalism transformed the ways that much of the American population and its government perceived their border with Mexico, providing a rationale for a much more highly policed border and for the increasingly brutal treatment of Mexican-descent people in the United States. The Mexican Revolution was a turning point for Mexico, the United States, and their shared border, and for all who crossed it.

Gendered differences in emigration and mobility perspectives among European researchers working abroad

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Scheibelhofer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Research Strategy ◽  
The Future ◽  
Highly Skilled

This paper focuses on gendered mobilities of highly skilled researchers working abroad. It is based on an empirical qualitative study that explored the mobility aspirations of Austrian scientists who were working in the United States at the time they were interviewed. Supported by a case study, the paper demonstrates how a qualitative research strategy including graphic drawings sketched by the interviewed persons can help us gain a better understanding of the gendered importance of social relations for the future mobility aspirations of scientists working abroad.

‘A Routh O’ Auld Nick-Nackets’ – the antiquarian collection of John Rae

2015 ◽  
Vol 36-37 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Paul Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Moral Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Representative Case ◽  
National Museums ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The University

John Rae, a Scottish antiquarian collector and spirit merchant, played a highly prominent role in the local natural history societies and exhibitions of nineteenth-century Aberdeen. While he modestly described his collection of archaeological lithics and other artefacts, principally drawn from Aberdeenshire but including some items from as far afield as the United States, as a mere ‘routh o’ auld nick-nackets' (abundance of old knick-knacks), a contemporary singled it out as ‘the best known in private hands' (Daily Free Press 4/5/91). After Rae's death, Glasgow Museums, National Museums Scotland, the University of Aberdeen Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, as well as numerous individual private collectors, purchased items from the collection. Making use of historical and archive materials to explore the individual biography of Rae and his collection, this article examines how Rae's collecting and other antiquarian activities represent and mirror wider developments in both the ‘amateur’ antiquarianism carried out by Rae and his fellow collectors for reasons of self-improvement and moral education, and the ‘professional’ antiquarianism of the museums which purchased his artefacts. Considered in its wider nineteenth-century context, this is a representative case study of the early development of archaeology in the wider intellectual, scientific and social context of the era.

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