Balancing Act: Identity and Otherness among Latin American Immigrants and their Food Practices

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 72-83
Author(s):  
Paulette Kershenovich Schuster
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Communication Systems ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Cultural Perceptions ◽  
Cultural Elements ◽  
Food Practices ◽  
Food Research ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Latin American Immigrants

This article deals with the identity construction of Latin American immigrants in Israel through their food practices. Food is a basic symbolic element connecting cultural perceptions and experiences. For immigrants, food is also an important element in the maintenance of personal ties with their home countries and a cohesive factor in the construction of a new identity in Israel, their adopted homeland. Food practices encode tacit information and non-verbal cues that are integral parts of an individual’s relationship with different social groups. In this case, I recruited participants from an online group formed within social media platforms of Latin American women living in Israel. The basic assumption of this study posits that certain communication systems are set in motion around food events in various social contexts pertaining to different national or local cuisines and culinary customs. Their meaning, significance and modifications and how they are framed. This article focuses on the adaptation and acculturation processes because it is at that point that immigrants are faced with an interesting duality of reconstructing their unique cultural perceptions to either fit the existing national collective ethos or create a new reality. In this study, the main objective is to compare two different immigrant groups: Jewish and non-Jewish women from Latin America who came to Israel during the last ten years. The comparative nature of the research revealed marked differences between ethnic, religious and cultural elements that reflect coping strategies manifested in the cultural production of food and its representation in two distinct domains: private and public. In the former, it is illustrated within the family and home and how they connect or clash with the latter in the form of consumption in public. Combining cultural studies and discourse analysis, this article offers fresh insight into new models of food practices and reproductions. The article’s contribution to new food research lies in its ability to shed light on how inter-generational and inter-religious discourses are melded while food practices and traditions are embedded in a new Israeli identity.

Prosperity Gospel Latinos and Their American Dream

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Tian-Ren Lin
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
American Dream ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
Religious Experiences ◽  
Prosperity Gospel ◽  
White American ◽  
Material Goods ◽  
Latin American Immigrants ◽  
Insight Into

In this immersive ethnography, Tony Tian-Ren Lin explores the reasons that Latin American immigrants across the United States are increasingly drawn to Prosperity Gospel Pentecostalism, a strand of Protestantism gaining popularity around the world. Lin contends that Latinos embrace Prosperity Gospel, which teaches that believers may achieve both divine salvation and worldly success, because it helps them account for the contradictions of their lives as immigrants. Weaving together his informants’ firsthand accounts of their religious experiences and everyday lives, Lin offers poignant insight into how they see their faith transforming them both as individuals and as communities. The theology fuses salvation with material goods so that as these immigrants pursue spiritual rewards they are also, perhaps paradoxically, striving for the American dream. But after all, Lin observes, prosperity is the gospel of the American dream. In this way, while becoming better Prosperity Gospel Pentecostals they are also adopting traditional white American norms. Yet this is not a story of smooth assimilation as most of these immigrants must deal with the immensity of the broader cultural and political resistance to their actually becoming Americans. Rather, Prosperity Gospel Pentecostalism gives Latinos the logic and understanding of themselves as those who belong in this country yet remain perpetual outsiders.

scholarly journals An Empirical Study of Private Saving in Brazil

2003 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
CLAUDIO PAIVA ◽  
SARWAT JAHAN
Keyword(s):  
Fiscal Policy ◽  
Empirical Study ◽  
Empirical Analysis ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Financial Market ◽  
Market Reforms ◽  
Private Saving ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Additional Support ◽  
Latin American Countries

ABSTRACT This paper provides an empirical analysis of the determinants of private saving in Brazil during 1965-2000. Our estimates indicate that the degree of offset between private and public saving is relatively high, in line with evidence for other Latin American countries, although it may have started to decline in recent years. In any case, fiscal policy is identified as one of the main instruments to promote the much needed increase in national saving in Brazil. Additional support to savings could come from continued financial market reforms and trade diversification.

scholarly journals Wishes and Gratitude of Students from Private and Public Schools

Psico-USF ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 651-662 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisa A. Merçon-Vargas ◽  
Maria Adélia M. Pieta ◽  
Lia Beatriz de Lucca Freitas ◽  
Jonathan R. H. Tudge
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Private Schools ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Chi Square ◽  
Curve Estimation ◽  
Age Related ◽  
Gender And Age ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Chi Square Analysis

Abstract We examined social class (measured by attendance in public or private schools), gender, and age-related variations in the expression of wishes and gratitude of 430 7- to 14-year-olds (181 male, 62.1% from public schools). Chi-square analysis indicated that students from private schools expressed significantly more social-oriented wishes and connective gratitude, whereas those from public schools expressed significantly more self-oriented wishes. Girls in the public schools expressed significantly more self-oriented wishes and verbal gratitude than did boys. Regression analysis (curve estimation) indicated that verbal gratitude, self- and social oriented wishes increased and concrete gratitude decreased significantly with age, but connective gratitude tended to increase. These findings support the idea that gratitude and wish types involve the development of cognitive aspects, such as taking others into account and thinking about the future, but it is also influenced by the social contexts in which children live, such as their social class.

scholarly journals Community screening campaign for Strongyloides stercoralis among Latin American immigrants in Spain

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (11) ◽  
pp. 1220-1221 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Monge-Maillo ◽  
M. Navarro ◽  
E. Rodríguez ◽  
J.M. Ramos Rincón ◽  
S. Chamorro Tojeiro ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Strongyloides Stercoralis ◽  
Community Screening ◽  
Latin American Immigrants

The Borderlines of Family Reunification

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leah Perry
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Personal Responsibility ◽  
Immigrant Families ◽  
Family Values ◽  
Family Reunification ◽  
Nuclear Families ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
American Immigrant ◽  
Latin American Immigrants ◽  
Primary Focus

This chapter explores the importance of family in 1980s immigration discourse. While family reunification has been the primary focus of immigration policy since 1965, in the context of the “immigration emergency,” some lawmakers viewed Asian and Latin American immigrant families as threats to American “family values” and the economy. This chapter traces backlash against multiculturalism and second-wave feminism as it arose in “family values” rhetoric. It also comparatively traces the “nation of immigrants” narrative in television shows that represented white ethnic immigrant families as industrious additions to the nation who overcame poverty with nothing but hard work. While these non-nuclear families sometimes seemed to be queer, the chapter argues that racially differentiated discourses about immigrant families reflected and created a flexible neoliberal narrative of “personal responsibility” that erased or glossed over the racial politics affecting Asian and Latin American immigrants and the global forces underscoring immigration.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Latin American Culture ◽  
Identity And Difference ◽  
Opening Up

The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that a critical perspective anchored in conflict and multiplicity at the edge of what is termed “human” can generate fresh assessments of the ways in which Latin American cultural production has confronted historical, ethical, political, and economic processes. Such cultural production at the edge of the human promotes awareness of the ways in which the decentering of the human subject, now so often invoked as a means of encouraging radical equality across species lines, has also been used as an instrument of oppression and exclusion across history. Our principal argument is that a conceptual focus on “limits” as figures of human-nonhuman relations allows for the opening up of new dimensions to longstanding debates around identity and difference, the local and the global, and coloniality and power in Latin American culture.

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