Highway for the Hemisphere

This chapter explores how interest in Mexico continued to orient Los Angles toward the borderlands and Pacific world in the 1930s and through the post-war era. Los Angeles rebuilt its cross-border relationship with Mexico in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution through the construction of a transnational highway running from Los Angeles to Mexico City. While the political borderline running horizontally between the two countries became increasingly rigid during this period, the construction of the International Pacific Highway reveals how regional elites hoped to strengthen ties through cross-border infrastructure, tourism, and trade. The Automobile Club of Southern California, precursor to the American Automobile Association, and a number of Mexican governors spearheaded the project, which they completed in 1957. Through the highway, elites in Los Angeles and in Mexico envisioned and negotiated a new regional relationship between two borderlands regions.

Connections between the folk dance culture and regionality in the area of Derecske and Mikepércs

The culture of folk dance has been prominently cultivated in Hungary nowadays, however some regions are yet to be discovered by ethnographers. Stopping this gap by this time is almost impossible due to the small number of informants. Nevertheless, memories of ethographers’ collections, motion pictures, photographs, notes and the choregraphies made from them endure, on the basis of which traditions can be reconstructed, that were so typical of some townships at one time and have been forgotten by now. What can a recreated tradition mean to a community, that sometime was left to waste by them? This is the problem the article is dealing with through the history of Derecske and Mikepércs, two townships in Hajdú-Bihar county, revealing the regional relationship system as well as late and recent potentials of the area.