Minnesota Books

If you think of El Paso as a "frontier town," a border zone where "everything goes," or even a romantic region that functions for some thinkers as a paradigm or "alluring" allegory for the meeting and mixing of different cultures, you might be right. But you might also be in the grip of powerful interpretive mechanisms that conceal more of El Paso than they reveal.

El Paso: Local Frontiers at a Global Crossroads aims to provide a better "optic" for El Paso - and the border - than all the familiar metaphors, clichés, and traditional views that have passed for understanding of the enormously complex border phenomenon. Te crux of Ortiz's argument is that what is missing from the standard view(s) of El Paso is the central reality that the city suffers from an "overwhelming and pervasive subordination of local concerns to nonlocal interests." El Paso, as is true of other border cities, serves a mediating function for activities too often generated by forces that are beyond its control and which result from decisions made elsewhere.

"Overwhelmed by the region's linking role for transit and traffic, both legal and nonlegal," he says, "most of the interactions in the region are influenced by this intermediary function. The border's population is disproportionately affected by migration and trade flows. Its welfare and opportunities are overridden by national and international developments and measures. Immigration laws and currency devaluations, for example, have shattering local affects. In addition, much of the economic life of border cities depends on decisions made by companies elsewhere."

At the same time, he says, "the city's residents have little or no significant say in most of these policies, decisions, and migratory flows."

"In this subordination," Ortiz says, "most of the benefits accrued from the geographical position of the border have been taken away from the region's residents. In turn, residents contend with a skewed share of the costs of providing the services or resources for the intermediation" demanded by relationships in existence at any particular moment here. The term for that, in Ortiz's analysis, is "alienated instrumentality."

Ortiz describes the subordination as "overwhelming and pervasive." The impact ranges from wear and tear on the area's physical infrastructure to the costs of traffic bottlenecks at and on both sides of the international bridges, pollution and a variety of other serious dislocations that the community, often invisible to the decision makers and key players, has to suffer.

The book explores the efforts of five local attempts in the 1990s to assert a measure of control over the forces affecting El Paso:
1. An effort by La Mujer Obrera to upgrade the city's infrastructure for garment production;
2. A multi-million dollar business venture that involved investors from different countries;
3. A second business initiative designed to broaden the city's industrial base by developing mid-tech manufacturing;
4. The founding of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce against the opposition of what subsequently became the Greater El Paso Chamber of Commerce;
5. The multiethnic attempt of Unite El Paso to develop broad-based community leadership.

All of these efforts bore some fruit, but none of them succeeded in asserting control over El Paso's future or even in positioning itself to significantly influence the city's fate.

The strength of the book is Ortiz's effort to conceptualize the city in a nontraditional, nonstereotypical way, and in terms that don't "erase," "occlude," "hide," "elide," "blur," "trivialize" or "sidestep" the complex reality that is lived on the ground both in El Paso and other border cities. Ortiz offers critiques of such conceptions by writers Gloria Anzaldúa and Guillermo Gómez-Peña that see the border as a place of "hybridity and cross fertilization," and even by academics such as anthropologist Renato Rosaldo, who took up the notion and transformed it into "border crossings" to explain multiculturalism in the United States.

For such writers and thinkers, the border, never in full view itself, "becomes a lens for looking somewhere else." Ortiz's aim "is to offer an alternative view to the border to counter the reifying glow of the region as a site of mythic or stigmatic [stigmatizing] dimensions" inherent in the traditional metaphors and allegorical representations of the border.

"We need a new analytical prism for looking at the perplexing situation of the border and the overall spectral transformation of globalization in most other settings," he writes.

Central to Ortiz's vision of El Paso is the notion that the city is "a frontier [where] local concerns are persistently and pervasively subordinated to nonlocal interests" and that as a frontier, the area is always open to "takeovers" by powers located elsewhere. Examples are the domination of the border economy by the maquiladora industry that brought hundreds of Fortune 500 firms to industrial parks in Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana, as well international trade treaties (such as NAFTA) and customs and immigration policies enunciated by federal governments in Washington, D.C., and Mexico City.

The book contains numerous insights and provocative perspectives. One illustration is that while the border is often conceived as "empty space," it is attractive to multinational corporations for the abundance of cheap labor!

Ortiz suggests a different conceptual model that takes in more of the reality of the border: "Instead of a so-called paradigm, the border region suggests to me the image of a sphere situated on the dividing line between the United States and Mexico. The sphere is a play of mirrors. Internally, the concave surfaces of the sphere reflect each edge - each city - on the divide. Externally, the convex surfaces reflect each country. I believe that the image of a sphere allows us to recognize the simultaneously distorting and elucidating function of the border region in is frontier condition."

The concluding chapter elaborates on that notion. The analytical terminology is sometimes a bit difficult, but the effort at untangling it is worthwhile. There are a few typos, but they are easily corrected in the next edition. That should in no way constitute an excuse for missing this important book.

El autor hace una mirada objetiva respecto de el auge de la sociedad de la información y junto a ella una apreciacion etica de los problemas que conlleva la vigilancia del consumidor en el capitalismo posmoderno. Hace ademas un analisis Foucaultiano de los fenomenos de vigilancia y estudia la teoria de la vigilancia en Bentham, con su Panoptico.

Great book for someone who visits this area. Gives us outsiders a peek into what life was like for the "pioneers" of canoe country.

This book began our American Studies graduate seminar at the U of Minnesota, taught by the author. It is a gem, a concise and yet thorough analysis, particularly in the case of post-world war II American intellectuals like Hofstadter and Niebuhr. It is a serious work of intellectual history, influenced by the ideas of William Appleman Williams, Thomas Kuhn, and Benedict Anderson, and delivers a very different conceptualization of cold war consensus historians than what most historiographies offer.

Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization is an art history study of the effect that the early images and engravings of North American Indians had on establishing the "visual prototype" of North American Indians in the minds of European and Euro-American readers. Paying particular attention to the early engravings of Carolina Algonquian Indians, created in 1585 by British painter-explorer John White and engraved in 1590 by Flemish publisher and printmaker Theodor de Bray, Engraving the Savage reveals how the image of the "savage other" as an intellectual and ideological concept was engendered. An in-depth scrutiny of how art and perception reinforced one another; though the topic discussed is specifically that of visual portrayals of Native Americans, the deeper precepts of human perception as shaped by art are broad-ranging in the extreme. A welcome addition to both art history and Native American studies shelves.

Philip Young is I believe the first critic to provide a clear understanding of the Hemingway code - hero. The hero is not as some may think the public figure hero the bullfighter, or the champion boxer or even the commanding soldier . The hero is like Hemingway himself and like Jake Barnes and in a way Nick Adams the one who has been wounded in the war and who must somehow " be stronger at the broken places". The public hero in his ' grace under pressure ' may give an example. But the code hero the true Hemingway hero has to imitate in silence without complaint, without big words, without heroic proclamation of himself those simple right actions which answer the situation. This is in accord with the famous Hemingway passage when he speaks about the inability after the War to use words like ' sacred ' and ' patriotic' , the big words. The code hero instead wounded, numbed must act in a kind of clean and efficient almost ritual way in restoring himself and the world. Simple action with a minimum of words. Action which is repeated almost like a ritual. Action which has something of the quality of the famous Heminway style with its hypnotic Biblical simplicity and its conjunctive connections. The rhythmic ' and ' and ' and' of Hemingway's prose conveys too the mirror of this kind of redemptive action.
An excellent work for better understanding the whole structure and basic meaning of the Hemingway word and act.

Young is one of the foremost Hemingway critics. I believe he was the first who outlined the central relationship between the 'code hero' and the major 'wounded character' in Hemingway's work. For instance in 'The Sun Also Rises' the code- hero acts with grace under pressure, is the bullfighter at his best. Against the code- hero is Jake Barnes 'who has been wounded at the hard places' and cannot act with the same kind of first- time ability. His act of courage is to take the impossible situation Life has given him, not complain, and act with that minimum of word and complaint that it is commended by Hemingway implicitly as 'right'. The same kind of situation applies in Hemingway's favorite story 'The Snows of Kiliminjaro' whose hero too must somehow display a kind of moral courage after having failed and been wounded.
The parallel in the Literature is to the Hemingway situation in life of having been wounded by shrapnel at Fossalta- and having to be 'stronger at the broken places'. The redemptive 'born again' more complex hero of the Hemingway story is then set over against the model of the first- born simple grace- under- pressure hero.

While ethanol programs, particularly in Minnesota, are fascinating in most any context, Long writes with superb clarity and offers the reader a new perspective on a most interesting subject.

Champagne's critique and recommendation make for an interesting and thought provoking read. His ideas are a warning for our future thought that academics have a responsibility to understand.

this is just what I was looking for. methods of measurement and recording joint motion. not too much information, just enough. thanks