Streets, Bedrooms, and Patios: The Ordinariness of Diversity in Urban Oaxaca

by Michael James Higgins, Tanya L. Coen

Overview

Diversity characterizes the people of Oaxaca, Mexico. Within this city of half a million, residents are rising against traditional barriers of race and class, defining new gender roles, and expanding access for the disabled. In this rich ethnography of the city, Michael Higgins and Tanya Coen explore how these activities fit into the ordinary daily lives of the people of Oaxaca.

Higgins and Coen focus their attention on groups that are often marginalized—the urban poor, transvestite and female prostitutes, discapacitados (the physically challenged), gays and lesbians, and artists and intellectuals. Blending portraits of and comments by group members with their own ethnographic observations, the authors reveal how such issues as racism, sexism, sexuality, spirituality, and class struggle play out in the people's daily lives and in grassroots political activism. By doing so, they translate the abstract concepts of social action and identity formation into the actual lived experiences of real people.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780292731349
Publisher:	University of Texas Press
Publication date:	06/01/2000
Pages:	322
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.73(d)

About the Author

Michael James Higgins is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Northern Colorado. Tanya L. Coen is Co-Director of Zacalero Creative Cultural Productions in San Francisco. Together they also wrote ¡Oigame! ¡Oigame!: Struggle and Social Change in a Nicaraguan Urban Community.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments

1. Streets, Bedrooms, and Patios: The Ordinariness of Diversity in Urban Oaxaca
2. Better to Arrive Than to Be Invited: The Urban Poor of the City of Oaxaca
3. We Are Not Lesbians! Grupo Unión: Homosexual Transvestite Prostitutes in Urban Oaxaca
4. Only the Spoon Knows What's at the Bottom of the Pot! Ethnographic Portraits of Other Groups That Are Transgressing Sexual and Gender Borders in Urban Oaxaca
5. Thanks to God for Giving Me Polio, for I Have Been Able to See the World: Los Discapacitados of the City of Oaxaca
6. A Conclusion of Sorts

• Notes
• Bibliography and Suggested Readings
• Index

What People are Saying About This

Jean Rahier

What is remarkably powerful about this book is the fantastic humanity of its descriptions, feelings, characters, relationships, etc. . . . At certain occasions it was amazingly impossible for me to put the book down: I could not help but want to know more.
—(Jean Rahier, Associate Professor of Anthropology and African-New World Studies, Florida International University)

Editorial Reviews

Higgins (anthropology, Univ. of Northern Colorado) and Coen (an anthropologist and codirector of Zacalero Creative Cultural Productions, San Francisco) present portraits of several cultural and social groups in the city of Oaxaca, Mexico. This metropolitan area of 500,000 people contains a wide variety of residents. The authors interviewed the urban poor, transvestite and female prostitutes, the disabled, gays and lesbians, and AIDS activists in order to demonstrate the diversity of customs in this Mexican metropolis. They contrast these ondas, or "lifestyles," with one another and those of the average Mexican. The text mixes excerpts from interviews with anthropological analysis. The ethnographic detail and complex terminology make this book most appropriate for academic libraries.--Gwen Gregory, New Mexico State Univ., Las Cruces Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

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