Mongrels Bastards Orphans and Vagabonds or Merchant of Death

Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America

Author: Gregory Rodriguez

Wide-ranging and provocative, Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds offers an unprecedented account of the long-term cultural and political influences that Mexican Americans will have on the collective character of our nation.

In considering the largest immigrant group in American history, Gregory Rodriguez examines the complexities of its heritage and of the racial and cultural synthesis--mestizaje--that has defined the Mexican people since the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century. Rodriguez deftly delineates the effects of mestizaje throughout the centuries, traces the northern movement of this "mongrelization," explores the emergence of a new Mexican American identity in the 1930s, and analyzes the birth and death of the Chicano movement. Vis-a-vis the present era of Mexican American confidence, he persuasively argues that the rapidly expanding Mexican American integration in to the mainstream is changing not only how Americans think about race but how we envision our nation.

Deeply informative--as historically sound as it is anecdotally rich, brilliantly reasoned, and highly though provoking--Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds is a major contribution to the discussion of the cultural and political future of the United States.

The Washington Post - Pamela Constable

Despite its unappealing title, Gregory Rodriguez's Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds provides a fascinating excursion through the history of Mexican immigrants in the United States. Full of instructive revelations and forgotten facts, the book shows how the treatment and status of immigrants have always been hostage to the vicissitudes of history—from the Gold Rush to the invasion of Iraq. The best sections of this book by a Mexican American columnist for the Los Angeles Times cover events that occurred long ago. But by putting the current tensions in a solid historical context, Rodriguez offers hope that they too will eventually subside and be followed by a cooler spell in which a lasting, more rational solution can prevail over the politics of fear and bigotry.

Publishers Weekly

Despite its title, this volume from L.A. Timescolumnist Rodriguez is a thorough and accessible history of Mexico that emphasizes the legacy of mestizaje, mixed races, among Mexico's inhabitants. Beginning with Cortes's arrival in 1519, an elaborate system of racial classification was put into place to keep separate Spanish and native peoples. The failure of this system, Rodriguez argues, allowed for a more progressive and open-minded approach to race in Mexico compared with, for example, the U.S.: "In colonial New Mexico, mestizajewas the rule rather than the exception." Black/white racial lines were nonexistent, as African natives merged effortlessly into Mexican society (which abolished slavery nearly 40 years before the States). Other developments include the Mexican American War and subsequent insurgencies in the huge swath of Mexican land ceded to the U.S.; the Mexican Revolution and the immigration wave it inspired; the backlash against Mexican-Americans during the depression years; and the Chicano movement of the 1960s and '70s. There's more at stake in Rodriguez's text than the latest immigration hullabaloo (he doesn't get around to addressing the past 30 years until the last chapter); aside from illuminating a complicated history and deeply contextualizing the present debate, the author takes on the concept of racial classification itself, calling for a change in attitude that more closely reflects the Mexican unifying idea of mestizaje, that we are all, to some extent, racially mixed "mongrels." (Oct.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Kirkus Reviews

Montezuma's revenge is not what you think. Instead, suggests essayist-journalist Rodriguez, the emperor's true revenge may be in the dismantling of the idea of racial differences among white, brown and every other hue. "After the conquest of Mexico," writes the author, "some conquistadors married Indian princesses and daughters of chiefs." So they did, and the Spaniards who came after that first generation of conquistadors married other Indian women, while some Indian men married white women. The result was the mestizo, the Mexican: the race that melded all other races, with "a great variety of phenotypic traits." The upper crust kept itself as white as possible and used skin color as a measure of race and social position. This way of reckoning among whites, creoles, mestizos, indios and other phenotypic types was carried over to the frontier. Once gringo census takers arrived, Californios gave themselves promotions so that, as Rodriguez quotes a historian as remarking, "everyone acquired some fictitious Caucasian ancestry and shed Negro backgrounds-becoming, in effect, lighter as they moved up the social scale." Today, Mexican Americans-who, as Rodriguez points out, constitute two-thirds of the Latino population in the United States-self-identify on the census differently depending on their perceived social status. The upper class considers itself white, but the vast majority of Mexican Americans check "other race," even as most identify ethnically as Hispanic or Latino. As Rodriguez's lucid book demonstrates, now that whites are no longer the majority in California, there is not much talk there of majorities or minorities, even as census officials worry that this confounding of race andethnicity will "undermine the validity of all the other racial categories." In other words, given the growth of the Latino population and high rate of intermarriage, the "other" will do what its forerunner did, namely subvert and redefine the notion of a melting-pot nation. Of great interest to the demographically inclined, and those who wonder what America will look like at the tricentennial.

Table of Contents:

Preface     ix
The Birth of a People     3
The Rise and Fall of the Spanish Colonial Racial System     33
The Spaniards Venture North     55
Mexicans and the Limits of Slavery     80
The Anglos Move West     98
Caught Between North and South     122
Becoming Mexican American     159
The Chicano Movement     201
Mongrel America and the New Assimilation     224
Acknowledgments     263
Notes     265
Index     305

See also: Gestione finanziaria contemporanea

Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible

Author: Douglas Farah

Praise for Merchant of Death

"A riveting investigation of the world's most notorious arms dealer—a page-turner that digs deep into the amazing, murky story of Viktor Bout. Farah and Braun have exposed the inner workings of one of the world's most secretive businesses—the international arms trade."
—Peter L. Bergen, author of The Osama bin Laden I Know

"Viktor Bout is like Osama bin Laden: a major target of U.S. intelligence officials who time and again gets away. Farah and Braun have skillfully documented how this notorious arms dealer has stoked violence around the world and thwarted international sanctions. Even more appalling, they show how Bout ended up getting millions of dollars in U.S. government money to assist the war in Iraq. A truly impressive piece of investigative reporting."
—Michael Isikoff, coauthor of Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War

"Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun are two of the toughest investigative reporters in the country. This is an important book about a hidden world of gunrunning and profiteering in some of the world's poorest countries."
—Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001

"In Merchant of Death, two of America's finest reporters have performed a major public service, turning over the right rocks that reveal the brutal international arms business at the dawn of the twenty-first century. In Viktor Bout, they have given us a new Lord of War, a man who knows no side but his own,and who has a knack for turning up in every war zone just in time to turn a profit. As Farah and Braun uncover and document his troubling role in the Bush Administration's Global War on Terror, his ties to Washington almost seem inevitable."
—James Risen, author of State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration

"An extraordinary and timely piece of investigative reporting, Merchant of Death is also a vividly compelling read. The true story of Viktor Bout, a sociopathic Russian gunrunner who has supplied weapons for use in some of the most gruesome conflicts of modern times—and who can count amongst his clients both the former Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the U.S. military in Iraq—is a stomach-churning indictment of the policy failures and moral contradictions of the world's most powerful governments, including that of the United States."
—Jon Lee Anderson, author of The Fall of Baghdad

The Washington Post - Fawaz A. Gerges

…a riveting investigation of the world's most notorious weapons dealer, Viktor Bout, whose post-Cold War arms network has stoked violence worldwide. Although U.S. intelligence officers have tried for years to shut down Bout's operation, Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun reveal that the United States paid firms linked to him as much as $60 million to ferry weapons to the U.S. military and private contractors in Iraq in 2003 and 2004.

Publishers Weekly

While there's no shortage of books on international terrorism, drug cartels and genocide, the international weapons trade has received less attention. Journalists Farah and Braun center their absorbing exposé of this source of global misery on its most successful practitioner, the Russian dealer Victor Bout. Throughout the Cold War, they show, the Kremlin supplied arms to oppressive regimes and insurgent groups, keeping close tabs on customers; after the U.S.S.R. collapsed, the floodgates opened in the 1990s. With weapons factories starved for customers, Soviet-era air transports lying idle and rusting, and dictators, warlords and insurgents throughout the world clamoring for arms, entrepreneurs and organized criminals saw fortunes to be made. The authors paint a depressing picture of an avalanche of war-making material pouring into poor, violence-wracked nations despite well-publicized U.N. embargoes. America denounces this trade, but turns a blind eye if recipients proclaim they are fighting terrorism, they say. Ruthless people who shun publicity make poor biographical subjects, and Bout is no exception. The authors' energetic research reveals that rivals dislike him, colleagues admire him, enemies condemn him, and Bout describes himself as a much-maligned but honest businessman. Although an unsatisfactory portrait, the book surrounds it with an engrossing, detailed description of this wildly destructive traffic. (Aug.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information