Books by "Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas"
2 books found
Despite being lumped together by census data, there are deep divisions between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans living in the United States. Mexicans see Puerto Ricans as deceptive, disagreeable, nervous, rude, violent, and dangerous, while Puerto Ricans see Mexicans as submissive, gullible, naive, and folksy. The distinctly different styles of Spanish each group speaks reinforces racialized class differences. Despite these antagonistic divisions, these two groups do show some form of Latinidad, or a shared sense of Latin American identity. Latino Crossings examines how these constructions of Latino self and otherness interact with America's dominant white/black racial consciousness. Latino Crossings is a striking piece of scholarship that transcends the usually rigid boundary between Chicano/Mexican and Puerto Rican studies.
Drawing from almost a decade of ethnographic research in largely Brazilian and Puerto Rican neighborhoods in Newark, New Jersey, Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas, in Street Therapists,examines how affect, emotion, and sentiment serve as waypoints for the navigation of interracial relationships among US-born Latinos, Latin American migrants, blacks, and white ethnics. Tackling a rarely studied dynamic approach to affect, Ramos-Zayas offers a thorough—and sometimes paradoxical—new articulation of race, space, and neoliberalism in US urban communities. After looking at the historical, political, and economic contexts in which an intensified connection between affect and race has emerged in Newark, New Jersey, Street Therapists engages in detailed examinations of various community sites—including high schools, workplaces, beauty salons, and funeral homes, among others—and secondary sites in Belo Horizonte, Brazil and San Juan to uncover the ways US-born Latinos and Latin American migrants interpret and analyze everyday racial encounters through a language of psychology and emotions. As Ramos-Zayas notes, this emotive approach to race resurrects Latin American and Caribbean ideologies of "racial democracy" in an urban US context—and often leads to new psychological stereotypes and forms of social exclusion. Extensively researched and thoughtfully argued, Street Therapists theorizes the conflictive connection between race, affect, and urban neoliberalism.