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Satan's Playground
Paul J. Vanderwood, Satan's Playground: Mobsters and Movie Stars at America's Greatest Gaming Resort.

This is a fascinating history of Tijuana's fabulous Agua Caliente resort and casino. Engagingly written, exhaustively researched, Vanderwood (the author of Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint, (2004) and The People of God Against the Guns of Government (1998), opens up a pandora's box of multiple stories about the famed resort, the politically and socially well connected "barons" who owned it, the mobsters who tried to fleece them, the politicians on both sides of the international border who profited by it, the Mexican workers who made it function and the Hollywood glitterati and middle class Americans who boozed, schmoozed and gambled away their money for as long as the resort operated.

In a style and with a flair that is reminiscent of Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America (2004), and Timothy Gilfoyle's A Pickpocket's Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth Century New York (2007) Vanderwood opens his book with a brutal robbery and murder in San Diego in May 1929 tying it into the crime and violence spawned by America's disastrous experiment with prohibition and the Tijuana resort built to take advantage of it. While thousands of Americans flocked to Tijuana "with its wide-open gambling, whorehouses and cantinas" others saw "that peppery community as corrupting the morals and endangering the health of young people (is it only the young who get corrupted and diseased south of the border?)," the author asks (99).The admonitions and actions of church leaders, the U.S. Naval Command at San Diego and many other guardians of the nation's morals is another of the many issues the author analyzes with insight and sound judgment. By the end of the 1930s moralists on both sides of the border hailed the closing of Agua Caliente, but they could never be happy with the flourishing bars, whorehouses, and night clubs that continue to attract tourists on Avenida Revolución.

For those readers interested in post-revolutionary Mexican history Vanderwood has brought forth rich material from Mexican archives detailing the involvement of the revolutionary generals Obregón, Calles, Rodríguez and Cárdenas with the owners of Agua Caliente. Abelardo Rodríguez, in fact, became one of the "barons" who owned the resort, protected it from revolutionary reform fervor and profited handsomely.

This is an informative and exciting read about a place and time in border history that merits more attention from scholars who, like Vanderwood, write history for everybody to enjoy, not just colleagues in the profession.

Errol D. Jones

Satan's Playground
Making his way deep into the lost world of Tijuana's legendary entertainment complex, Paul Vanderwood boldly leads us where few historians have gone before. This transnational tale centered in and around the lost world of Tijuana's Agua Caliente upscale resort is masterfully revealed through an array of sumptuous, sometimes spine-chilling, vignettes combined with probing historical analysis.With a stylistic nod to the great crime fiction writers who have similarly cast their narratives in the shadows of the southern California sun, Vanderwood has produced an impeccably researched, well written and reader-friendly piece of work.This is "true crime" at its' finest!

Another Vanderwood triumph
This is another of Vanderwood's great books, which read like detective novels but are solidly based on historical research. "Satan's Playground" could have been written by Raymond Chandler, and is full of celebrities who fled prohibition in the U.S. to gambol in Tijuana. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in U.S.-Mexican cultural relations, as well as for those who simply like well-written history. ... Read more

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The Mexican-American War (1846-1848) found Americans on new terrain. A republic founded on the principle of armed defense of freedom was now going to war on behalf of Manifest Destiny, seeking to conquer an unfamiliar nation and people. Through an examination of rank-and-file soldiers, Paul Foos sheds new light on the war and its effect on attitudes toward other races and nationalities that stood in the way of American expansionism.

Drawing on wartime diaries and letters not previously examined by scholars, Foos shows that the experience of soldiers in the war differed radically from the positive, patriotic image trumpeted by political and military leaders seeking recruits for a volunteer army. Promised access to land, economic opportunity, and political equality, the enlistees instead found themselves subjected to unusually harsh discipline and harrowing battle conditions. As a result, some soldiers adapted the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny to their own purposes, taking for themselves what had been promised, often by looting the Mexican countryside or committing racial and sexual atrocities. Others deserted the army to fight for the enemy or seek employment in the West. These acts, Foos argues, along with the government's tacit acceptance of them, translated into a more violent, damaging variety of Manifest Destiny. ... Read more

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A significant dissappointment
While I had initial high hopes for this book, unfortunately within 30 pages I found it to be quite unsatisfying.First, Foos' prose is so full of theory and jargon, he's fallen into the trap many (most?) academics do, which is to say, they have turned an interesting subject into an unreadable monstrosity.The books lacks lucidity, and is rather an academic study that bored this reader considerably.Why Foos can't just say what he has to say in clear, readable language is unclear.
Second, there's no conherent, overall narrative of the Mexican War here!Foos never tells the STORY of the war so as to provide context, but jumps right into the matter as if he has provided some kind of background.We never learn why the US is fighting the war, what were its major events, etc.The fact that the words "Alamo" and "Texas" do not appear in the index is telling.Foos's editor should also be held responsible for putting out such a jumbled mess as this as well.
In short--I do not recommend this book at all.

An unflinching and brutal look at the horrors of war
A Short, Offhand Killing Affair: Soldiers And Social Conflict During The Mexican-American War by Paul Foos (History Department, Georgia State University - Atlanta) draws directly upon diaries and letters of soldiers in the Mexican-American War (1846-48), to survey and examine a bitterly fought conflict which was to change the shape of the emerging American nation. Offering an unflinching and brutal look at the horrors of war as sufferingly experienced by rank-and-file soldiers (as well as the violent, sometimes murderous and ravaging behavior many such soldiers exacted upon the inhabitants of the territory they conquered), A Short, Offhand Killing Affair fully and dramatically reveals a ruthless and darker aspect of what came to be called America's "Manifest Destiny".

Excellent Analysis
This book crystalizes the events of the Mexican war into an honest appraisal of American society at the time.

history repeats itself
This lucidly written history of how American soldiers were lured into service for a supposedly noble cause and then discovered themselves in a confounding situation couldn't be more timely. Issues of racism and nationalism are shown to be as alive then as they are today. ... Read more

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Published for the first time in English, this is Jean Baudrillard's earliest book, written in 1968, at a time when (as the author would put it later), "The society of the spectacle and its denunciation were still the focal point of semiological, psychoanalytical and sociological arguments". Pressing Freudian and Saussurean categories into the service of a basically Marxist perspective, this book offers a cultural critique of the commodity in consumer society. Baudrillard classifies the everyday objects of the "new technical order" as functional, non-functional and metafunctional. He contrasts "modern" and "traditional" functional objects, subjecting home furnishing and interior design to a celebrated semiological analysis. His treatment of non-functional or "marginal" objects focuses on antiques and the psychology of collecting, while the metafunctional category extends to the useless, the aberrant and even the "schizofunctional". Finally, Baudrillard deals at length with the implications of credit and advertising for the commodification of everyday life.This book is an in-depth study of the materialist semiotics of the early Baudrillard, who emerges in retrospect as something of a lightning rod for the live ideas of the day: Bataille's political economy of "expenditure" and Mauss's theory of the gift; Reisman's "lonely crowd" and the "technological society" of Jacques Ellul; the struturalism of Roland Barthes in "The System of Fashion"; Henri Lefebvre's work on the social construction of space; and Guy Debord's situationist critique of the spectacle. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Every Industrial Designer or related designer should read this!
Very mind-boggling key points on the shifts in our material culture of before industrialization and after. Even though some passages as aforementioned were confusing because of those loaded sentences caused by translation, this is a must-read. There are some very well-stated thoughts on the shortcomings of industrialization which I was delighted to discover. There are also some analysis on color in mass-production and this and that which were enlightening. This book is half prose involving observations of societal changes, and half persuasive reasoning with theory and proof.

I wish more industrial/product designers could read this book. I agree with the point about how the gesture of an action is missing from many of our functional objects. The myth of the functional object was interesting to think about. As a Sculptor, it helped me question my role as a maker in this era.

Essays on Color and on Warhol
Hardly seems to have been written in 1968 (Year of publication) the writing still relevant. I especially
appreciated the essays on Warhol and contemporary art in general, and the interview in which the author clarifies some of his most extreme published statements. (I've only read about half of this book so far)

:D nice book
It's really a nice book...
everyone should get one lol

keen insights within a cloud of pompous prose
Baudrillard's SYSTEM OF OBJECTS stands as a landmark... the first book by one of France's leading men of letters, an astute social critic (and deconstructionist?!critical theorist?!).The author discusses the roles objects play in our lives, from mirrors to automobiles to furniture.He dissects the role and purpose of credit (in the late 1960's; his ideas about the expansion of credit purchasing are humorous in hindsight). Author devotes sections to gadgets, gizmos, and robots.

Some of OBJECTS' highlights:a discussion of why the rich and other status seekers acquire old things, a critique of collectors and their motivations ("everything that cannot be invested in human relationships is invested in objects."), and a commendable exegesis of the personalization of cars (since the 1970s this critique could be expanded to houses).In addition the section on credit is juicy:"the credit system is the acme of man's irresponsibility to himself."

Should I credit the translator with handling a difficult text well?I can't say.I don't read French (at least not on Baudrillard's level).However, the reader is left with some of the most pompous and opaque prose.Nothing is stated simply.Example:"In the love relationship the tendency to break the object down into discrete details in accordance with a perverse autoerotic system is slowed by the living unity of the other person."Another:"We may thus trace functional mythologies, born of technics itself, all the way to a sort of fatality in which the world-mastering technology seems to crystallize in the form of an inverse and threatening purpose."Here's a favorite:"Thus freed from practical functions and from the human gestural system, forms become purely relative with respect both to one another and to the space to which they lend 'rhythm.' "

These overwrought and ridiculous passages would be humorous, but they impede the reader's understanding of the text. Various worthwhile statements pepper the book throughout, which could be condensed into a sort of "famous quotes by Baudrillard," perhaps as captions in a book of photographs, a coffee-table book.I recommend this currentlynonexistent product.Until its creation, we must be partially satisfied by SYSTEM OF OBJECTS.

Ken Miller

Rewarding 1968 analysis of psycho-sociology of consumption
Some contemporary French philosophy is a fascinating and invigorating mix of psychology, sociology, semiotics and, dare one say it, poetry. In the English speaking world, Marshall McLuhan is probably the philosopher whose style is most similar to this first, 1968, book by the now well known Jean Baudrillard.

What is the book about? In a sense it is about the meaning of low tech everyday objects, and thus it is also about the psycho-sociology of our technology. Take mirrors, for example, which were frankly disappearing as an element of interior decoration when Baudrillard wrote his book. Yet for years, mirrors were an important fixture of well-to-do bourgeois interiors; they were opulent, expensive objects which in Baudrillard's words permitted "...the self-indulgent bourgeois
individual to exercise his privilege --reproduce his own image and revel in his possessions". Family portraits and photographs represent diachronic mirrors of the family, and thus played a similar narcissistic role in decoration. Baudrillard analyses clocks, lighting, glass, seating, antiques and the drive to automate and miniaturize gadgets and tools, and always comes up with provocative, sometimes maddening, insights into modern society and one's place in it --and after all what is philosophy
for but to make you think?

There is a brilliant and probably timeless exploration of the passion of collecting and leads up nicely to what the bulk of the book is devoted to:the study of systems of objects (one of the main chapters is aptly titled "The Socio-Ideological System of Objects and Their Consumption"). What do we yearn to express through technology? What is it it that fascinates us about robots? Why is there such a proliferation of automatism, accessory features, inessential features to the point where
an object's dysfunctions are as important as its functions? Baudrillard acknowledges his debt to some of Lewis Mumford's ideas, and deplores with him that too often we try to solve problems by building a machine (perhaps nowadays we would tend to develop software, or in Baudrillard's terms simulate) and thus not onlyfall wide of the mark but also reveal clear signs of social ineptitude and paralysis. Fashion, consumption, technology are intertwined themes in modern society, feeding off each other and leading to a world that is at once systematized, fragile and baroque, in the sense that the proliferation of forms seems to be more important than mining for substance. It is interesting to compare some of these insights with a more recent book by another French philosopher, Gilles Lipovetsky, on fashion in modern societies ("The empire of the ephemeral", 1987).

The book ends by looking at the role credit and advertising play in the consumption of systems of objects, and thus completes what the book's jacket indicates is"a cultural critique of the commodity in consumer society". Baudrillard is a humanist critic of technology and consumer society and uses psychoanalytical ideas as weapons to grapple with his subject. The book is by turns, infuriating, keen, stimulating but in the end one feels that, curiously, it lacks a certain depth; it plays with
mirrors and is content with catching the light and obtaining the occasional blinding flash; but sometimes that the criticisms seem a little too one-sided or perhaps I simply prefer more constructive criticism. Still, the book is a tour-de-force, and I feel that the translator, James Benedict, did a fine job with a difficult text. ... Read more

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In Cartographic Mexico, Raymond B. Craib analyzes the powerful role cartographic routines such as exploration, surveying, and mapmaking played in the creation of the modern Mexican state in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such routines were part of a federal obsession—or "state fixation"—with determining and "fixing" geographic points, lines and names in order to facilitate economic development and political administration. As well as analyzing the maps that resulted from such routines, Craib examines in close detail the processes that eventually generated them. Taking central Veracruz as a case in point, he shows how in the field, agrarian officials, military surveyors and metropolitan geographers traversed a "fugitive landscape" of overlapping jurisdictions and use-rights, ambiguous borders, shifting place names, and villagers with their own conceptions of history and territory. Drawing on an array of sources—including maps, letters from peasants, official reports, and surveyors’ journals and correspondence—Craib follows the everyday, contested processes through which officials attempted to redefine and codify such fugitive landscapes in struggle with the villagers they encountered in the field.In the process, he vividly demonstrates how surveying and mapmaking were never mere technical procedures: they were, and remain to this day, profoundly social and political practices in which surveyors, landowners, agrarian bureaucrats, and peasants all played powerful and complex roles. ... Read more

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Maya people have lived for thousands of years in the mountains and forests of what is now Guatemala, but they lost control of their land and became serfs and refugees when the Spanish conquered them in the sixteenth century. Under both the Spanish and the Guatemalan non-Indian elites, they suffered enforced poverty and thereby served as a resident source of cheap labor for non-Maya projects, particularly agricultural production. Following the CIA-induced coup that toppled Guatemala's elected government in 1954, their misery was exacerbated by government accommodation to United States' 'interests', which promoted crops for export and reinforced the need for a source of cheap and passive labor. This widespread poverty was most intense in northwestern Guatemala, where 80 per cent of Maya children were chronically malnourished, and forced a continuing migration to the Pacific coast. The self-help aid that flowed into the area in the 1960s and 1970s raised hopes for justice and equity that were brutally suppressed by Guatemala's military government. This military reprisal led to a massive diaspora of Maya throughout Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Central America.This collection describes that process and the results. The chapters show the dangers and problems of the migratory/refugee process and the range of creative cultural adaptations that the Maya have developed. It provides the first comparative view of the formation and transformation of this new and expanding transnational population, presented from the standpoint of the migrants themselves as well as from a societal and international perspective. Taken together, the chapters furnish unique and ethnographically grounded perspectives on the dynamic implications of uprooting and resettlement, social and psychological adjustment, long-term prospects for continued links to a migration history from Guatemala, and the development of a sense of co-ethnicity with other indigenous people of Maya descent. As the Maya struggle to find their place in a more global society, their stories of quiet courage are representative of many other ethnic groups, migrants, and refugees today. Author note: James Loucky is a Professor teaching anthropology, Latin American studies, and international studies at Western Washington University. Marilyn M.Moors is Professor emerita from Montgomery College, National Coordinator of the Guatemala Scholars Network, and an adjunct professor teaching anthropology and gender at Frostburg State University. ... Read more

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In this bracing book by one of Latin America's foremost intellectuals, Beatriz Sarlo offers a remarkably clear, forthright, and forceful statement of what precisely cultural criticism is and might be in our age of manic consumption, commercialization, popularization, and mass marketing.

As postmodernity and late capitalism reinvent culture and society, social and cultural critique must also be reinvented-and in Scenes from Postmodern Life Sarlo aims to show how this might be done. Her readings of cultural practices such as television zapping, playing video games, or trawling the shopping mall; her vignettes of traditional intellectuals and practitioners of high art; her discussions of popular culture and the dissolution of social identities: these, as well as Sarlo's own writerly stance, go a considerable way toward developing the role of thinking in global times. Taking full advantage of the fact that her native Argentina is both fully part of global culture and yet in some ways on its periphery, Sarlo shows how an off-center or decentered perspective can bring the political consequences of the culture industry into sharp relief.

As an introduction to a preeminent Latin American thinker, as a challenge to intellectuals to rethink and revitalize their critical positions, and as an instructive engagement with the politics of global culture, this book will be essential-and electrifying-reading for anyone concerned about the prospects for critical thinking in the new millennium.

Beatriz Sarlo is among the foremost Latin American literary and cultural critics. She works in Buenos Aires but has also taught at Columbia, Maryland, Berkeley, and Cambridge, and has lectured and published widely. Sarlo is the cofounder of the journal Punto de Vista and the author of many books, including Jorge Luis Borges:A Writer on the Edge.

Jon Beasley-Murray lectures in Latin American studies at the University of Manchester.

Cultural Studies of the Americas Series, volume 7 ... Read more

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This edited volume explores the experiences of minority groups within American society in the aftermath of disaster. Focusing on four minority groups, Native Americans, Asian Americans, African Americans and Latinos, contributing authors discuss the various strategies used by these groups to recover from natural and technological disasters. During the aftermath of natural and technological disasters, often times spiralling human toll, financial costs, loss of livelihoods, and communities left in disarray can often be traced to policies unsuited to the emerging scale of problems. This volume illustrates the need for policy-makers and emergency planners to develop more culturally competent approaches to implementing planning and prevention strategies within culturally responsive frameworks that ultimately maximize a group's ability to be resilient in the aftermath of disasters. The editors of this volume believe that his research contributes to the discipline of disaster studies by highlighting social groups within American society and provides insight into how a democratic society can reshape its approach to disaster mitigation in a more socially just manner. ... Read more

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In an engaging chronicle illuminated by his travels in the region, Shawn Smallman shows how the varying histories and cultures of the nations of Latin America have influenced the course of the pandemic. ... Read more

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This book brings together ten essays relating to the manner in which postcolonial research is conducted and information put forth on the representation of indigenous cultures in the Americas. It is divided into three parts: Part One describes the current state of affairs of postcolonial studies in the North American region; Part Two explores Mesoamerican culture, and Nuu Savi and Zapotec studies in particular; and Part Three looks at the Andean region. ... Read more

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This work explores how after acquiring Puerto Rico in 1898, the United States engaged in a systematic ideological conquest of the population through social science textbooks used in the public school system. ... Read more

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The essays analyze the gendered politics of state power, language, culture, history, social movements, human rights, and knowledge.

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Gender Politics in Latin America
Gender Politics in Latin America, edited by Elizabeth Dore, successfully challenges past approaches to Latin American feminist studies.The contributing authors, all left leaning, use a multi-disiplinary tactic to dispel past myths and call for a more diverse and complete approach to feminist studies.With this new method, they motivate the need to change the writing of history and to mobilize all classes of women in the name ofequality rather than survival. Although, not perfect, a good text on modern approaches to feminism in Latin America. ... Read more

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Largely absent from our history books is the social history of railroad development in nineteenth-century Mexico, which promoted rapid economic growth that greatly benefited elites but also heavily impacted rural and provincial Mexican residents in communities traversed by the rails. In this beautifully written and original book, Teresa Van Hoy connects foreign investment in Mexico, largely in railroad development, with its effects on the people living in the isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico's region of greatest ethnic diversity. ... Read more

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Creating Ourselves is a unique effort to lay the cultural and theological groundwork for cross-cultural collaboration between the African and Latino/a American communities. In the introduction, the editors contend that given overlapping histories and interests of the two communities, they should work together to challenge social injustices. Acknowledging that dialogue is a necessary precursor to collaboration, they maintain that African and Latino/a Americans need to get into the habit of engaging "the other" in substantive conversation. Toward that end, they have brought together in this collection theologians and scholars of religion from both communities. The contributors offer broadly comparative exchanges about the religious and theological significance of various forms of African American and Latino/a popular culture, including representations of the body, literature, music, television, visual arts, and cooking.

Corresponding to a particular form of popular culture, each section features two essays, one by an African American scholar and one by a Latino/a scholar, who each also provide short responses to the other's essays. The essays and responses are lively, varied, and often personal. One contributor puts forth a "brown" theology of hip hop that celebrates hybridity, contradiction, and cultural miscegenation. Another analyzes the content of the message transmitted by African American evangelical preachers who have become popular sensations through television broadcasts, video distribution, and Internet promotions. The other essays include a theological reading of the Latina body, a consideration of the "authenticity" of representations of Jesus as white, a theological account of the popularity of telenovelas, and a reading of African American ideas of paradise in one of Toni Morrison's novels. Creating Ourselves helps to make popular culture available as a resource for theology and religious studies and for facilitating meaningful discussions across racial and ethnic boundaries.

Contributors. Teresa Delgado, James H. Evans Jr., Joseph De León, Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, Angel F. Méndez Montoya, Alexander Nava, Anthony B. Pinn, Mayra Rivera, Suzanne E. Hoeferkamp Segovia, Benjamin Valentin, Jonathan L. Walton, Traci C. West, Nancy Lynne Westfield, Sheila F. Winborne ... Read more