Transnational Indigenous Communities

Mixtecs are indigenous peoples from the southern Mexican states of the western portion of Oaxaca and small adjacent parts of Puebla and Guerrero. Mixtecs have been coming to the United States since the late 1970s as migrant workers. Michael Kearney became for the Mixtec migrant community in diaspora and in Oaxaca a solid ally and a critical thinker who contributed with his intellect and sometimes plain hard physical labor to the efforts of the Mixtec community to promote the fundamental human rights of all indigenous Mexicans. He played an important role in advancing the struggle of indigenous migrants by forging innovative theoretical concepts that indigenous activists appropriated to focus and advance their struggle, among them transnational indigenous community, Oaxacalifornia, and Mixtec political consciousness. In the late 1980s and early 1990s these concepts appeared strange and abstract to indigenous activists, but eventually they became cornerstones of the discourse of many activists and indigenous organizers both in the United States and Mexico and are now common coin

Questions of Identity

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/66967/2/10.1177_0308275X9501500406.pd

Association between farnesoid X receptor expression and cell proliferation in estrogen receptor-positive luminal-like breast cancer from postmenopausal patients.

The farnesoid X receptor (FXR, NR1H4), a member of the nuclear receptor superfamily of ligand-dependent transcription factors, is normally produced in the liver and the gastrointestinal tract, where it acts as a bile acid sensor. It has been recently detected in breast cancer cell lines and tissue specimens. The expression of FXR was scored (0-8) by immunohistochemistry on 204 breast cancer samples and correlated with established cancer biomarkers. Moreover, the effect of the FXR activator chenodeoxycholic acid (CDCA) was determined on cell proliferation and estrogen receptor regulation/activation in breast cancer cell lines. FXR was detected in 82.4% of samples with a high median expression score of 5. FXR expression significantly correlated with estrogen receptor (ER) expression (P = 0.009) and luminal-like markers. In ER-positive tumors, FXR expression was significantly correlated with the proliferation marker Ki-67 (P < 0.001) and the nodal status (P = 0.028), but only so in postmenopausal women, suggesting that lack of estrogens may disclose the association between FXR and cell proliferation. In vitro experiments confirmed clinical data since CDCA stimulated the proliferation of ER-positive cells only in steroid-free medium, a stimulation inhibited upon siRNA-silencing of FXR expression as well as ER blockade by antiestrogens. Moreover, co-immunoprecipitation experiments revealed that CDCA activated-FXR interacted with ER. These results suggest that ER-positive breast tumors could be stimulated to proliferate via a crosstalk between FXR and ER, particularly in a state of estrogen deprivation (menopause, aromatase inhibitors).Journal ArticleResearch Support, Non-U.S. Gov'tinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

“The Gender and Geography of Citizenship in Mexico-U.S. Transnational Spaces”

This paper proposes an approach for analyzing the gender and geography of citizenship practices in transnational social spaces in order to contribute to theorizing on state-transmigrant relations and citizenship. Drawing on feminist scholarship on citizenship I conceptualize citizenship as including formal rights and substantive citizenship practices that are exercised in relation to different levels of political authority, and in different geographic sites within transnational spaces. The approach is used to examine dynamics between Mexican state policies and programs and transmigrant organizations in Los Angeles. Using data from research on migration between Zacatecas and California, I argue that men find a privileged arena of action in transmigrant organizations and Mexican state-mediated transnational social spaces, which become spaces for practicing forms of citizenship that enhance their social and gender status. Women are excluded from active citizenship in this arena, but often practice substantive social citizenship in the United States