Latino Immigrant Narratives from Maryland

Despite the intensive work conducted by scholars to capture and preserve the memories of Latino immigrants in the Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and Chicago metro areas, relatively little is known about the history and experiences of this immigrant group living in the Washington metro area, home to twelve of the top sixty Latino communities in the nation.62 Currently, there are 906,000 Latinos living in the region.63 This paper showcases some of the perspectives of Latino immigrants through oral history interviews conducted by students in two undergraduate history courses offer at Montgomery College (MC)64 : “History of Latinos in the US” and “Latin American History.” Students in these classes are required to identify immigrant community members and to request their cooperation for being interviewed. The process of collecting, creating, and preserving the life stories of these immigrants stimulates a keen interest in how both place of origin and historical experience inform the lives of immigrants. It gives the students too the opportunity to understand the impact of the past on immigrant experience and to gain an understanding of immigrants’ aspirations, hopes, and fears as well as their positive contributions to American society and culture. During the course of a semester, students conduct, transcribe, and construct oral histories and compose brief, one-page reflections on their interviews. Specifically, students document how their assumptions about the historical immigrant experience have changed as a result of their participation in this oral history project. The transcripts generated by these students represent original and relevant primary sources contributing an understanding of how the past is prologue for American immigrants going forward and foster an appreciation of the immigrant presence among us

Co-word Analysis using the Chinese Character Set

Until recently, Chinese texts could not be studied using co-word analysis because the words are not separated by spaces in Chinese (and Japanese). A word can be composed of one or more characters. The online availability of programs that separate Chinese texts makes it possible to analyze them using semantic maps. Chinese characters contain not only information, but also meaning. This may enhance the readability of semantic maps. In this study, we analyze 58 words which occur ten or more times in the 1652 journal titles of the China Scientific and Technical Papers and Citations Database. The word occurrence matrix is visualized and factor-analyzed

Transmigrate between planes of existence. Disnesting the Mythologiques from Northwest Mexico

Entre sociedades amerindias del noroeste mexicano, la muerte de una persona produce un equívoco y un vínculo indebido entre el fallecido y su colectivo de origen; el equívoco debe solucionarse y el vínculo disolverse. Morir implica el inicio de un “Gran viaje” por parte la persona fallecida. Sus parientes y amigos deben trabajar en conjunto para ayudarla a transmigrar a un nuevo plano de existencia. El objetivo de este artículo es describir algunos aspectos de estos rituales para establecer conexiones de transformación con dos pasajes de las Mitológicas de Lévi-Strauss. Por un lado, evocaré el mito de referencia y el ritual asociado y, por otro, remitiré a la vida breve tratada en Lo crudo y lo cocido. Veremos cómo los rituales –con sus propias plasticidades– administran un arbitraje imposible que permite construir la buena distancia entre relaciones indebidas creando conexiones y desconexiones en distintos planos de existencia.In the Mexican Northwest among Amerindian societies, the death of a person produces an equivocal and an improper link between the deceased and his or her group of origin; the misunderstanding must be resolved, and the link dissolved. Dying implies the beginning of a “Great voyage” by the deceased person and their relatives and friends must work together to help them transmigrate to their new plane of existence. The objective of this article is to describe aspects of these rituals to establish connections and transformations with two passages treated in the Mythologiques of Lévi-Strauss: I will evoke the reference myth and its associated ritual, as well as the theme of the brief life dealt with in The Raw and the Cooked. We will see how the rituals -with their own plasticities- manage an impossible arbitration that allows to build the good distance between improper relationships, creating connections and disconnections on different planes of existence.Entre sociedades amerindias del noroeste mexicano, la muerte de una persona produce un equívoco y un vínculo indebido entre el fallecido y su colectivo de origen; el equívoco debe solucionarse y el vínculo disolverse. Morir implica el inicio de un “Gran viaje” por parte la persona fallecida. Sus parientes y amigos deben trabajar en conjunto para ayudarla a transmigrar a un nuevo plano de existencia. El objetivo de este artículo es describir algunos aspectos de estos rituales para establecer conexiones de transformación con dos pasajes de las Mitológicas de Lévi-Strauss. Por un lado, evocaré el mito de referencia y el ritual asociado y, por otro, remitiré a la vida breve tratada en Lo crudo y lo cocido. Veremos cómo los rituales –con sus propias plasticidades– administran un arbitraje imposible que permite construir la buena distancia entre relaciones indebidas creando conexiones y desconexiones en distintos planos de existencia