Informal Education. Sociocultural Expression. and Symbolic Meaning in Popular Immigration Music Text

One February morning as I noted the events of the primary school talent show, a sixth-grade boy belted out this song made popular in two countries by the Mexican rock group, Los Bukis. It was 1987, and I was doing fieldwork in a rural Mexican immigrant-sending community I call San Felipe, for an ethnography of families and their children who emigrated from Mexico to the United States[2

Joining the 'discretionary homeless' : a reporter's decision to live in a Walmart parking lot and what he found

textI lived eight months of my final year of graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin as a homeless person, sleeping in my car. I parked overnight at various Walmart store locations across Austin. There was a group I have come to think of as the "discretionary homeless" who also regularly parked on Walmart lots. Being a member of the discretionary homeless means living in your car and being mobile - an option that many homeless people do not enjoy. Not unlike many members of the country's struggling middle and working classes, they may have had trouble finding steady work, failed to meet payments on a mortgage or opted not to deplete their financial resources to zero. It’s unclear how big a subset such people make up of the country's 610,000 homeless but what I learned from my reporting is that there are a sizable proportion of people who have made a conscious decision to become homeless. And perhaps it is a good prism through which one can examine these discretionary homeless -- to get a sense of the logic behind their decision, and to see how they are being handled or offered help. Discretionary homeless people are not likely to come in frequent contact with city residents and will likely continue staying on Walmart parking lots. We are generally self-sufficient and usually not a nuisance -- able to blend in with everyone else on the road and in public.Journalis

Space--time torsion contribution to quantum interference phases

From the latest experimental readouts in this context an intriguing discrepancy has been elicited. Indeed, theory and experiment dissent by one per cent, and though this fact could be a consequence of the mounting of the experimental device, it might also embody a difference between the way in which gravity behaves in classical and quantum mechanics. In this work the effects, upon the interference pattern, of space--time torsion will be analyzed heeding its coupling with the spin of the neutron beam. It will be proved that, even with this contribution, there is enough leeway for a further discussion of the validity of the equivalence principle in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics.Comment: Contribution to the Proceedings of the Meeting ''Topics in Mathematical Physics, General Relativity, and Cosmology''. On the Occasion of the 75th Birthday of Jerzy F. Plebanski. CINVESTAV, September, 17th--20th, 200

Remittances, Migration and Informality in Mexico. A Simple Model

In this paper, we analyse the possible channels through which informality, remittances and migration could interact and consequently affect growth in Mexico. In order to do so, we develop a simple endogenous growth model that allows for remittances and the coexistence of the formal and informal sector in the production function. In the literature, there is no agreement regarding the effects of the informal sector on economic growth. Moreover, thanks to globalization, migration and remittances have increased significantly their macroeconomic weight, renewing interest in studying the interactions that these variables might have, especially in developing countries like Mexico, where remittances are the third source of income after oil and tourism revenues. Our model shows that remittances play a crucial role on enhancing the Mexican resource constraint, while the possibility of migration in the informal sector drains the aggregate labor force. However, the magnitude of potential remittances may offset this loss, thus having an overall positive effect on economic growth.Growth; Informal Sector; Migration; Remittances