Product details
Biographical note
A former meat cutter and truck driver, as well as a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award, Mike Davis's many books include Set the Night on Fire, Planet of Slums, and Late Victorian Holocausts. He lives in San Diego.Another contemporary classic of urban studies from Davis. A wake-up call for anyone who cares about the future of American cities.
Kirkus Reviews
Fans of Mike Davis's slash-an-burn prose and take-no-prisoners credo will not be disappointed ... His new book about citified Latinos serves up more helpings of the elegant muckraking that thrilled the readers of <i>City of Quartz</i> and <i>Ecology of Fear</i>.
- Andrew Ross, Bookforum
Ricky Martin, Sammy Sosa, Jennifer Lopez, Christina Aguilera - something is happening to American popular culture. Mike Davis pulls together the startling facts, identifies the underlying trends and...brings his characteristic energy, eye for detail and exhaustive research to bear on an important phenomenon that remains mostly unexplored.
- Jon Wiener, In These Times
A non-romantic, optimistic view of the role Latinos will play in revitalizing dead urban areas and a dying American Left.
San Francisco Bay Guardian
This well-researched, well-written book is driven by powerful feelings of indignation at the hardships Latinos are suffering in the United States today.
Washington Post Book World
A CONTEMPORARY CLASSIC, Magical Urbanism focuses on how Latinos are attempting to translate their urban demographic ascendancy into effective social power. Mike Davis chronicles the Dickensian underworld of day labor in New York, tracks the development of new ecologies and levels of development along the border, and examines the shifting realities of life and work for Latinos in US cities. The cosmopolitan result of the Latinization of America's cities "is a rich, constantly evolving" culture that has the potential, argues Davis, to become a radical new American counterculture.
1 Spicing the City
2 Buscando América
3 Siamese Twins
4 ¿Cuántos Mas?
5 The Latino Metropolis
6 Tropicalizing Cold Urban Space
7 The Third Border
8 The Devil's Rancho
9 Fabricating the "Brown Peril"
10 Transnational Suburbs
11 Falling Down
12 The Puerto Rican Tragedy
13 Education Ground Zero
14 Disabling Spanish
15 Who Will Feed the Dragon?
16 Broken Rainbows
17 Uprising of the Million
Notes
Index