Considers the role of beauty in Costa Rican sex work. While Costa Rica's national mythology has long focused on claims to white origins, sex tourists identify local women's ‘exoticism’ and non-whiteness as particularly appealing. Explores how women experience and manage their sexual attractiveness to foreign tourists in their daily lives and work.
Interviews Afro-Costa Rican writer Quince Duncan. Discusses the lack of critics who are familiar with Black literature in Costa Rica; asks Duncan to compare North American and Latin American criticism of his work, asks Duncan about his latest projects and the direction of his work; and compares Duncan's work with that of Alejo Carpentier and Manuel Zapata Olivella. Also touches upon language usage, the theme of literature of combat, and Duncan's future plans.;
Los Angeles, CA: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Foreword by R.S. Bryce-Laporte., 197 p, Presents an anthropological analysis of the West Indians' adjustment in Costa Rica over a hundred-year period. The book also looks at the development of the inequality that occurred as Blacks, who initially saw themselves as superior to local Hispanics, later found themselves at the mercy of a Hispanic cultural hegemony. An important contribution to the anthropology of West Indians in the Caribbean's Hispanic borderlands, the book is rich in its observations on race, class, & mobility among West Indian immigrants & lays the foundation for comparison with other such immigrant communities in other areas of the Americas.
Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have spread throughout Latin America and beyond based on the claim that they are an effective social policy tool to combat poverty. Gender relations are shaped by these policies. Recognizes the potential for CCTs to transform gender relations should mechanisms allowing childcare facilities and encouraging male participation in domestic labor become an integral part of these programs.
