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Provides a brief account of major historical trends in the Philippine political economy. It begins by examining the character of the economic elite that emerged during the country's integration into the world economy in the nineteenth century. It focuses particular attention on the period since 1986 and argues that political and institutional factors are central to understanding the uneven and often lagging character of Philippine economic performance. Four political regimes have been surveyed, each with its notable strengths and weaknesses: (1) Aquino's “modest revolution;” (2) Ramos administration characterized as one of “building reform momentum;” (3) the “flawed experiment” of the Estrada administration; and (4) the “dilemma of normalcy” under the Macapagal–Arroyo administration.

This chapter first provides an overview of the history of Sino-Philippine relations, noting the strong improvement during Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s term as president from 2001-2010. It uses each president’s annual State of the Nation Address (SONA) as well as data on the number of state visits to and from China to illustrate the relative strength of these relations over time. The chapter then provides evidence that, despite much closer relations with the Arroyo administration, major investments from China agreed to by Arroyo were halted due to strong domestic opposition. Given the Philippine’s relatively democratic institutions, opposition in the courts, the legislature, the media, and civil society was able to force the administration to halt these Chinese projects and end efforts at cooperation between the two governments in the South China Sea. The chapter also presents the Philippines case against Chinese claims and activities in the South China Sea before the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague, which the Philippines instituted partially due to the inability of ASEAN to act collectively regarding the disputes. It concludes by noting efforts of Rodrigo Duterte’s administration to improve relations with China but suggests that these too may be hampered by domestic political opposition.

Examines arts culture in the Arroyo Seco from the Arts and Crafts movement colony of the “Arroyo Culture” to the contemporary NELA art scene. It chronicles the major figures of this bohemia which waned with the decline of the region during decades of suburban outmovement and white flight. The significance of art collectives in the revival of the Northeast Los Angeles art scene is discussed, with Chicano(a)/Latino(a) art collectives emerging in the 1970s and white artists through the Arroyo Arts Collective in the 1980s. The central figures and themes of the Latino/a arts renaissance are explored in depth. The contributions of the arts to community development and cultural revitalization are identified. Finally the growing role of arts entrepreneurs in economic development is discussed, with reflections from arts leaders on the gentrification process and their growing role in local politics and cultural policy

This chapter presents the osteobiography of a middle-aged woman from Arroyo Hondo Pueblo, a Pueblo IV Late Prehistoric site near Santa Fe, New Mexico. Permanent bone deformation due to early childhood rickets presented physical challenges as residual rickets to this woman throughout her life. The author discusses notions of physical impairment and “disability” as they may have been perceived by the inhabitants of this late prehistoric village.

Chapter 6 argues that the middle class see themselves as besieged not just territorially but electorally. On the one hand, they see the poor as political dupes, able to be fooled and bought by unscrupulous politicians. On the other, they see themselves as possessing moral authority over the poor by virtue of their greater education and autonomy from political inducements. They see themselves, in short, as possessing a greater right to govern. The problem is, they are outnumbered and thus, in an electoral system, outvoted in cases of candidates whose appeal cuts along class lines. The chapter shows how a situation of electoral siege has informed their political calculations with respect to both the populist president Joseph Estrada and his successor Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. It highlights the frustration many middle-class informants feel toward democracy.

The focus of this chapter is a recently discovered archaeological site, Arroyo Piedras Azules, located on the northern Pacific coast of Jalisco, Mexico. Excavated materials provide considerable information about the colonization of this area by Aztatlán groups in the Early Postclassic period, as well as the nature of the expansion of the Aztatlán phenomenon in West Mexico. Based on the data thus far obtained from the site, the authors offer five significant conclusions regarding the development and the spread of the Aztatlán archaeological culture in West Mexico, concerning the timing of development, subsistence strategies of Pacific coastal groups, the nature of Aztatlán expansion, specialized production, and links between the Arroyo Piedras Azules site to the Mixteca-Puebla area.

For the opening week of the new Philharmonic Hall at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in 1962, Barber composed a piano concerto in honor of the 100th anniversary of his publisher. The concerto was tailored to the technical prowess and individual style of John Browning, reflecting the Russian influence of his piano teacher Rosina Lhévinne. The second movement was a reworking of an earlier piece, Elegy, written for Manfred Ibel, a young art student and amateur flute player, to whom Barber dedicated his piano concerto. This chapter details Barber’s compositional process and influences for each movement of the concerto and describes the enthusiastic reception of the debut performance. Nearing completion of the concerto, Barber was invited to Russia as the first American composer ever to attend the biennial Congress of Soviet Composers, where he freely discussed his compositional philosophy and methods. For the concerto, Barber won his second Pulitzer Prize and the Annual Award of the Music Critics Circle of New York. His second composition for the opening season of Lincoln Center was Andromache’s Farewell, for soprano and orchestra. Based on a scene from Euripides’s The Trojan Women, the piece displayed deep emotional expression and striking imagery. With a superior opera singer, Martina Arroyo, singing the solo part, the success of Andromache’s Farewell presaged Barber’s opera Antony and Cleopatra.

It is one of the great ironies of history—equine and human—that the continent on which the horse was born was also the continent on which it died out. For after more than 40 million years, sometime between 12,000 and 7,600 years ago, the last truly wild horse in North America was no more. And yet, as it turned out, that animal’s last breath marked not an end, but only a hiatus, one that ended when Columbus—on his second trans-Atlantic voyage—brought horses to the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. This chapter therefore looks at four interrelated questions: the initial arrival of people in the Americas over 13,000 years ago; the variety of horses that they encountered there; how far their interactions with those horses contributed to the latter’s extinction; and how the horse returned to North America following Columbus’s voyage. When, where, and how people first arrived in the Americas remain some of archaeology’s most hotly contested topics, but we do know that horses were there to welcome them. Before considering how these two different mammals—the bipedal newcomer and the quadrupedal native—interacted, we need to answer the questions with which this paragraph began. Almost certainly humans entered the Americas from Siberia: early settlers in the western Pacific reached no further east than the Solomon Islands, while arguments that eastern North America was reached from Europe by Upper Palaeolithic hunters moving by boat and across ice around the North Atlantic fly in the face of both technology and chronology. But if the ancestors of Native Americans did indeed arrive in the New World from Asia (something that all genetic analyses of both modern and ancient populations confirm), when and how did they do so? Until recently the archaeological consensus—especially among Anglophone scholars in North America—was that this occurred around 13,000 years ago and was effected by people taking advantage of the globally depressed sea levels of the Last Ice Age to cross the Bering Straits when they formed part of a much broader landmass, Beringia.

Modern-day deforestation in the southern Yucatán peninsular region began in earnest in the late 1960s. The composition of the region’s forest and options for land uses, however, were partly shaped by eighty years of activity leading up to the 1960s, just as it was by the ancient Maya over a millennium ago (Ch. 2). Most of the modern impacts began in the twentieth century and are traced here through three major episodes of use and occupation of the region: forest extraction, 1880–1983; big projects and forest clearing, 1975–82; and land-use diversification, conservation, and tourism, 1983 to the present. Each episode corresponds to different visions of how the region should be used and to different human–environment conditions shaping the kind, location, and magnitude of land change. Understanding these changing conditions underpins all other assessments of the SYPR project. The episode of forest extraction spans the bulk of the modern history of the region. It began in the late nineteenth century and ended with the demise of parastatal logging companies in the 1970s and early 1980s, due primarily to the depletion of reserves of mahogany and Spanish cedar throughout the region. Before this episode fully expired, a new one, that of big projects and forest clearing began, marked by large-scale rice and cattle schemes undertaken in the mid to late 1970s and early 1980s. This episode accelerated the road construction that began in the latter part of the 1960s, and it witnessed expanded settlement linked to colonization programs. The Mexican debt crisis of 1982 brought this episode to an abrupt halt, triggering the search for a new alternative to developing the frontier. This search, made in the context of neoliberal economic reforms, led to the establishment of the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in 1989 and other, more recent initiatives, defining the most recent episode of land-use diversification, conservation, and tourism. From the collapse of the Classic Maya civilization to the twentieth century, the occupation of the region was sparse (Turner 1990), the forest serving as a refuge during the colonial period for those Maya fleeing Spanish domination along the coasts and in the north, especially during the Caste War of the middle nineteenth century, when the northern Maya revolted against Mexico (Jones 1989).

The total area of agricultural systems in tropical Mexico increased by 64 per cent from 1977 to 1992—a mean annual deforestation rate of 1.9 per cent (Cairns et al. 2000). In all likelihood, this rate has continued for the past ten years. Dry tropical forest covers 8 per cent of Mexico and is subject to conversion for agricultural use (Trejo and Dirzo 2000). Because the southern Yucatán contains the largest contiguous block of dry tropical forest in Mexico and Central America, understanding the biogeochemical consequences of land-use change there is important for effective national and international conservation and development efforts. Over the past four decades the southern Yucatán peninsular region has undergone an increasing amount and intensity of land use (Chs. 3, 9, 10). These land uses, many focused on swidden practices, alter the structure and function of forested lands and often generate new feedbacks in terms of subsequent human use. Consequently, a major goal in assessing regional environmental change is to understand how biogeochemical processes respond to land-use change, emphasizing the potential of a human-dominated landscape to sustain continued human use. One of the greatest challenges in these studies is to untangle the effects of environmentally induced variation from, for example, climate, geology, or natural disturbance, from that induced by human activity. In the SYPR project the approach to this challenge has been to investigate variation in ecosystem processes in several study sites across the dominant environmental gradients while focusing on the influence of local, human-controlled factors within a given area. In the southern Yucatán peninsular region annual precipitation increases by more than 50 per cent over a distance of 120km. Median annual precipitation varies from about 900mm in the northern part of the study area to about 1,400mm in the southern part. This dramatic gradient overlies a seasonal pattern shared by all sites regardless of their total annual precipitation. Rainfall is highly variable, with a pronounced dry period lasting from four to six months, depending on latitude. The range in precipitation observed in the study area encompasses approximately 50 per cent of the variation in precipitation of dry tropical forests worldwide (Murphy and Lugo 1986).

After maize, the commercial cultivation of jalapeño chili (Capsicum annuum L.; henceforth, jalapeño or chili) is the most important land use in the southern Yucatán peninsular region in terms of the numbers of farmers engaged in the practice and the total area devoted to it. Chili surpasses all other land uses in the way that it ties the region to the national economy and the way that it has altered household economies and land use. Open-backed semi-trailers and large pick-up trucks crowd the paved roads of the region between October and the end of January laden with large bags of jalapeños taken on the way to central gathering areas and, ultimately, the central wholesale market in Mexico City (Fig. 10.1). The flow of chili at this time is so large that even the casual observer would have little problem concurring with Uc Reyes’s (1999: 4.24) claims that ‘su cultivo [chile] constituye la más importante fuente de ingreso para los productores hortícolas de la entidad, además es generador de empleos para los trabajadores del campo.’ (Its cultivation constitutes the most important source of income for horticultural producers, and generates jobs for field workers.) The spread of the jalapeño describes how farmers adopt new crops, change their agriculture, and ultimately change their livelihood. It also teaches how land covers—forest, savanna, and farm field—can travel a new trajectory over a relatively short period of time, changing not only the way a region or landscape looks but the way it is viewed (Gudeman 1978; Watts and Goodman 1997). These changes began in 1975 when colonizing farmers arrived from a traditional chili-growing zone—the Chiapas/Veracruz border—and introduced its commercial cultivation. After the first year they recruited national intermediaries or middlemen (in Spanish: coyote) to purchase and transport their product to the national market in Mexico City. Observing the success of the first jalapeño pioneers, other smallholders began to adopt the practice. Today, the south-central portion of the study region is called the zonas chileras (chile-growing zones); about 85 per cent of the smallholders there cultivate chili on as much as 7,500ha, usually on small plots, about 1.5ha on average (mean = 1.42 ha).