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Admiration and resentment of America are deeply rooted in the political traditions of the United States' nearest neighbors. As in other parts of the world, resentment has been on the rise in recent years. This paper distinguishes in its first part between critical opinion, skepticism, and prejudice on the one hand, and different types of anti-Americanism on the other. In the paper's next two parts, these general categories are confronted with data from Canada and Mexico and the dramatically different historical trajectories in the evolution of anti-Americanism in these two countries. In the fourth and final section, the paper seeks to identify commonalities, if any, in these radically different political settings. The expected finding is that even in close proximity to the United States, we find a plurality of different types of anti-Americanisms, a condition that characterizes world politics more generally. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As post-neo-liberal scholars have pointed out, social investment targeting risk groups has become the focus of social spending by states in many countries around the world, and children, given their inherent potential, have increasingly become the focus of state investments aimed at enhancing their future integration into the market economy. This paper details the results of two case studies which examine the regulation of motherhood in very different contexts where neo-liberal techniques target investment in children. In Canada recent campaigns have urged mothers to invest heavily in their children during their early years in order to enhance brain development and future market success. In Mexico, the state-sponsored anti-poverty programme aims to increase children?s human capital development through the educational system as a way to ensure the future insertion of rural Mexicans into the market economy. The results of in-depth interviews with mothers in southern Ontario and rural Mexico are compared and while the there are many class-based and cultural differences in the experiences of these mothers, there are also some surprising similarities in terms of the effects of a social investment framework on the regulation of motherhood. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]