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Research on gender violence has been conducted since the sixties. The problem has been conceptualized and documented, although not necessarily looked after. Oaxaca stands out as one of the states where women are more likely to be attacked. This paper analyzes gender violence in Ayutla, a Mixe community of Oaxaca. Data were gathered through quantitative and qualitative methods. The main results are: psychological violence is the most common one; numerous cases of incest and ravishment occur; economic violence generally involves men totally abandoning women; local and State authorities exercise institutional violence by neglecting women s charges. The paper analyzes women's discursive strategies to re-signify their rights, and a successful case of rape within marriage which strengthened the struggle for such rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is related to the anthropology of food and nutrition. The main idea is that the acts of eating or not eating express several meanings whose complexity demands a biomedical and cultural perspective. Overweight and obesity have become serious public health issues in Mexico, not only in urban areas, but in rural areas as well, where a concern with physical appearance is being detected among women. The present paper is a first approach to the subject of body perception in two different groups of women from Oaxaca: a mestizo group from the southern coastal area and an indigenous group from the "Sierra de Juárez". Their ages vary between fifteen and fifty years. It has been observed that women from the coast are more prone to overweight and obesity, hence, there is a greater concern with looking fat and they wish to be slim. There have been some cases of anorexia and bulimia detected. This is not the case with indigenous women from the Sierra. Based on the results of this study, the possibility of doing further research in this topic is discussed in order to include aspects related with body perception in future educational nutritional programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the poverty - environment relation as observed in the rural communities living next to the tourist development called Bahías de Huatulco, located to the south of Oaxaca, in the poorest zone in Southeastern Mexico. The information presented was gathered throughout five years of work of various institutions; the methodology applied was that of participative rural research and continuous improvement techniques, that allowed the conformation of work groups in which family and community members of San Isidro Chacalapa, Santa María Xadani, Petatengo and Playa Grande were involved. In the paper, variables that are affected by the poverty - environment relation are defined, and some indicators that serve to identify such relation in the work zone are described. In rural communities, the preservation of natural resources is strongly determined by conditioning factors and family behavior. In production activities, family organization for work and rural people's attitude towards change and innovation have a negative impact on the quality and quantity of the natural resources available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a review and the results of the Seminar on Regional Educational Research in Oaxaca, held in the city of Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico. The seminar, a space of academic, inter-institutional, and multidisciplinary exchange, represented initial efforts to discover and analyze collectively a set of educational research studies produ¬ced in the region on the topic of "Individual Development in the Educational Field in Contemporary Societies of South/Southeast Mexico". The presented papers offer a view of the primary theoretical concerns and methodological alternatives used, as well as the process of integrating local and regional academic networks. The review analyzes the main questions posed at the seminar, its lines of analysis, methods, and focuses of research, in order to begin to classify part of the regional production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collection of water rights and property tax are the major contributing sources in municipal finance, but most Oaxacan municipalities are organized by customs and in this form of organization not contemplates the payment of water and general public services. On the other hand, the mayors of these municipalities know that any attempt to collect this service at cost of production, generate social unrest and possible protests, making municipal palaces and departure of persons who drive these measures. These conditions causing lower tax revenues for these services, which in turn exacerbate the difficulty of improving the water distribution system, the creation and improvement of public works projects. In this sense, this paper analyzes the influence of the system of government that municipalities take on the collection of water rights in the state of Oaxaca, for it is used an econometric model that includes economic, demographic and institutional variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the effect of international migration and remittances on agricultural activities and income distribution in an indigenous community that has recently massified its international migration. Models were used to relate agricultural variables to productive, social, demographic and migration financing factors at home; also, breakdown of the Gini coefficient was used to determine the effect of income sources on the distribution of total income in the community. Information comes from a 2005 survey in 35% of the households. Results show that international migration does not affect the demand for labor in agriculture or raising livestock, but it does promote agricultural production and the recovery of abandoned land. Remittances promote the livestock industry and abandoned land reclamation, but do not affect the demand for labor or agricultural production; they also have a negative, insignificant effect on total income distribution in the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to point at the dynamic, unstable and vital character of religion that, especially in indigenous contexts, is fragmentating and remodeling in a process inscribed within a much broader context than that of unknown, accelerated and multiple social changes. The recent and steady advance of Protestantism and the transformation occurring inside Catholicism represent two sides, albeit conflictive between themselves, of the same development process: the religious phenomena is a privileged interlocutor of (post) modernity and a generator of new discourses and social practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of collective work focused on the construction of cultural mapping in the field of religion within the framework of a national research project called La formación de las ofertas culturales y sus públicos en México Siglo XX: genealogías, cartografías y prácticas culturales (FOCYP) conducted during 2001-2003 in the city of Oaxaca. The project was divided into four historical periods; the territory was delimited from data provided by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística Geografía e Informática (INEGI); and field work was employed across the observation unit to collect data and then record them in physical and electronic records that were fed into a previously constructed information system. The work involved the preparation of 5 maps and the results of the investigation showed the transformation of the religious field in the city of Oaxaca during the twentieth century, the privileged presence of Catholic churches along with the sharp rise in non-Catholic Christian churches that made possible seeing that, at least in quantity, the Catholic offer has been overcome. The above results provide an opportunity to reflect on the construction of new religious identities and their cultural implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Seasonal flu is an infectious disease under epidemiological surveillance in México since 1947. Material and Methods: We performed a retrospective cohort study in three Intensive Care Units (ICU) of Oaxaca, México, by review of patient records in a range of 18 to 70 years, infected by influenza virus A (H1N1) between March 1 and December 31, 2009. results: Forty records were reviewed. The average age of patients was 40.68 (± 11.86 years), 57.5% (23) were men and 42.5% (17) women, mean BMI was 33.34% (± 7.3). We found diabetes in 17.5%, hypertension in 10% and obesity in 60% patients. 97.5% required mechanical ventilation (MV) for 15.1 (± 11.72) days, mean 14.38 ± 11.67 days of intensive care staying and 18.88 ± 14.24 of the residence time. Mortality was 67.5%. Comparative analysis at admission and discharge showed significant differences in biochemical makers like leukocyte count and albumin, pH, PaCO2 and bicarbonate levels. Survival group showed significant differences for: MV days, intensive care and residence time as well immature forms in leukocyte count. At discharge there were significant differences in all variables except fibrinogen levels. Ventilator and blood gas parameters had not significant differences in admission, all the discharge values except bicarbonate showed significant differences. discussion: The severe community-acquired pneumonia due to influenza A (H1N1) affects young population with comorbidities such as mellitus diabetes, hypertension and obesity, but did not affect mortality. The reported mortality in this paper is similar to previous reports in México. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: the hand hygiene (HH) is the more effective and economical universal is known to prevent transmission of infectious diseases. Objective: understanding the impact of a program of continuous improvement in the process of HH in the health personnel. Methods: shadow, quantitative, prospective and longitudinal study from February 1 to September 30, 2009 at the Regional Hospital "Presidente Juarez" in Oaxaca of ISSSTE, the HH was assessed in 307 health workers, from a database that was evaluated through Rho correlation test of Spearman, with the aid of SPSS 11.5. Results: before training and provision of inputs, health personnel performed hand hygiene procedure in 189 cases (61.5%), while 79.8% did so after training and installation of toilets and hand sanitizer dispensers, liquid soap and paper towels, when an assessment was conduced two months later, 68.4% were conducted HH. At the end of the study were able to observe the program's impact in increasing the percentage of people who applied the HH: in the emergency service increased from 2 to 6%, in the surgery room from 71 to 84% in ICU from 94 to 97%, in pediatric ward from 95 to 99%, in the surgical floor from 4 to 78%, in internal medicine from 44 to 47%, in gynecology from 38 to 49%, in nursery from 89 to 92%, and outpatients from 20 to 29%. The Spearman's Rho test was significant at the three times evaluation. Conclusions: in this study, the pediatric service showed great attachment to comply with the HH, as well as ICU. This reveals that to the extent that there is more material equipment for this purpose, the greater the compliance of the measure which amounted in all services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the relevance of the genealogical method in the study of mobility of migrant farm worker families from an indigenous community of the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. The richness of the method institutionalized by Rivers is shown in the analysis of the mobility of household groups related to each other by kinship and the changes it undergoes through several generations, with reference to both where and how individual members of the groups move. In addition, the method also allows reconstruction of the networks that sustain migrants and reveal the differential roles of men and women in these migrations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the following paper, we attempt to re-evaluate the rise of complex societies in the Valley of Oaxaca based on indigenous conceptualizations of land, territory and "resources" as components within a broader Mesoamerican cosmological system. In so doing, we challenge Eurocentric theoretical models of the emergence of civilization that rely on a uniform linear progression, and we articulate an approach that seeks to integrate both material and ideological perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current knowledge about savanna vegetation in Mexico is still incomplete, and it is dominated by an ongoing debate over their natural versus anthropogenic origin. In this paper we provide a detailed structural and floristic description of the savannas of the Nizanda region (Oaxaca, S Mexico). Vegetation was sampled in 20 sites of 15 m² each (totaling 300 m²). A total of 135 morphospecies were encountered, 86 of which could be determined to species level; they were distributed in 29 families and 68 genera. Leguminosae, poaceae and asteraceae were the families with the largest taxonomic richness. Total community cover was 200.7 m², of which 69% was accounted for by grasses and sedges. Despite a clear dominance of Trachypogon spicatus (berger-parker index = 0.82), this community had a relatively large diversity (log[sub 2] shannon = 3.64). Life form spectrum showed a dominance of chamaephytes and hemicryptophytes, indicating a harsh environment. Notwithstanding the widespread occurrence of secondary vegetation and ruderal species in the region, the virtual lack of exotic species in these savannas, together with the presence of some endemics and the identity of the dominant species, strongly support the primary nature of this plant community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]