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My research focuses on the factors determining women's work histories and their shifts among maquiladora, self-employment and household labor in northern Mexico. Using data from in-depth interviews with 20 women maquiladora workers from Northern Sonora, Mexico I explore women's life histories and their changing employment preferences. Previous research (Lim, 1990; Tiano, 1994; Fussell 2000) argues that women's employment in export processing firms offers them better more stable employment over traditional self-employment work and that women prefer maquiladora work over self-employment work. My sample includes women who have had experience both working in the maquiladoras and working for themselves in small informal enterprises. To date, no one has conducted in-depth interviews with women who fit this profile. I find that find that when subjects were young, during the late 1970s and 1980s, they opted for maquildora work. However, overtime, continuing to work in the maquiladora became more difficult, since the late 1990s women have shown no preference for maquiladora work. At this later stage in their lives, I find that unless they need the health insurance benefits, or are the sole income providers for their families, women have opted to leave factory work for self-employment. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My research closely examines the shift in Brazil's state racial policy beginning in 2001. To do this, I look at events in Rio de Janiero's State Legislative Assembly as a case study. This allows me to highlight the combination of local, national and international processes that configure the development of affirmative action policy in Brazil. I am interested in uncovering the micro-mechanisms of power that operate in Rio de Janiero's local politics as I consider these to be not that different from what happens at the national or global level. Democratic regimes operate with a logic according to which indignation and resistance should be incorporated into the system. Time and again Black Movement activists and other SMOs and activists in Brazil have complied comprehensive policies and programs to address racial and social injustice -- including land and wealth redistribution -- only to have their work transformed by state institutions and actors into policies of quotas for black Brazilians in hiring and education. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dozens of Brazilian universities recently adopted racial quotas for negros, read Afro-Brazilians, in higher education. Anyone familiar with the Brazilian context will recognize these steps as a paradigm shift in the state's approach to "race." Dominant national discourse in past decades touted a mixed-race population not beset by overt discriminatory practices. In response to this new approach, two well-defined clusters of professors in Brazil's universities authored several dueling manifestos supporting and opposing race-based affirmative action. This paper frames the debate as a culture war and delineates the contrasting historic ideologies of racialism and antiracialism that inform the racial worldviews of each academic camp. It then explores four points of contention from the manifestos that characterize their divergent perspectives. They differ in terms of 1) their images of the Brazilian nation, 2) their diagnoses of the mechanisms behind nonwhite underrepresentation, 3) their prognoses for a remedy via racial quotas, and 4) their motivations for entering the debate. At the same time, the paper locates some possible common ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]