Women Without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity (review)

272 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Using the same format of the earlier volume , Fox and Waisbord begin with a co-authored introductory essay, followed by eleven chapters covering the media and political situations in Mexico, Central and South America. Absent from consideration is any discussion of media in Cuba, although Nicaragua, nor included in the earlier volume, is rreated in Rick Rockwell and Noreene Janus's highly informative essay, "The Triumph of the Media Elite in Postwar Central America." Rockwell also contributes a provocative chapter, "The Fox Factor," covering the media campaign that led to the historic election of Vicente Fox to the Mexican presidency in 2000. The book's tide notwithstanding, only the editors' introductory chapter direcdy addresses the nature of globalization in the region's media development . Although not breaking any new conceptual ground, the essay does present a useful picture of the implementation of market-centered policies and free-trade economics in media industries . This includes a synthesis of die new relations between local, regional, and global enterprises and the legal dimensions of global media finance. The contributing writers are at their best when synthesizing the local political contexts that have served to thwart the democratizing goals of freedom of expression of marginalized communities within various nations. The descriptions of the relation between emergent democracies and the media, as formulated around the concept of the local in Latin America, are perhaps the most valuable sections of the current volume. For Fox, Waisbord and their contributors, the local is defined through the institutional history of authoritarian regimes in various Latin American nations, governmental practices aimed at controlling the media and the assessment of public interest defined from a variety of perspectives. Of special note in this regard are Luis Peirano's narrative of the "Fujimori Decade" in Peru, John Sinclair's discussion of die "Aging Dynasties" of media moguls in Mexico and Brazil and Roberto Amarais account of "Mass Media in Brazil" which, in addition to detailing the history of the manipulation of the mass media markets in Latin Americas largest democracy, is also the only essay to discuss the status of die internet in the age of globalization. Because the editors' strategy is to focus on national media industries, the volume unavoidably reinscribes the fragmented geopolitics of Latin America onto nearly every chapter, even as, at crucial poinrs, it sketches an emerging paradigm of transnational forces beginning ro take hold in the region through new technologies. Readers might want to query these authors abour the fate of national cultures as the nature and range of transnational technologies, such as cable television and internet, progressively weaken the geographic borders of national cultures. This is a question barely hinted at by any of the authors oÃ- Latin Politics, GbbalMedia, even though, on the surface, much of the media evolution described in this volume appears to be advancing in that direction. Though lacking any theoretic discussion of the ideological implications of globalization or its impact on Latin American audiences, Latin Politics is, nonetheless, rich in descriptions of the crucial interplay between local politics and media. In many ways, this is die most valuable contribution made by die collection, as it details through a chorus of experts the maneuvers through which local political histories continue to determine, if not undermine, the potential impact of the modernization process in Latin American media. Marvin D'Lugo Clark University Women Without Class: Girh, Race, and Identity University of California Press, 2003 By Julie Bettie Women without Cbss is, at heart, an ethnography . Bettie spent an intensive year in a Central Valley Californian high school talking to senior girls in order to find out "how these young women experience and understand class differences" (7). However, Bettie's ethnographic work moves beyond a reflection of the students' own perceptions of class, ethnidty, and gender to provide compelling and innovative dieoretical condusions about rhe ways in which U.S. American ideologies—disseminated through the mass media, die public school system, the government, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 273 etc.—employ discourses that obscure class categories and their structural impositions and effects. "Class is omnipresent even as it is discursively invisible," states Bettie (201). Her...