Bøker av Jon Cruz

Do you ever wonder why the swallows migrated from the south to the north to the old Mission of San Juan Capistrano and how it all happened? This is the tale about the lost orphan hatchling who was alone, and there was no one to watch over him. Later, he was rescued by the human priest named Reverend Rafeal. Reverend Rafeal found him, and he took him to the mission of San Juan Capistrano. He raised him, fed him, and took him to the chapel. He named the hatchling Jaime.Some months later, Jaime was grown up. He was wondering what kind of bird he was and where his kind was. His best friend, Pablo the rooster, helped him to find his kind. Pablo took him to see El Muerto, the wise rattlesnake. El Muerto explained to Jaime that he must find his kind beyond the hills. Jaime flew to the hills, and he found his king. He discovered that he is the swallow! When the swallows were leaving to the south for the winter, Jaime went with them to learn their survival instincts. Later in spring, Jaime led the swallows to the north to his favorite place in the world-the old Mission of San Juan Capistrano.This story is about history of Hispanic culture, music, religion, and the science for the swallows, which are the most abundant and widely distributed bird species in the world. When you visit the San Juan Capistrano mission, you will learn the experience and the wonders of the swallows, the pioneer birds from the south to the north.

In Culture on the Margins, Jon Cruz recounts the "e;discovery"e; of black music by white elites in the nineteenth century, boldly revealing how the episode shaped modern approaches to studying racial and ethnic cultures. Slave owners had long heard black song making as meaningless "e;noise."e; Abolitionists began to attribute social and political meaning to the music, inspired, as many were, by Frederick Douglass's invitation to hear slaves' songs as testimonies to their inner, subjective worlds. This interpretive shift--which Cruz calls "e;ethnosympathy"e;--marks the beginning of a mainstream American interest in the country's cultural margins. In tracing the emergence of a new interpretive framework for black music, Cruz shows how the concept of "e;cultural authenticity"e; is constantly redefined by critics for a variety of purposes--from easing anxieties arising from contested social relations to furthering debates about modern ethics and egalitarianism. In focusing on the spiritual aspect of black music, abolitionists, for example, pivoted toward an idealized religious singing subject at the expense of absorbing the more socially and politically elaborate issues presented in the slave narratives and other black writings. By the end of the century, Cruz maintains, modern social science also annexed much of this cultural turn. The result was a fully modern tension-ridden interest in culture on the racial margins of American society that has long had the effect of divorcing black culture from politics.