Learning Capitalist Culture: Deep in the Heart of Tejas

by Douglas E. Foley

Book Overview

Building on the author's thirty-six years of experience with North Town, this second edition of Learning Capitalist Culture presents an updated ethnographic study of the small, economically depressed, predominantly Mexican American south Texas town. Like many communities in the Southwest, North Town has undergone significant cultural and political change since the late 1960s, when the Chicano civil rights movement emerged and challenged...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812220986
• ISBN13: 9780812220988
• Release Date: July 2010
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

deserves a wider audience

I'm amazed this book only has two reviews. It's a valuable work that's not just meaty, but highly readable. Foley offers a new model for engaged ethnography, where he is present throughout the story but not center stage. This book set me on my own career path -- it's a classic, and deserves to be.

Terrific ethnographic work on a much ignored region

Do not let the stale title fool you here. Foley employs some wonderful ethnographic, qualitative research methods in this piece of work. Foley disobeys the old, archaic rules of the social sciences, in that he leaves his objectivitiy behind and immerses himself into the city of North Town (a mythical name). Texas is much more than Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. The author shows us another side of the state. Foley focuses on the South Texas region and its much too often ignored Mexican American population. Many people do not realize the old, colonized treatment that Mexican Americans are still subjugated to and Foley makes a point of writing about this in his text. In addition to being an ethnographic account of the socially inequities that exist between the dominant Anglo population and the subordinate Mexican American population in North Town, this book is also an analysis and critique of an educational system. Foley demonstrates how the educational system in North Town perpetuates inequality and tracks its young people to take their assigned role in society according to their socioeconomic status and their ethnic background. Learning Capitalist Culture is a book for those not only interested in the social sciences, but those of us interested in research techniques and methodological approaches that are new, exciting, and part of a new kind of social science model.

Very Good

Doug Foley wrote a very food account of a small town in this book. It is an ethnographic, and fuliflls that part. Mostyl the book discusess the race relation of the poor town, and delves into the politics that make such a racial divide possible. I highly recommend it!