Parenting Empires

“In this brilliant ethnography, Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas invites us into the intimate worlds of parents and children in two affluent enclaves to listen carefully to conversations about ordinary things: nature, yoga, Eastern spirituality, mindfulness, government corruption, austerity, and sovereignty. She astutely and sensitively shows us how to read the mundane worlds of childrearing as imperial formations that are recasting hierarchies of race and class in very unequal societies under the shadow of U.S. empire.” - Laura Briggs, author of Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico

“This ambitious and fascinating book connects the interior lives, affects, and childrearing practices of urban elites in Brazil and Puerto Rico to their spatial environments, interpersonal relationships, and national and international political and discursive contexts. Based on rich ethnography in an understudied field, Parenting Empires makes a strong contribution to research on elites and will be of interest to people working on a broad range of issues from class, race, and identity to parenting, urban studies, and development.” - Rachel Sherman, author of Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence

"This book makes a significant contribution to various aspects of Latin American studies, reproductive sociology, critical whiteness studies and critical race theory, to name only a few." - R. Sánchez-Rivera, Patterns of Prejudice

"Parenting Empires reveals that a strategy for governability in subject populations is to cultivate the imperial core's likeness in them, or at least in the key elite. I recommend this high-end science for students and scholars of social/racial stratification, political economy, and Latin Americanists of all stripes." - Stanley Bailey, American Journal of Sociology

“Agile, informed, and engaging prose.... Where Parenting Empires reveals itself as a trail-blazing text within critical race studies in Latin America is in the author’s knack for picking up, and keenly reflecting, on the anxiety and uncertainty that sit at the root of white identities.” - Guillermo Rebollo Gil, CENTRO

"Brimming over with insightful analyses, memorable fieldwork, and instigating arguments, Parenting Empires is a pathbreaking monograph on the workings of race and class privilege among Latin American upper classes." - Maureen E. O'Dougherty, Anthropos

"This is an ethnography that adds to current literature on Latin America analyzing the rise of the far right by turning to the ways in which the elite justify white privilege and the implementation of austerity measures in the continent through ideas around parenting. It also provides a critical analysis of upper-class parents and their everyday lives, demonstrating how moral ideas about child-rearing and consumption are utilized to justify and solidify deep seeded racial, gendered, and class inequality in both Puerto Rico and Brazil." - Juliana B. Valente, Anthropology Book Forum

"Parenting Empires thus examines how a concrete neoliberal parenting subjectivity promotes peculiar forms of aspirations, languages, scientific narratives, and an emphasis on spiritual cultivation that morally underpinned an imperial expansion. This book demonstrates how ideas about morality and austerity practices turn extreme wealth and racial inequalities into deserving and legitimate privilege conditions." - Hugo Ceron-Anaya, Journal of Latin American Caribbean Anthropology