istence of a mosaic of Maya polities under- going decline, survival, and transforma- tion somewhat analogous to processes taking place towards the end of the Roman Empire. The collaborative effort made in producing this volume has allowed Maya scholars to achieve new levels of interpre- tation and a greater understanding Maya prehistory. El Paso: Local Frontiers at a Global Crossroads. Victor M. Ortíz-González, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. xl + 172 pp. Josiah McC. Heyman University of Texas at El Paso This book, together with a variety of other works, signals the maturation of the an- thropology of the U.S.-Mexico border. Ini- tially, the subject was marked by two tendencies, each of them extreme. One was simple, naive empiricism, the collecting of exotic details about a new cultural region, with the interesting hook that two cultures were “meeting.” The other was radical the- oretical speculation based on impressions, sometimes on direct or indirect life experi- ence, but without systematic ethnographic inquiry. Theoretical treatments often pos- tulated a privileged cultural space of hy- bridity and of resistance to dominant cultural orders (Mexico and U.S.); such works were quite aware of violence and suffering, but lacked a clear sense of the complexities and difficulties of hybrid so- cial and cultural life in a region with ex- treme inequalities and powerful national police agencies. Ortíz-González puts for- ward his work as a synthesis of the best of both tendencies—the empiricism from one side, the sophisticated questions about the remaking of culture from the other— and he progresses significantly in this di- rection. He justly criticizes much border theory for ignoring inequality, suffering, and limitations imposed on peoples’ lives. Perhaps he overstates his distinctiveness in taking these positions, a forgivable flaw in an author asserting the agenda of a book, but on the whole, his book lives up to its billing. Ortíz-González draws his theoretical framework from the heterodox Marxist urban geographer Henri Lefebvre who identifies three moments in the spatial process: the activities as “spatial practices,” ideas about space as “representations of space,” and social experiences occuring in “represented space” composed of (and re- composing) those representations and practices (1991:31, 38). This is a very ab- stract perspective, of course, but it is useful for studying El Paso, Texas, a large U.S.- side border city, because it allows us ex- plore carefully various ideas, stances, and forms of agency in border spaces, rather than crushing the border experience into a simplistic theoretical image, either night- mare of the global future or hybridized cultural paradise. However, the spatial focus of the book heavily is on the U.S. side, and there is fairly little on Mexican- side or binational social movements, ex- cept for human rights activism in immigration and border crossing. The central concern of this work is the lack of control that El Paso exerts over its future in the face of globally mobile capital and nation states with distant centers of power.Yet the people of the city do not take this passively. Case studies of varied social- political movements, from radical organiz- ers of displaced workers to business development visionaries, all of whom at- tempt to reverse this power imbalance, constitute the ethnographic core of the 484 The J ournal of L atin A merican A nthropology