Sex hormones significantly impact women's lives. Throughout the different stages of life, from menarche to menopause and all stages in between, women experience dramatic fluctuations in the levels of progesterone and estradiol, among other hormones. These fluctuations affect the body as a whole, including the central nervous system (CNS). In the CNS, sex hormones act via steroid receptors. They also have an effect on different neurotransmitters such as GABA, serotonin, dopamine, and glutamate. Additionally, studies show that sex hormones and their metabolites influence brain areas that regulate mood, behavior, and cognitive abilities. This review emphasizes the benefits a proper hormonal balance during the different stages of life has in the CNS. To achieve this goal, it is essential that hormone levels are evaluated considering a woman's age and ovulatory status, so that a correct diagnosis and treatment can be made. Knowledge of steroid hormone activity in the brain will give women and health providers an important tool for improving their health and well-being.

Throughout the 20th century, US public health and immigration policies intersected with and informed one another in the country's response to Mexican immigration. Three historical episodes illustrate how perceived racial differences influenced disease diagnosis: a 1916 typhus outbreak, the midcentury Bracero Program, and medical deportations that are taking place today. Disease, or just the threat of it, marked Mexicans as foreign, just as much as phenotype, native language, accent, or clothing. A focus on race rendered other factors and structures, such as poor working conditions or structural inequalities in health care, invisible. This attitude had long-term effects on immigration policy, as well as on how Mexicans were received in the United States.

This article looks at restaurants as urban forms of public space in which ethnic entrepreneurs act as place-makers. The author highlights El Nayarit, a Mexican restaurant in the Echo Park section of Los Angeles, from 1947 to the present, as a nucleus of a community where racial, ethnic, class, and generational boundaries were breached. This restaurant and its spin-off enterprises also helped to define the neighborhood as ethnic space. In contrast, urban redevelopment and gentrification, beginning in the 1990s, have resulted in erasure of the area’s history and the sense of space in which ethnic identity and multiethnic bonds were once fostered.

This article traces challenges to Mexicans' legal and racial status by various groups, including federal bureaucrats, nativist organizations, and everyday citizens. Early twentieth-century efforts to make Mexicans ineligible for U.S. citizenship, despite provisions in the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, focused on the premise that Mexicans were neither "black" nor "white"; interest groups and politicians both strove instead to categorize Mexicans as "Indian." These efforts intensified after the 1924 Immigration Act and two Supreme Court decisions, Ozawa v. United States (1922) and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), which declared Japanese and Asian Indians ineligible for citizenship because they were not white. Underlying U.S. efforts to resolve Mexican immigration and citizenship issues was the ongoing problem of determining who could be considered white; this concern clashed with positive Mexican understandings of mestizaje.

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