I have worked at the intersection of psychology and culture for some time, and my work tends to be deeply psychological rather than sociological in character. In No Dancin' in Anson (Jason Aronson, 1995) I chronicled the experience of a West Texas community that had been transformed by the Civil Rights era, having once been almost exclusively White (prior to 1965) and now finding itself with a population that was over a third Mexican-American. I have also published chapters related to culture and the experience of immigration (see "Cultural Mourning: Vignettes from the Mexican immigrant experience", in Crossings: Mexican Immigration in Interdisciplinary Perspectives Suarez-Orozco, Ed. Harvard University Press, 1998; and "The plasticity of culture and psychodynamics and psychosocial processes in Latino immigrant families" in Latinos: Remaking America. Suarez-Orozco, M. & Paez, M. Eds. UC Press, 2002). More recently, I have studied the impact of a racial murder (the 1998 killing of James Byrd, Jr. in Jasper, Texas) on a Texas community (see. Ainslie, R.C. & Brabeck, K., 2003) "Race murder and community trauma: Psychoanalysis and Ethnography in exploring the impact of the killing of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas" Journal of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society. Vol 8:1, pp 42-51; and, Ainslie, R.C., & Hall, E. (2004). "Community resilience and grassroots leadership: Serendipity in the wake of a race murder." Mind and Human Interaction.
I have also engaged these topics through documentary film and photographic exhibits. In my documentary 1999 film, "Crossover: A story of desegregation," I addressed issues of cultural conflict and transformation by examining the impact of school desegregation on the community of Hempstead, Texas. Similarly, in a collaboration with a documentary photographer I developed a photographic exhibit describing the impact of the murder of James Byrd on Jasper, in East Texas. “Looking North: Mexican Images of Immigration” is a 2006 documentary film exploring how Mexicans view this powerful social phenomenon, and “Ya Basta” is a 2007 documentary film exploring the causes of the wave of kidnappings and other crime that have swept over Mexico in the last decade.

Quotes


"Ricardo Ainslie has done a brilliant job of analyzing the social change in America by looking at the conflict in a single small Texas town over the freedom to dance. Ainslie takes the reader into their hearts of the citizens of Anson, who are struggling, like all Americans, with racial conflict and religious divisiveness. This book is amusing, generous, and at times profoundly surprising."
-Lawrence Wright
staff writer, THE NEW YORKER

"Ricardo Ainslie has put the life and times and the true humanity of a small town between the covers of this book. Rarely has a community been so carefully-and so lovingly-dissected. Just as Thomas Hardy does his novels, Ainslie shows that life in small towns is as complicated and rich in nuance and drama as life in the most sophisticated cities. It's just that in places as remote as Anson, Texas and in books as fine as Dr. Ainslie's, we can best see and understand individuals struggling with change, with differences among people, and with themselves."
-Gregory Curtis
Editor in Chief, TEXAS MONTHLY

"With 'No Dancin In Anson', Dr. Ricardo Ainslie establishes himself as a formidable theoretician whose observations on the intertwining of internal and external worlds and intergenerational processes pertaining to immigration and acculturation are as insightful as they are interesting. As added inducement, however, as he describes the drama of mexican-americans who settled in the west Teas town of Anson, Ainslie offers up a golden prose that reads like pure fiction. As the demographics on the United States shift, mental health providers and those involved in social agencies need to understand the psychological and social ramifications of cultural transformation. This delightful book fits the bill and would also be a wonderful classroom textbook on the psychology of multiculturalism."
-Vamik Volkan, M.D.
Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction.