“In Avocado Dreams, Ana Patricia Rodríguez offers a needed perspective on Salvadoran invisibility, identity, and place-making in Washington, D.C. As such, her book fruitfully complicates existing paradigms within Central American studies rooted in the diasporic experiences of predominantly mestizo Salvadoran/Central American populations in California and/or the Southwest.”—Yajaira M. Padilla, author of Changing Women, Changing Nation: Female Agency, Nationhood, and Identity in Trans-Salvadoran Narratives

“The theorization of the aguacatero/a as a racial sign is brilliant and sophisticated and appropriately responds to the problematics of a Black/white binary as well as to the enduring limitations of the concept of mestizaje. The book enacts a geographical shift, contributing to a necessary examination of cultural production from a translocal perspective, centering on the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. Throughout her study, Rodríguez excels at necessarily engaging with the history and politics that inform the works she studies and enacting an impressively multidisciplinary analysis that considers linguistic, agricultural, and etymological movement and migration; at the same time, the book remains focused on the art and artists themselves.”—Ariana E. Vigil, author of Public Negotiations: Gender and Journalism in Contemporary US Latina/o Literature

"Avocado Dreams provides a much-needed examination of an underrepresented community within Latino studies generally and American studies more broadly. Important to this work is that Rodríguez’s study is not born out of dehumanized, sanitized documents and statistics but instead from the arts. Doing so shifts the narrative about Salvadoran communities by emphasizing the criticality with which people are considering their positions and their histories, and challenging attempts at erasure."—Robert Hurtado, Latino Studies