A painter and poet, Desirée Alvarez engages with the powerful forces of lyric and rhythm to create a collection that moves across time and place. Inspired by Lorca’s passionate cante jondo, or “deep song,” and her own family history with Andalusian flamenco, Alvarez weaves together a time-travelling epic that searches through myth, culture, and nature for the roots of identity. Navigating both her Latina and European heritage through works by artists of the ancient Americas and Spain, Alvarez maps intersections between personal and political history. Searching narratives both fictitious and real, Raft of Flame includes imagined conversations between a conquistador and an Olmec sculpture, between Frida Kahlo and Velazquez, and between The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy and Glinda the Good Witch.

In Raft of Flame, Alvarez constructs and fleshes out a fantastic narrative of personal and cultural history, offering glimpses into the art, history, and land that comprise her story. Her narrative explores how both nature and human populations continue to be trapped in the violence of colonialism. Vivid lyrics interrogate the complexities of mixed race, digging the dualities, upheavals, and casts of characters that underly Alvarez’s identity.

Raft of Flame won Omnidawn's 2018 Lake Merritt Prize. 

Raúl R. Salinas is regarded as one of today's most important Chicano poets and human rights activists, but his passage to this place of distinction took him through four of the most brutal prisons in the country. His singular journey from individual alienation to rage to political resistance reflected the social movements occurring inside and outside of prison, making his story both personal and universal.

This groundbreaking collection of Salinas' journalism and personal correspondence from his years of incarceration and following his release provides a unique perspective into his spiritual, intellectual, and political metamorphosis. The book also offers an insider's view of the prison rebellion movement and its relation to the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The numerous letters between Salinas and his family, friends, and potential allies illustrate his burgeoning political awareness of the cause and conditions of his and his comrades' incarceration and their link to the larger political and historical web of social relations between dominant and subaltern groups. These collected pieces, as well as two interviews with Salinas—one conducted upon his release from prison in 1972, the second more than two decades later—reveal to readers the transformation of Salinas from a street hipster to a man seeking to be a part of something larger than himself. Louis Mendoza has painstakingly compiled a body of work that is autobiographical, politically insurgent, and representative.

A race-based oppositional paradigm has informed Chicano studies since its emergence. In this work, Sandra K. Soto replaces that paradigm with a less didactic, more flexible framework geared for a queer analysis of the discursive relationship between racialization and sexuality. Through rereadings of a diverse range of widely discussed writers—from Américo Paredes to Cherríe Moraga—Soto demonstrates that representations of racialization actually depend on the sexual and that a racialized sexuality is a heretofore unrecognized organizing principle of Chican@ literature, even in the most unlikely texts. Soto gives us a broader and deeper engagement with Chican@ representations of racialization, desire, and both inter- and intracultural social relations.

While several scholars have begun to take sexuality seriously by invoking the rich terrain of contemporary Chicana feminist literature for its portrayal of culturally specific and historically laden gender and sexual frameworks, as well as for its imaginative transgressions against them, this is the first study to theorize racialized sexuality as pervasive to and enabling of the canon of Chican@ literature. Exemplifying the broad usefulness of queer theory by extending its critical tools and anti-heteronormative insights to racialization, Soto stages a crucial intervention amid a certain loss of optimism that circulates both as a fear that queer theory was a fad whose time has passed, and that queer theory is incapable of offering an incisive, politically grounded analysis in and of the current historical moment.

A dynamic and philosophical debut collection, Daniel Ruiz’s Reality Checkmate choreographs the endless wrestling match between lyrical sensibility and ontological principles taking place on the mind’s stage. These poems exquisitely demonstrate that phenomena in the material world are rarely as simple as they seem and yet must continually confront the universe’s countermove—the constraints of life itself, the knowledge that all we truly have is the present moment and the face value of our perceptions. He succinctly summarizes the history of art as cultural capital—“all of us are / eternally punished with proving / literature is about literature // after all”—while revealing the redundancies and blind spots of intellectualism—“Meanwhile, a lost sheep / finds grass to eat // anywhere it wants, / and does not mind, / like Lorca, letting its hair // grow long.” While Reality Checkmate delights in the cerebral mode, its celebration of relativity as well as the lush materiality of language yields equal imagery and musicality, upholding sensory experience and human relationships as existentially significant in the absence of absolute truths. In Ruiz’s astonishing first book, dawn is not morning—or rather, not merely morning. “Madrugada” rejects a navel-gazing discourse on sentimentality and the passage of days, commanding that “you for whom meaning / is the meaning of beauty, be gone.” We could spend our whole lives ideating a metaphysics of time and waste the wonder of sunlight right in front of us. “Meanwhile, / the clouds are proud of all of us. It’s 12:01. / A man dragged by a poodle says / Good morning. Everyone in the orchestra / stands up at once.”
 

Rebel Dance, Renegade Stanceshows how community music-makers and dancers take in all that is around them socially and globally, and publicly and bodily unfold their memories, sentiments, and raw responses within open spaces designated or commandeered for local popular dance. Umi Vaughan, an African American anthropologist, musician, dancer, and photographer "plantao" in Cuba—planted, living like a Cuban—reveals a rarely discussed perspective on contemporary Cuban society during the 1990s, the peak decade of timba, and beyond, as the Cuban leadership transferred from Fidel Castro to his brother. Simultaneously, the book reveals popular dance music in the context of a young and astutely educated Cuban generation of fierce and creative performers.

By looking at the experiences of black Cubans and exploring the notion of "Afro Cuba," Rebel Dance, Renegade Stanceexplains timba's evolution and achieved significance in the larger context of Cuban culture. Vaughan discusses a maroon aesthetic extended beyond the colonial era to the context of contemporary society; describes the dance spaces of Cuba; and examines the performance of identity and desire through the character of the "especulador." This book will find an audience with musicians, anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, interdisciplinary specialists in performance studies, cultural studies, and Latin American and Caribbean studies, as well as laypeople who are interested in Atlantic/African and African American/Africana studies and/or Cuban culture.

2023 Outstanding Book Award​, National Association for Ethnic Studies
2024 Finalist, Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, College Art Association
2024 Best Arts Book, Empowering Latino Futures’ International Latino Book Awards
2025 Ewell L. Newman Book Award, American Historical Print Collectors Society

How Latinx artists around the US adopted the medium of printmaking to reclaim the lands of the Americas.

Printmakers have conspired, historically, to illustrate the maps created by European colonizers that were used to chart and claim their expanding territories. Over the last three decades, Latinx artists and print studios have reclaimed this printed art form for their own spatial discourse. This book examines the limited editions produced at four art studios around the US that span everything from sly critiques of Manifest Destiny to printed portraits of Dreamers in Texas.

Reclaiming the Americas is the visual history of Latinx printmaking in the US. Tatiana Reinoza employs a pan-ethnic comparative model for this interdisciplinary study of graphic art, drawing on art history, Latinx studies, and geography in her discussions. The book contests printmaking’s historical complicity in the logics of colonization and restores the art form and the lands it once illustrated to the Indigenous, migrant, mestiza/o, and Afro-descendant people of the Americas.

A landmark in Brazilian music scholarship, A Respectable Spell introduces English-speaking readers to the rich history of samba from its nineteenth century origins to its emergence as a distinctive genre in the 1930s. Merging storytelling with theory, Carlos Sandroni profiles performers, composers, and others while analyzing the complex ideologies their music can communicate in their lyrics and rhythms, and how the meaning of songs and musical genres can vary depending on social and historical context. He also delves into lundu, modinha, maxixe, and many other genres of Brazilian music; presents the little-heard voices and perspectives of marginalized Brazilians like the African-descended sambistas; and presents a study in step with the types of decolonial approaches to ethnomusicology that have since emerged, treating the people being studied not only as makers of music but also of knowledge.

Incisive and comprehensive, A Respectable Spell tells the compelling story of an iconic Brazilian musical genre.

Rupert García: The Making of an American Artist, a Testimonio is a compelling story of a working-class Mexican American from California’s Central Valley who became a major American artist with national and international recognition. Mario T. García’s oral history of Rupert García, based on extensive interviews over many years, provides a compelling autobiographical narrative of the life and times of an American artist. This testimonio places Rupert García’s art in historical perspective, spanning his beginnings in Stockton, California and his time in the Air Force, including participating in the U.S. war in Vietnam, to his experience at San Francisco State during the historic San Francisco State student strike in 1968-69. Influenced by history and politics, Rupert García’s art speaks to a changing America through the eyes of an artist, speaking to issues of race, class, imperialism, war, and the role of the artist in society.