Hispanics/Latinos are the largest ethnic minority in the United States—but they are far from being a homogenous group. Mexican Americans in the Southwest have roots that extend back four centuries, while Dominicans and Salvadorans are very recent immigrants. Cuban Americans in South Florida have very different occupational achievements, employment levels, and income from immigrant Guatemalans who work in the poultry industry in Virginia. In fact, the only characteristic shared by all Hispanics/Latinos in the United States is birth or ancestry in a Spanish-speaking country.

In this book, sixteen geographers and two sociologists map the regional and cultural diversity of the Hispanic/Latino population of the United States. They report on Hispanic communities in all sections of the country, showing how factors such as people's country/culture of origin, length of time in the United States, and relations with non-Hispanic society have interacted to create a wide variety of Hispanic communities. Identifying larger trends, they also discuss the common characteristics of three types of Hispanic communities—those that have always been predominantly Hispanic, those that have become Anglo-dominated, and those in which Hispanics are just becoming a significant portion of the population.

Between 1900 and the late 1950s, Mexican border towns came of age both as tourist destinations and as emerging cities. Commercial photographers produced thousands of images of their streets, plazas, historic architecture, and tourist attractions, which were reproduced as photo postcards. Daniel Arreola has amassed one of the largest collections of these border town postcards, and in this book, he uses this amazing visual archive to offer a new way of understanding how the border towns grew and transformed themselves in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as how they were pictured to attract American tourists.

Postcards from the Río Bravo Border presents nearly two hundred images of five significant towns on the lower Río Bravo—Matamoros, Reynosa, Nuevo Laredo, Piedras Negras, and Villa Acuña. Using multiple images of sites within each city, Arreola tracks changes both within the cities as places and in the ways in which the cities have been pictured for tourist consumption. He makes a strong case that visual imagery has a shaping influence on how we negotiate and think about places, creating a serial scripting or narrating of the place. Arreola also shows how postcard images, when systematically and chronologically arranged, can tell us a great deal about how Mexican border towns have been viewed over time. This innovative visual approach demonstrates that historical imagery, no less than text or maps, can be assembled to tell a compelling geographical story about place and time.

Winner, John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize, Association of American Geographers

On the plains between the San Antonio River and the Rio Grande lies the heartland of what is perhaps the largest ethnic region in the United States, Tejano South Texas. In this cultural geography, Daniel Arreola charts the many ways in which Texans of Mexican ancestry have established a cultural province in this Texas-Mexico borderland that is unlike any other Mexican American region.

Arreola begins by delineating South Texas as an environmental and cultural region. He then explores who the Tejanos are, where in Mexico they originated, and how and where they settled historically in South Texas. Moving into the present, he examines many factors that make Tejano South Texas distinctive from other Mexican American regions—the physical spaces of ranchos, plazas, barrios, and colonias; the cultural life of the small towns and the cities of San Antonio and Laredo; and the foods, public celebrations, and political attitudes that characterize the region. Arreola's findings thus offer a new appreciation for the great cultural diversity that exists within the Mexican American borderlands.