front cover of A Queer Mother For The Nation
A Queer Mother For The Nation
The State And Gabriela Mistral
Licia Fiol-Matta
University of Minnesota Press, 2002

Chilean writer Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), the first Latin American to win theNobel Prize for Literature, was a poetic idol for generations of Latin Americans who viewed her as Womanhood incarnate, the national schoolteacher-mother. How this distinctly masculine woman who never gave birth came to occupy this role, and what Mistral’s image, poetry, and life have to say about the relations-and realities-of race, gender, and sexual politics in her time, are the questions Licia Fiol-Matta pursues in this book, recreating the story of a woman whose misrepresentation is at least as intriguing, and as instructive, as her fame.

A Queer Mother for the Nation weaves a nuanced understanding of how Mistral cooperated with authority and fashioned herself as the figure of Motherhood in collaboration with the state. Drawing on Mistral’s little-known political and social essays, her correspondence and photographs, Fiol-Matta reconstructs Mistral’s relationship to state politics. Her work questions the notion of queer bodies as outlaws, and insists on the many ways in which queer subjects have participated in and sustained the normative discourses they seem to rebel against

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A Quiet Victory for Latino Rights
FDR and the Controversy Over "Whiteness"
Patrick D. Lukens
University of Arizona Press, 2012

In 1935 a federal court judge handed down a ruling that could have been disastrous for Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and all Latinos in the United States. However, in an unprecedented move, the Roosevelt administration wielded the power of "administrative law" to neutralize the decision and thereby dealt a severe blow to the nativist movement. A Quiet Victory for Latino Rights recounts this important but little-known story.

To the dismay of some nativist groups, the Immigration Act of 1924, which limited the number of immigrants who could be admitted annually, did not apply to immigrants from Latin America. In response to nativist legal maneuverings, the 1935 decision said that the act could be applied to Mexican immigrants. That decision, which ruled that the Mexican petitioners were not "free white person[s]," might have paved the road to segregation for all Latinos.

The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), founded in 1929, had worked to sensitize the Roosevelt administration to the tenuous position of Latinos in the United States. Advised by LULAC, the Mexican government, and the US State Department, the administration used its authority under administrative law to have all Mexican immigrants—and Mexican Americans—classified as "white." It implemented the policy when the federal judiciary "acquiesced" to the New Deal, which in effect prevented further rulings.

In recounting this story, complete with colorful characters and unlikely bedfellows, Patrick D. Lukens adds a significant chapter to the racial history of the United States. 

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front cover of The Quotable Abigail Adams
The Quotable Abigail Adams
Abigail Adams
Harvard University Press, 2009

John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail that her letters “give me more entertainment than all the speeches I hear. There is more good Thoughts, fine strokes and Mother Wit in them than I hear in the whole Week. An Ounce of Mother Wit is worth a Pound of Clergy.” The Quotable Abigail Adams invites you to enjoy Abigail Adams’s wit and wisdom on a wide range of subjects, drawn from writings throughout her lifetime. Abigail shared her penetrating and often humorous observations with correspondents ranging from friends and neighbors to family members to heads of state, offering lively opinions on human nature, politics, culture, and family life. Selected and arranged by topic, these quotations provide an entertaining introduction to the thought and character of America’s founding mother. They are accompanied by a biographical introduction, source notes, chronology, and a comprehensive index, making this book the primary resource for those meeting this remarkable woman for the first time as well as for her longtime admirers.

“The Service of this Government is not a Bed of Roses, in any department of it.”

“A Nation which does not respect itself, cannot expect to receive it from others.”

“Gentlemen are not half as particular as the Ladies are in their details.”

“No woman of sense will ever make her Husband an object of Ridicule; for in proportion as she lowers him she lessens herself.”

“A woman may forgive the man she loves an indiscretion, but never a neglect.”

“There is no musick sweeter in the Ears of parents, than the well earned praises of their children.”

“Better is a little contentment than great Treasure; and trouble therewith.”

“Time, which improves youth, every year furrows the brow of age."

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