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767 books match the query 'Hispanic & Latino Studies' and 44 start with b

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Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes

The Ambivalence of Mexican American Identity in Literature and Film

Juan J. Alonzo

University of Arizona Press, 2009

Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes is a comparative study of the literary and cinematic representation of Mexican American masculine identity from early twentieth-century adventure stories and movie Westerns through contemporary self-representations by Chicano/a writers and filmmakers. In this deeply compelling book, Juan J. Alonzo proposes a reconsideration of the early stereotypical depictions of Mexicans in fiction and film: rather than viewing stereotypes as unrelentingly negative, Alonzo presents them as part of a complex apparatus of identification and disavowal. Furthermore, Alonzo reassesses Chicano/a self-representation in literature and film, and argues that the Chicano/a expression of identity is characterized less by essentialism than by an acknowldgement of the contingent status of present-day identity formations.

Alonzo opens his provocative study with a fresh look at the adventure stories of Stephen Crane and the silent Western movies of D. W. Griffith. He also investigates the conflation of the greaser, the bandit, and the Mexican revolutionary into one villainous figure in early Western movies and, more broadly, traces the development of the badman in Westerns. He newly interrogates the writings of Américo Paredes regarding the makeup of Mexican masculinity, and productively trains his analytic eye on the recent films of Jim Mendiola and the contemporary poetry of Evangelina Vigil.

Throughout Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes, Alonzo convincingly demonstrates how fiction and films that formerly appeared one-dimensional in their treatment of Mexicans and Mexican Americans actually offer surprisingly multifarious and ambivalent representations. At the same time, his valuation of indeterminacy, contingency, and hybridity in contemporary cultural production creates new possibilities for understanding identity formation.

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Bandits, Captives, Heroines, and Saints

Cultural Icons of Mexico’s Northwest Borderlands

Robert McKee Irwin

University of Minnesota Press, 2007

Bandits, Captives, Heroines, and Saints investigates cultural icons of the late nineteenth century from Mexico’s largely unstudied northwest borderlands, present-day Sonora, Baja California, and western Chihuahua. Robert McKee Irwin looks at popular figures such as Joaquín Murrieta, the gold rush social bandit; Lola Casanova, the anti-Malinche, whose marriage to a Seri Indian symbolized a forbidden form of mestizaje; and la Santa de Cabora, a young faith healer who inspired armed insurgencies and was exiled to Arizona.

Cultural icons such as Murrieta, Lola Casanova, and la Santa de Cabora are products of intercultural dialogue, Irwin reveals, and their characterizations are unstable. They remain relevant for generations because there is no consensus regarding their meanings, and they are weapons in struggles of representation in the borderlands. The figures studied here are especially malleable, he argues, because they are marginalized from the mainstream of historiography.

A timely analysis, Bandits, Captives, Heroines, and Saints challenges current paradigms of border studies and presents a rich understanding of the ways in which cultural icons influence people’s minds and lives.

Robert McKee Irwin is associate professor of Spanish at the University of California, Davis, and the author of Mexican Masculinities (Minnesota, 2003).

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Barrio Libre

Criminalizing States and Delinquent Refusals of the New Frontier

Gilberto Rosas

Duke University Press, 2012

The city of Nogales straddles the border running between Arizona and Sonora, Mexico. On the Mexican side, marginalized youths calling themselves Barrio Libre (Free 'Hood) employ violence, theft, and bribery to survive, often preying on undocumented migrants who navigate the city's sewer system to cross the US-Mexico border. In this book, Gilberto Rosas draws on his in-depth ethnographic research among the members of Barrio Libre to understand why they have embraced criminality and how neoliberalism and security policies on both sides of the border have affected the youths' descent into Barrio Libre.

Rosas argues that although these youths participate in the victimization of others, they should not be demonized. They are complexly and adversely situated. The effects of NAFTA have forced many of them, as well as other Mexicans, to migrate to Nogales. Moving fluidly with the youths through the spaces that they inhabit and control, he shows how the militarization of the border actually destabilized the region and led Barrio Libre to turn to increasingly violent activities, including drug trafficking. By focusing on these youths and their delinquency, Rosas demonstrates how capitalism and criminality shape perceptions and experiences of race, sovereignty, and resistance along the US-Mexico border.

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Baseball as Mediated Latinidad

Race, Masculinity, Nationalism, and Performances of Identity

Jennifer Domino Rudolph

The Ohio State University Press, 2020

In her incisive study Baseball as Mediated Latinidad: Race, Masculinity, Nationalism, and Performances of Identity, Jennifer Domino Rudolph analyzes major league baseball’s Latin/o American players—who now make up more than twenty-five percent of MLB—as sites of undesirable surveillance due to the historical, political, and sociological weight placed on them via stereotypes around immigration, crime, masculinity, aggression, and violence. Rudolph examines the perception by media and fans of Latino baseball players and the consumption of these athletes as both social and political stand-ins for an entire culture, showing how these participants in the nationalist game of baseball exemplify tensions over race, nation, and language for some while simultaneously revealing baseball as a practice of latinidad, or pan-Latina/o/x identity, for others. By simultaneously exploring the ways in which Latino baseball players can appear both as threats to American values and the embodiment of the American Dream, and engaging with both archival research and new media representations of MLB players, Rudolph sheds new light on the current ambivalence of mainstream American media and fans towards Latin/o culture.

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Beautiful Politics of Music

Trova in Yucatán, Mexico

Gabriela Vargas-Cetina

University of Alabama Press, 2017

An exploration into the history and practice of trova, a genre of music that is the soul of Yucatán.

Yucatecan trova is a music genre comprising a type of romantic song that is considered “the soul of Yucatán and Yucatecans.” This first book on Yucatecan trova offers an insider’s view of the history and practice of a treasured cultural heritage. A central theme of Gabriela Vargas-Cetina’s ethnography is what she refers to as the “beautiful politics of music” practiced by Yucatecan trova patrons and organizations, which is a way of asserting the importance of groups and issues through nonconfrontational means.

Trova emerged on the peninsula at the end of the nineteenth century and continues to be part of the general urban soundscape in the states of Yucatán and Campeche. Until the 1920s, this music was little known outside Yucatán and became absorbed into the larger Latin American Bolero genre, making it difficult to perceive its uniqueness and relation to life in Yucatán.

Vargas-Cetina, a native Yucatecan and trova musician, offers ethnographic insight into the local music scene. With family connections, she embedded herself as a trovadora, and her fieldwork—singing, playing the guitar in a trova group, and extensively researching the genre and talking with fellow enthusiasts and experts—ensued. Trova, like other types of artistic endeavors, is the result of collaboration and social milieu. She describes the dedicated trova clubs, cultural institutions, the Yucatecan economy of agricultural exports, and identity politics that helped the music come about and have maintained it today.

Positioned in the larger context of the music of Mexico and Latin America and engaging with theories of modernity and cosmopolitanism, experimental ethnography, and the anthropology of organizations, Beautiful Politics of Music consists of rigorous scholarship. It is also a warm tribute to performers and songs that have inspired many people around the world for more than two centuries.

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Because I Don't Have Wings

Stories of Mexican Immigrant Life

Philip Garrison

University of Arizona Press, 2006

For Mexican workers, the agricultural valleys of the inland Northwest are a long way from home. But there they have established communities, settlements recent enough that it feels like these newly arrived immigrant mexicanos are pioneers, still getting used to the Anglos and to each other. This book looks at the inner lives of Mexican immigrants in a northwestern U.S. boomtown, a loose collection of families from Michoacán and surrounding states living a mere 150 miles from Canada. They are more isolated than most mexicano communities closer to home, and they endure severe winters that make life more difficult still. Neighborhoods form, dissolve, and re-form. Family members who leave may stay in touch, but friends very often simply vanish, leaving only their nicknames behind. Without a market or a plaza, residents meet at weddings, christenings, and funerals—or at the food bank.

Philip Garrison has spent most of his life in this region and shares in vivid prose tales of immigrant life, both contemporary and historical, revealing the dual lives of first-generation Mexican immigrants who move smoothly between the Yakima Valley and their homes in Mexico. And with a scholar’s eye he examines figures of speech that reflect mexicano feelings about immigrant life, offering glimpses of adaptation through offhand remarks, family spats, and town gossip.

Written with irony but bursting with compassion, Because I Don’t Have Wings features vivid characters, telling anecdotes, and poignant reflections on life, unfolding an immigrant’s world strikingly different from the one we usually read about. Adaptation, persistence, and survival, we learn, are traits that mexicano culture values. We also learn that, over time, mexicano immigrants don’t merely adapt to the culture of el norte, they transform it.

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Becoming Mexipino

Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego

Guevarra, Rudy P

Rutgers University Press, 2012

Becoming Mexipino is a social-historical interpretation of two ethnic groups, one Mexican, the other Filipino, whose paths led both groups to San Diego, California. Rudy Guevarra traces the earliest interactions of both groups with Spanish colonialism to illustrate how these historical ties and cultural bonds laid the foundation for what would become close interethnic relationships and communities in twentieth-century San Diego as well as in other locales throughout California and the Pacific West Coast.

Through racially restrictive covenants and other forms of discrimination, both groups, regardless of their differences, were confined to segregated living spaces along with African Americans, other Asian groups, and a few European immigrant clusters. Within these urban multiracial spaces, Mexicans and Filipinos coalesced to build a world of their own through family and kin networks, shared cultural practices, social organizations, and music and other forms of entertainment. They occupied the same living spaces, attended the same Catholic churches, and worked together creating labor cultures that reinforced their ties, often fostering marriages. Mexipino children, living simultaneously in two cultures, have forged a new identity for themselves. Their lives are the lens through which these two communities are examined, revealing the ways in which Mexicans and Filipinos interacted over generations to produce this distinct and instructive multiethnic experience. Using archival sources, oral histories, newspapers, and personal collections and photographs, Guevarra defines the niche that this particular group carved out for itself.

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Becoming Transnational Youth Workers

Independent Mexican Teenage Migrants and Pathways of Survival and Social Mobility

Isabel Martinez

Rutgers University Press, 2018

Becoming Transnational Youth Workers contests mainstream notions of adolescence with its study of a previously under-documented cross-section of Mexican immigrant youth. Preceding the latest wave of Central American children and teenagers now fleeing violence in their homelands, Isabel Martinez examines a group of unaccompanied Mexican teenage minors who emigrated to New York City in the early 2000s. As one of the consequences of intractable poverty in their homeland, these emigrant youth exhibit levels of agency and competence not usually assigned to children and teenage minors, and disrupt mainstream notions of what practices are appropriate at their ages. Leaving school and family in Mexico and financially supporting not only themselves through their work in New York City, but also their families back home, these youths are independent teenage migrants who, upon migration, wish to assume or resume autonomy and agency rather than dependence. This book also explores community and family understandings about survival and social mobility in an era of extreme global economic inequality.

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Beliefs and Holy Places

A Spiritual Geography of the Pimería Alta

James S. Griffith

University of Arizona Press, 1992

The region once known as Pimería Alta—now southern Arizona and northern Sonora—has for more than three centuries been a melting pot for the beliefs of native Tohono O'odham and immigrant Yaquis and those of colonizing Spaniards and Mexicans. One need look no further than the roadside crosses along desert highways or the diversity of local celebrations to sense the richness of this cultural commingling.

Folklorist Jim Griffith has lived in the Pimería Alta for more than thirty years, visiting its holy places and attending its fiestas, and has uncovered a background of belief, tradition, and history lying beneath the surface of these cultural expressions. In Beliefs and Holy Places, he reveals some of the supernaturally sanctioned relationships that tie people to places within that region, describing the cultural and religious meanings of locations and showing how bonds between people and places have in turn created relationships between places, a spiritual geography undetectable on physical maps.

Throughout the book, Griffith shows how culture moves from legend to art to belief to practice, all the while serving as a dynamic link between past and future. Now as the desert gives way to newcomers, Griffith's book offers visitors and residents alike a rare opportunity to share in these rich traditions.

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Beloved Land

An Oral History of Mexican Americans in Southern Arizona

Collected and Edited by Patricia Preciado Martin, with Photographs by José Galvez

University of Arizona Press, 2004

Doña Ramona Benítez Franco was born in 1902 on her parents' Arizona ranch and celebrated her hundredth birthday with family and friends in 2002, still living in her family's century-old adobe house. Doña Ramona witnessed many changes in the intervening years, but her memories of the land and customs she knew as a child are indelible.

For Doña Ramona as well as for countless generations of Mexican Americans, memories of rural life recall la querida tierra, the beloved land. Through good times and bad, the land provided sustenance. Today, many of those homesteads and ranches have succumbed to bulldozers that have brought housing projects and strip malls in their wake.

Now a writer and a photographer who have long been intimately involved with Arizona's Hispanic community have preserved the voices and images of men and women who are descendants of pioneer ranching and farming families in southern Arizona. Ranging from Tucson to the San Rafael Valley and points in between, this book documents the contributions of Mexican American families whose history and culture are intertwined with the lifestyle of the contemporary Southwest. These were hardy, self-reliant pioneers who settled in what were then remote areas. Their stories tell of love affairs with the land and a way of life that is rapidly disappearing.

Through oral histories and a captivating array of historic and contemporary photos, Beloved Land records a vibrant and resourceful way of life that has contributed so much to the region. Individuals like Doña Ramona tell stories about rural life, farming, ranching, and vaquero culture that enrich our knowledge of settlement, culinary practices, religious traditions, arts, and education of Hispanic settlers of Arizona. They talk frankly about how the land changed hands—not always by legal means—and tell how they feel about modern society and the disappearance of the rural lifestyle.

"Our ranch homes and fields, our chapels and corrals may have been bulldozed by progress or renovated into spas and guest ranches that never whisper our ancestors' names," writes Patricia Preciado Martin. "The story of our beautiful and resilient heritage will never be silenced . . . as long as we always remember to run our fingers through the nourishing and nurturing soil of our history." Beloved Land works that soil as it revitalizes that history for the generations to come.

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Between Race and Empire

African-Americans and Cubans before the Cuban Revolution

Lisa Brock

Temple University Press, 1998

For many black Americans, the prominence and success of black Cubans in early efforts for independence and abolition highlighted a sense of racial identity and pride, while after U.S. intervention the suppression of Afro-Cuban aspirations created a strong interest among African-Americans concerning Cuban affairs. This collection, edited by a black Cuban and a black American, traces the relations between Cubans and African-Americans from the abolitionist era to the Cuban Revolution of 1959.

The eleven essays gathered here, written by scholars from both countries, heighten our appreciation of African-Americans as international actors and challenge the notion that Cubans had little or no race consciousness. This is the first study of the world capitalist system to track the international consciousness of working peoples, peoples of color, and women. With a focus on two sets of peoples not in state power, Between Race and Empire expands our understanding of "history from below," and reflects current trends in PanAfricanist and African Diaspora studies by tracing a little-studied linkage between two peoples of African descent.

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Between the Lines

Letters Between Undocumented Mexican and Latin American Immigrants and Their Families and Friends

Larry Siems

University of Arizona Press, 1992

In the continuing U.S. debate over illegal immigration, a human face has rarely been shown. The topic has been presented as a monolithic abstraction, a creation of statistics, political rhetoric, and fear. This collection of letters between undocumented immigrants in California and their families back home reveals the other side of the story. Published for the first time in paperback, Between the Lines reveals the often poignant human drama currently being played out along the U.S.-Mexico border. The letters, presented in Spanish and English, express powerful feelings of hope, uncertainty, and fear among the undocumented travelers as they arrive in the United States and seek work, social support and legal status. The letters from their families in Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador return feelings of hope, love, and support. Translator/editor Siems provides a powerful and lyrical introductory essay that sets the stage for the letters that follow.

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Beyond Machismo

Intersectional Latino Masculinities

By Aída Hurtado and Mrinal Sinha

University of Texas Press, 2016

Long considered a pervasive value of Latino cultures both south and north of the US border, machismo—a hypermasculinity that obliterates any other possible influences on men’s attitudes and behavior—is still used to define Latino men and boys in the larger social narrative. Yet a closer look reveals young, educated Latino men who are going beyond machismo to a deeper understanding of women’s experiences and a commitment to ending gender oppression. This new Latino manhood is the subject of Beyond Machismo.

Applying and expanding the concept of intersectionality developed by Chicana feminists, Aída Hurtado and Mrinal Sinha explain how the influences of race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender shape Latinos’ views of manhood, masculinity, and gender issues in Latino communities and their acceptance or rejection of feminism. In particular, the authors show how encountering Chicana feminist writings in college, as well as witnessing the horrors of sexist oppression in the United States and Latin America, propels young Latino men to a feminist consciousness. By focusing on young, high-achieving Latinos, Beyond Machismo elucidates this social group’s internal diversity, thereby providing a more nuanced understanding of the processes by which Latino men can overcome structural obstacles, form coalitions across lines of difference, and contribute to movements for social justice.

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Beyond White Picket Fences

Evolution of an American Town

Catherine Simpson Bueker

Russell Sage Foundation, 2025

Wellesley, Massachusetts has long been considered the archetypal New England WASP community. However, as new groups moved in over the 20th and 21st centuries, Wellesley has undergone slow but consistent change, transforming into a more demographically diverse and multilayered town. In Beyond White Picket Fences, sociologist Catherine Simpson Bueker explores how Wellesley has been shaped—and continues to be shaped—by its diversity.

Drawing on interviews, archival data, and participant observations, Bueker examines how Italian, Jewish, and Chinese newcomers influenced and were influenced by the established Wellesley community. She examines the ways in which immigrant and ethnic groups assimilate, retain their cultural backgrounds, and respond to discrimination, sometimes simultaneously, and, in doing so, alter the mainstream. Some new residents responded to Wellesley by assimilating to it. They developed relationships with long-term resident neighbors, volunteered in their children’s schools, and ran for elected positions. In adapting themselves to their new community, however, they also influenced it by virtue of their distinct cultural backgrounds.

Other new residents worked to preserve their cultures by establishing ethnic-specific organizations, lobbying to have new holidays incorporated into the calendar, and hewing to their own ethnic culinary traditions. Their efforts also influenced the established community. When newcomers attempted to retain their culture by requesting ethnic-specific food items be stocked at the local grocery store, opening ethic restaurants, or renting space for a new organization, for example, they impacted the established community. New individuals and groups also responded to experiences of hostility and discrimination. Italian residents fought against attempts at school redistricting targeting them in the 1930s, Jewish residents pushed back against housing discrimination in the 1950s and 1960s, and Chinese residents responded to anti-Asian incidents in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. These groups had to engage with the larger community to rectify these injustices. Some of the changes in Wellesley have come about with little recognition or response, others have been met with resistance and anger. Whether the changes are subtle or obvious and whether new groups are embraced or resisted, the whole town is altered in an ongoing process as new groups continue to move to and settle in Wellesley.

Beyond White Picket Fences is a timely and compelling examination of the ways newcomers become part of and shape American communities.

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Beyond the Black and White TV

Asian and Latin American Spectacle in Cold War America

Benjamin M. Han

Rutgers University Press, 2020

This is the first book that examines how “ethnic spectacle” in the form of Asian and Latin American bodies played a significant role in the cultural Cold War at three historic junctures: the Korean War in 1950, the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and the statehood of Hawaii in 1959. As a means to strengthen U.S. internationalism and in an effort to combat the growing influence of communism, television variety shows, such as The Xavier Cugat Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, and The Chevy Show, were envisioned as early forms of global television. Beyond the Black and White TV examines the intimate moments of cultural interactions between the white hosts and the ethnic guests to illustrate U.S. aspirations for global power through the medium of television. These depictions of racial harmony aimed to shape a new perception of the United States as an exemplary nation of democracy, equality, and globalism.

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Beyond the Latino World War II Hero

The Social and Political Legacy of a Generation

Edited by Maggie Rivas-Rodríguez and Emilio Zamora

University of Texas Press, 2009

Maggie Rivas-Rodríguez 's edited volume Mexican Americans & World War II brought pivotal stories from the shadows, contributing to the growing acknowledgment of Mexican American patriotism as a meaningful force within the Greatest Generation. In this latest anthology, Rivas-Rodríguez and historian Emilio Zamora team up with scholars from various disciplines to add new insights. Beyond the Latino World War II Hero focuses on home-front issues and government relations, delving into new arenas of research and incorporating stirring oral histories.

These recollections highlight realities such as post-traumatic stress disorder and its effects on veterans' families, as well as Mexican American women of this era, whose fighting spirit inspired their daughters to participate in Chicana/o activism of the 1960s and 1970s. Other topics include the importance of radio as a powerful medium during the war and postwar periods, the participation of Mexican nationals in World War II, and intergovernmental negotiations involving Mexico and Puerto Rico. Addressing the complexity of the Latino war experience, such as the tandem between the frontline and the disruption of the agricultural migrant stream on the home front, the authors and contributors unite diverse perspectives to harness the rich resources of an invaluable oral history.

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Beyond the Moment

Connecting Histories of Latinx Performance and Resistance

Irene Mata

University of Texas Press, 2026

Exploring cultural resistance by creating and archiving Latinx performance art

Performance is often seen as ephemeral, a condition that seemingly reduces its activist possibilities. After all, not everyone can take part or bear witness. Beyond the Moment shows how Latinx artists have responded with a theater of dissent that endures—performance art that also documents and can itself be archived, creating opportunities for sustained solidarity and resistance.

Through close readings of works such as Coco Fusco’s multi-genre performance A Field Guide for Female Interrogators, Irene Mata theorizes what she calls “textual mentoring.” This method involves tracing previous moments of resistance, archiving the creative process itself, and transforming the performance into a pedagogical tool. By means of textual mentoring, a work like The Panza Monologues becomes a lesson in confronting systemic oppression through collaborative storytelling. Mata also shows how the 2012 No Papers, No Fear Ride for Justice, a multistate immigrant-rights action, relies on a vocabulary of refusal of movements of the past—like the Freedom Rides of the Civil Rights era—and continues its activism beyond its immediate performance context by digitally archiving its process. With an emphasis on intersectional critique, Beyond the Moment positions performance as a radical form of resistance that educates and inspires across generations and movements.

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Black behind the Ears

Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops

Ginetta E. B. Candelario

Duke University Press, 2007

Black behind the Ears is an innovative historical and ethnographic examination of Dominican identity formation in the Dominican Republic and the United States. For much of the Dominican Republic’s history, the national body has been defined as “not black,” even as black ancestry has been grudgingly acknowledged. Rejecting simplistic explanations, Ginetta E. B. Candelario suggests that it is not a desire for whiteness that guides Dominican identity discourses and displays. Instead, it is an ideal norm of what it means to be both indigenous to the Republic (indios) and “Hispanic.” Both indigeneity and Hispanicity have operated as vehicles for asserting Dominican sovereignty in the context of the historically triangulated dynamics of Spanish colonialism, Haitian unification efforts, and U.S. imperialism. Candelario shows how the legacy of that history is manifest in contemporary Dominican identity discourses and displays, whether in the national historiography, the national museum’s exhibits, or ideas about women’s beauty. Dominican beauty culture is crucial to efforts to identify as “indios” because, as an easily altered bodily feature, hair texture trumps skin color, facial features, and ancestry in defining Dominicans as indios.

Candelario draws on her participant observation in a Dominican beauty shop in Washington Heights, a New York City neighborhood with the oldest and largest Dominican community outside the Republic, and on interviews with Dominicans in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Santo Domingo. She also analyzes museum archives and displays in the Museo del Hombre Dominicano and the Smithsonian Institution as well as nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European and American travel narratives.

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Black-Brown Solidarity

Racial Politics in the New Gulf South

By John D. Márquez

University of Texas Press, 2014

Houston is the largest city in the Gulf South, a region sometimes referred to as the “black belt” because of its sizeable African American population. Yet, over the last thirty years, Latinos have become the largest ethnic minority in Houston, which is surpassed only by Los Angeles and New York in the number of Latino residents. Examining the history and effects of this phenomenon, Black-Brown Solidarity describes the outcomes of unexpected coalitions that have formed between the rapidly growing Latino populations and the long-held black enclaves in the region.

Together, minority residents have put the spotlight on prominent Old South issues such as racial profiling and police brutality. Expressions of solidarity, John D. Márquez argues, have manifested themselves in expressive forms such as hip-hop music, youth gang cultural traits, and the storytelling of ordinary residents in working-class communities. Contrary to a growing discourse regarding black-brown conflict across the United States, the blurring of racial boundaries reflects broader arguments regarding hybrid cultures that unsettle the orders established by centuries-old colonial formations. Accentuating what the author defines as a racial state of expendability—the lynchpin of vigilante violence and police brutality—the new hybridization has resulted in shared wariness of a linked fate. Black-Brown Solidarity also explores the ways in which the significance of African American history in the South has influenced the structures through which Latinos have endured and responded to expendability. Mining data from historical archives, oral histories, legal documents, popular media, and other sources, this work is a major contribution to urban studies, ethnic studies, and critical race theory.

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Blacktino Queer Performance

E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, editors

Duke University Press, 2016

Staging an important new conversation between performers and critics, Blacktino Queer Performance approaches the interrelations of blackness and Latinidad through a stimulating mix of theory and art. The collection contains nine performance scripts by established and emerging black and Latina/o queer playwrights and performance artists, each accompanied by an interview and critical essay conducted or written by leading scholars of black, Latina/o, and queer expressive practices. As the volume's framing device, "blacktino" grounds the specificities of black and brown social and political relations while allowing the contributors to maintain the goals of queer-of-color critique. Whether interrogating constructions of Latino masculinity, theorizing the black queer male experience, or examining black lesbian relationships, the contributors present blacktino queer performance as an artistic, critical, political, and collaborative practice. These scripts, interviews, and essays not only accentuate the value of blacktino as a reading device; they radiate the possibilities for thinking through the concepts of blacktino, queer, and performance across several disciplines. Blacktino Queer Performance reveals the inevitable flirtations, frictions, and seductions that mark the contours of any ethnoracial love affair.

Contributors. Jossiana Arroyo, Marlon M. Bailey, Pamela Booker, Sharon Bridgforth, Jennifer Devere Brody, Cedric Brown, Bernadette Marie Calafell, Javier Cardona, E. Patrick Johnson, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, John Keene, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, D. Soyini Madison, Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr., Andreea Micu, Charles I. Nero, Tavia Nyong'o, Paul Outlaw, Coya Paz, Charles Rice-González, Sandra L. Richards, Matt Richardson, Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, Celiany Rivera-Velázquez, Tamara Roberts, Lisa B. Thompson, Beliza Torres Narváez, Patricia Ybarra, Vershawn Ashanti Young

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Bodies at War

Genealogies of Militarism in Chicana Literature and Culture

Belinda Linn Rincón

University of Arizona Press, 2017

In the wake of U.S. military intervention abroad and collapsing domestic economies, scholars have turned their attention to neoliberalism and militarization, two ideological and material projects that are often treated as coincident, though not interdependent. Bodies at War examines neoliberal militarism, a term that signifies the complex ways in which neoliberalism and militarism interanimate each other as they naturalize dis/empowering notions of masculinity and femininity, alter democratic practices, and circumscribe the meaning of citizenship and national belonging.

Bodies at War examines the rise of neoliberal militarism from the early 1970s to the present and its transformation of political, economic, and social relations. It charts neoliberal militarism’s impact on democratic practices, economic policies, notions of citizenship, race relations, and gender norms by focusing on how these changes affect the Chicana/o community and, more specifically, on how it shapes and is shaped by Chicana bodies. The book raises important questions about the cultural legacies of war and the gendering of violence—topics that reach across multiple disciplinary fields of inquiry, including cultural and media studies. It draws attention to the relationship between war and society, to neoliberal militarism’s destructive social impact, and to the future of Latina soldiering. Through Chicana art, activism, and writing, Rincón offers a visionary foundation for an antiwar feminist politic.

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Bodies in Crisis

Culture, Violence, and Women's Resistance in Neoliberal Argentina

Sutton, Barbara

Rutgers University Press, 2010

Born and raised in Argentina and still maintaining significant ties to the area, Barbara Sutton examines the complex, and often hidden, bodily worlds of diverse women in that country during a period of profound social upheaval. Based primarily on women's experiential narratives and set against the backdrop of a severe economic crisis and intensified social movement activism post-2001, Bodies in Crisis illuminates how multiple forms of injustice converge in and are contested through women's bodies. Sutton reveals the bodily scars of neoliberal globalization; women's negotiation of cultural norms of femininity and beauty; experiences with clandestine, illegal, and unsafe abortions; exposure to and resistance against interpersonal and structural violence; and the role of bodies as tools and vehicles of political action.

Through the lens of women's body consciousness in a Global South country, and drawing on multifaceted stories and a politically embedded approach, Bodies in Crisis suggests that social policy, economic systems, cultural ideologies, and political resistance are ultimately fleshly matters.

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Border Biomes

Ecological Imaginaries of Mexico's Edges

Emily Celeste Vázquez Enríquez

Vanderbilt University Press, 2025

This book is freely available in an open-access edition thanks to the generous support by the University of California Davis Library.

What effect do heavily fortified national borders have on the natural environments that surround them? In Border Biomes, Emily Celeste Vázquez Enríquez explores this question by analyzing contemporary Mexican, Latinx, and Indigenous literature that has tried to highlight the human and ecological toll of Mexico’s borders with the United States and Guatemala. By challenging the very premise of borders as permanent, immovable boundaries, she shows how novelists and poets in Mexico and the United States have tried to represent and understand the vast social, political, and ecological harm caused by these constructions. She argues that the environmental destruction that borders create is inseparable from state‑sanctioned, anti‑immigrant racial violence. To do this, she structures the book around three main biomes: rivers, deserts, and forests. Within each chapter, Vázquez Enríquez considers how authors such as Dolores Dorantes, Natalie Diaz, and Ofelia Zepeda have drawn upon alternative Indigenous epistemologies and forms of representation to register the sweeping damage of bordering regimes on the Colorado River, the Southwest Desert, and the Selva El Petén, and other biomes. By critically analyzing the work of these US and Mexican writers, she contests traditional interpretations of Mexican literature as nationally bounded and instead proposes an expansive view of “Mexican literature.” More fundamentally, Border Biomes suggests literature's potential to create new ecological realities and challenge the naturalization of borders and the ecological violence that they provoke.

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Border Brokers

Children of Mexican Immigrants Navigating U.S. Society, Laws, and Politics

Christina M. Getrich

University of Arizona Press, 2019

Some 16.6 million people nationwide live in mixed-status families, containing a combination of U.S. citizens, residents, and undocumented immigrants. U.S. immigration governance has become an almost daily news headline. Yet even in the absence of federal immigration reform over the last twenty years, existing policies and practices have already been profoundly impacting these family units.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in San Diego over more than a decade, Border Brokers documents the continuing deleterious effects of U.S. immigration policies and enforcement practices on a group of now young adults and their families. In the first book-length longitudinal study of mixed-status families, Christina M. Getrich provides an on-the-ground portrayal of these young adults’ lives from their own perspectives and in their own words.

More importantly, Getrich identifies how these individuals have developed resiliency and agency beginning in their teens to improve circumstances for immigrant communities. Despite the significant constraints their families face, these children have emerged into adulthood as grounded and skilled brokers who effectively use their local knowledge bases, life skills honed in their families, and transborder competencies. Refuting the notion of their failure to assimilate, she highlights the mature, engaged citizenship they model as they transition to adulthood to be perhaps their most enduring contribution to creating a better U.S. society.

An accessible ethnography rooted in the everyday, this book portrays the complexity of life in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. It offers important insights for anthropologists, educators, policy-makers, and activists working on immigration and social justice issues.

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Border Contraband

A History of Smuggling across the Rio Grande

By George T. Díaz

University of Texas Press, 2015

Present-day smuggling across the U.S.-Mexico border is a professional, often violent, criminal activity. However, it is only the latest chapter in a history of illicit business dealings that stretches back to 1848, when attempts by Mexico and the United States to tax commerce across the Rio Grande upset local trade and caused popular resentment. Rather than acquiesce to what they regarded as arbitrary trade regulations, borderlanders continued to cross goods and accepted many forms of smuggling as just. In Border Contraband, George T. Díaz provides the first history of the common, yet little studied, practice of smuggling across the U.S.-Mexico border. In Part I, he examines the period between 1848 and 1910, when the United States’ and Mexico’s trade concerns focused on tariff collection and on borderlanders’ attempts to avoid paying tariffs by smuggling. Part II begins with the onset of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, when national customs and other security forces on the border shifted their emphasis to the interdiction of prohibited items (particularly guns and drugs) that threatened the state. Díaz’s pioneering research explains how greater restrictions have transformed smuggling from a low-level mundane activity, widely accepted and still routinely practiced, into a highly profitable professional criminal enterprise.

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Border Dilemmas

Racial and National Uncertainties in New Mexico, 1848–1912

Anthony Mora

Duke University Press, 2011

The U.S.-Mexican War officially ended in 1848 with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which called for Mexico to surrender more than one-third of its land. The treaty offered Mexicans living in the conquered territory a choice between staying there or returning to Mexico by moving south of the newly drawn borderline. In this fascinating history, Anthony Mora analyzes contrasting responses to the treaty’s provisions. The town of Las Cruces was built north of the border by Mexicans who decided to take their chances in the United States. La Mesilla was established just south of the border by men and women who did not want to live in a country that had waged war against the Mexican republic; nevertheless, it was incorporated into the United States in 1854, when the border was redrawn once again. Mora traces the trajectory of each town from its founding until New Mexico became a U.S. state in 1912. La Mesilla thrived initially, but then fell into decay and was surpassed by Las Cruces as a pro-U.S. regional discourse developed. Border Dilemmas explains how two towns, less than five miles apart, were deeply divided by conflicting ideas about the relations between race and nation, and how these ideas continue to inform discussion about what it means to “be Mexican” in the United States.

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Border Odyssey

Travels along the U.S./Mexico Divide

By Charles D. Thompson, Jr.

University of Texas Press, 2015

“We were trying to change the vision and the conversation about border fears.”

Border Odyssey takes us on a drive toward understanding the U.S./Mexico divide: all 1,969 miles—from Boca Chica to Tijuana—pressing on with the useful fiction of a map.

“We needed to go to the place where countless innocent people had been kicked, cussed, spit on, arrested, detained, trafficked, and killed. It would become clear that the border, la frontera, was more multifaceted and profound than anything we could have invented about it from afar.”

Along the journey, five centuries of cultural history (indigenous, French, Spanish, Mexican, African American, colonist, and U.S.), wars, and legislation unfold. And through observation, conversation, and meditation, Border Odyssey scopes the stories of the people and towns on both sides.

“Stories are the opposite of walls: they demand release, retelling, showing, connecting, each image chipping away at boundaries. Walls are full stops. But stories are like commas, always making possible the next clause.”

Among the terrain traversed: walls and more walls, unexpected roadblocks and patrol officers; a golf course (you could drive a ball across the border); a Civil War battlefield (you could camp there); the southernmost plantation in the United States; a hand-drawn ferry, a road-runner tracked desert, and a breathtaking national park; barbed wire, bridges, and a trucking-trade thoroughfare; ghosts with guns; obscured, unmarked, and unpaved roads; a Catholic priest and his dogs, artwork, icons, and political cartoons; a sheriff and a chain-smoking mayor; a Tex-Mex eatery empty of customers and a B&B shuttering its doors; murder-laden newspaper headlines at breakfast; the kindness of the border-crossing underground; and too many elderly, impoverished, ex-U.S. farmworkers, braceros, lined up to have Thompson take their photograph.

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Border People

Life and Society in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

Oscar J. Martínez

University of Arizona Press, 1994

While the U.S.-Mexico borderlands resemble border regions in other parts of the world, nowhere else do so many millions of people from two dissimilar nations live in such close proximity and interact with each other so intensely. Borderlanders are singular in their history, outlook, and behavior, and their lifestyle deviates from the norms of central Mexico and the interior United States; yet these Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and Anglo-Americans also differ among themselves, and within each group may be found cross-border consumers, commuters, and people who are inclined or disinclined to embrace both cultures. Based on firsthand interviews with individuals from all walks of life, Border People presents case histories of transnational interaction and transculturation, and addresses the themes of cross-border migration, interdependence, labor, border management, ethnic confrontation, cultural fusion, and social activism. Here migrants and workers, functionaries and activists, and "mixers" who have crossed cultural boundaries recall events in their lives related to life on the border. Their stories show how their lives have been shaped by the borderlands milieu and how they have responded to the situations they have faced. Border People shows that these borderlanders live in a unique human environment shaped by physical distance from central areas and constant exposure to transnational processes. The oral histories contained here reveal, to a degree that no scholarly analysis can, that borderlanders are indeed people, each with his or her own individual perspective, hopes, and dreams.

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Border Rhetorics

Citizenship and Identity on the US-Mexico Frontier

Edited by D. Robert DeChaine

University of Alabama Press, 2012

Undertakes a wide-ranging examination of the US-Mexico border as it functions in the rhetorical production of civic unity in the United States

A “border” is a powerful and versatile concept, variously invoked as the delineation of geographical territories, as a judicial marker of citizenship, and as an ideological trope for defining inclusion and exclusion. It has implications for both the empowerment and subjugation of any given populace. Both real and imagined, the border separates a zone of physical and symbolic exchange whose geographical, political, economic, and cultural interactions bear profoundly on popular understandings and experiences of citizenship and identity.

The border’s rhetorical significance is nowhere more apparent, nor its effects more concentrated, than on the frontier between the United States and Mexico. Often understood as an unruly boundary in dire need of containment from the ravages of criminals, illegal aliens, and other undesirable threats to the national body, this geopolitical locus exemplifies how normative constructions of “proper”; border relations reinforce definitions of US citizenship, which in turn can lead to anxiety, unrest, and violence centered around the struggle to define what it means to be a member of a national political community.

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Border Thinking

Latinx Youth Decolonizing Citizenship

Andrea Dyrness

University of Minnesota Press, 2020

Rich accounts of how Latinx migrant youth experience belonging across borders

As anti-immigrant nationalist discourses escalate globally, Border Thinking offers critical insights into how young people in the Latinx diaspora experience belonging, make sense of racism, and long for change. Every year thousands of youth leave Latin America for the United States and Europe, and often the young migrants are portrayed as invaders and, if able to stay, told to integrate into their new society. Border Thinking asks not how to help the diaspora youth assimilate but what the United States and Europe can learn about citizenship from these diasporic youth.

Working in the United States, Spain, and El Salvador, Andrea Dyrness and Enrique Sepúlveda III use participatory action research to collaborate with these young people to analyze how they make sense of their experiences in the borderlands. Dyrness and Sepúlveda engage them in reflecting on their feelings of belonging in multiple places—including some places that treat them as outsiders and criminals. Because of their transnational existence and connections to both home and host countries, diaspora youth have a critical perspective on national citizenship and yearn for new forms of belonging not restricted to national borders. The authors demonstrate how acompañamiento—spaces for solidarity and community-building among migrants—allow youth to critically reflect on their experiences and create support among one another.

Even as national borders grow more restricted and the subject of immigration becomes ever more politically fraught, young people’s identities are increasingly diasporic. As the so-called migrant crisis continues, change in how citizenship and belonging are constructed is necessary, and urgent, to create inclusive and sustainable futures. In Border Thinking, Dyrness and Sepúlveda decouple citizenship from the nation-state, calling for new understandings of civic engagement and belonging.

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Border Visions

Mexican Cultures of the Southwest United States

Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez

University of Arizona Press, 1996

The U.S.-Mexico border region is home to anthropologist Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez. Into these pages he pours nearly half a century of searching and finding answers to the Mexican experience in the southwestern United States. He describes and analyzes the process, as generation upon generation of Mexicans moved north and attempted to create an identity or sense of cultural space and place. In today’s border fences he also sees barriers to how Mexicans understand themselves and how they are fundamentally understood. From prehistory to the present, Vélez-Ibáñez traces the intense bumping among Native Americans, Spaniards, and Mexicans, as Mesoamerican populations and ideas moved northward. He demonstrates how cultural glue is constantly replenished by strengthening family ties that reach across both sides of the border. The author describes ways in which Mexicans have resisted and accommodated the dominant culture by creating communities and by forming labor unions, voluntary associations, and cultural movements. He analyzes the distribution of sadness, or overrepresentation of Mexicans in poverty, crime, illness, and war, and shows how that sadness is balanced by creative expressions of literature and art, especially mural art, in the ongoing search for space and place. Here is a book for the nineties and beyond, a book that relates to NAFTA, to complex questions of immigration, and to the expanding population of Mexicans in the U.S.-Mexico border region and other parts of the country. An important new volume for social science, humanities, and Latin American scholars, Border Visions will also attract general readers for its robust narrative and autobiographical edge. For all readers, the book points to new ways of seeing borders, whether they are visible walls of brick and stone or less visible, infinitely more powerful barriers of the mind.

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Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas

Autonomy in the Spaces of Neoliberal Neglect

Michelle Téllez

University of Arizona Press, 2021

Near Tijuana, Baja California, the autonomous community of Maclovio Rojas demonstrates what is possible for urban place-based political movements. More than a community, Maclovio Rojas is a women-led social movement that works for economic and political autonomy to address issues of health, education, housing, nutrition, and security.

Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas tells the story of the community’s struggle to carve out space for survival and thriving in the shadows of the U.S.-Mexico geopolitical border. This ethnography by Michelle Téllez demonstrates the state’s neglect in providing social services and local infrastructure. This neglect exacerbates the structural violence endemic to the border region—a continuation of colonial systems of power on the urban, rural, and racialized poor. Téllez shows that in creating the community of Maclovio Rojas, residents have challenged prescriptive notions of nation and belonging. Through women’s active participation and leadership, a women’s political subjectivity has emerged—Maclovianas. These border women both contest and invoke their citizenship as they struggle to have their land rights recognized, and they transform traditional political roles into that of agency and responsibility.

This book highlights the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as a space of resistance, conviviality, agency, and creative community building where transformative politics can take place. It shows hope, struggle, and possibility in the context of gendered violences of racial capitalism on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border.

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Borderlands Saints

Secular Sanctity in Chicano/a and Mexican Culture

Martín, Desirée A

Rutgers University Press, 2013

Winner of the 2014 Latina/o Studies Section - LASA Outstanding Book Award

In Borderlands Saints, Desirée A. Martín examines the rise and fall of popular saints and saint-like figures in the borderlands of the United States and Mexico. Focusing specifically on Teresa Urrea (La Santa de Cabora), Pancho Villa, César Chávez, Subcomandante Marcos, and Santa Muerte, she traces the intersections of these figures, their devotees, artistic representations, and dominant institutions with an eye for the ways in which such unofficial saints mirror traditional spiritual practices and serve specific cultural needs.

Popular spirituality of this kind engages the use and exchange of relics, faith healing, pilgrimages, and spirit possession, exemplifying the contradictions between high and popular culture, human and divine, and secular and sacred. Martín focuses upon a wide range of Mexican and Chicano/a cultural works drawn from the nineteenth century to the present, covering such diverse genres as the novel, the communiqué, drama, the essay or crónica, film, and contemporary digital media. She argues that spiritual practice is often represented as narrative, while narrative—whether literary, historical, visual, or oral—may modify or even function as devotional practice.

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Borderless Borders

edited by Frank Bonilla, Edwin Meléndez, Rebecca Morales and María de los Angeles Torres

Temple University Press, 2000

This new reality -- the Latinization of the United States -- is driven by forces that reach well beyond U.S. borders. It asserts itself demographically, politically, in the workplace, and in daily life. The perception that Latinos are now positioned to help bring about change in the Americas from within the United States has taken hold, sparking renewed interest and specific initiatives by hemispheric governments to cultivate new forms of relationships with emigrant communities.

Borderless Borders describes the structural processes and active interventions taking place inside and outside U.S. Latino communities. After a context-setting introduction by urban planner Rebecca Morales, the contributors focus on four themes. Economist Manuel Pastor Jr., urban sociologist Saskia Sassen, and political scientist Carol Wise look at emerging forms of global and transnational interdependence and at whether they are likely to produce individuals who are economically independent or simply more dependent. Sociologist Jorge Chapa, social anthropologist Maria P. Fernandez Kelly, and economist Edwin Melendez examine the negative impact of economic and political restructuring within the United States,especially within Latino communities. Performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena, legal scholar Gerald Torres, political scientist Maria de los Angeles Torres, and modern language specialist Silvio Torres-Saillant consider the implications -- for community formation, citizenship, political participation, and human rights -- of the fact that individuals are forced to construct identities for themselves in more than one sociopolitical setting. Finally, sociologist Jeremy Brecher, sociologist Frank Bonilla, and political scientist Pedro Caban speculate on new paths into international relations and issue-oriented social movements and organizations among these mobile populations. To supplement the written contributions, Painter Bibiana Suarez has chosen several artworks that contribute to the interdisciplinary scope of the book.

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Borderpunk

Non-Respectable Narratives of the Post-Sixties

Sophia Martínez Abbud

University of Arizona Press, 2027

The U.S.-Mexico border has long been a home to artists, poets, emos, and punks. In the clandestine undergrounds of borderlands cultural production, there lies an impulse to live below and beyond border surveillance technologies. This book is about the utopic stories that narrate this impulse and the punk literary scenes that facilitate these fabulations.

Using an innovative methodology of “scene-work”—a blend of literary analysis, queer theory, critical regionalism, and auto-ethnography—Borderpunk identifies, aggregates, and outlines the emergent genre of borderpunk cultural productions. Beginning with the post-1960s through the present, author Sophia Martínez Abbud examines how music, playlists, literature, art, and performance borderpunk narratives teach us to elide, undermine, and work against the border’s presumed authority. Through these narratives, readers become attuned to the anarchic sense of abjection that permeates the border regions and the kinds of punk subjectivities emerging from these sites of re-mediation.

Borderpunk offers scenes that refuse notions of respectability at different time periods, geographies, and scales. Following the mechanics of other narrative punk genres, such as cyberpunk or solarpunk, it sketches out the uses of “punk” as a way of being in border spaces—where abjection, relajo, and illegibility become useful tools that encourage us to divest from the norm, participate in horizontal community building, and imagine borders in radical new ways.

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Borícua Muslims

Everyday Cosmopolitanism among Puerto Rican Converts to Islam

Ken Chitwood

University of Texas Press, 2025

The stories and struggles of Puerto Rican Muslims in modern day America.

Among Puerto Rican converts to Islam, marginalization is a fact of daily life. Their “authenticity” is questioned by other Muslims and by fellow Borícua on the island and in the United States. At the same time, they exist under the shadow of US colonization and as Muslims in the context of American empire. To be a Puerto Rican Muslim, then, is to negotiate identity at numerous intersections of diversity and difference.

Drawing on years of ethnographic research and more than a hundred interviews conducted in Puerto Rico, New York, Florida, Texas, New Jersey, and online, Ken Chitwood tells the story of Puerto Rican Muslims as they construct a shared sense of peoplehood through everyday practices. Borícua Muslims thus provides a study of cosmopolitanism not as a political ideal but as a mundane social reality—a reality that complicates scholarly and public conversations about race, ethnicity, and religion in the Americas. Expanding the geography of global Islam and recasting the relationship between religion and Puerto Rican culture, Borícua Muslims is an insightful reckoning with the manifold entanglements of identity amid late-modern globalization.

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Bridging Sonic Borders

Sharina Maíllo-Pozo

University of Texas Press, 2025

2026 Creative Research Medal, Office of Research at the University of Georgia
2026 Isis Duarte Book Prize, Haiti/Dominican Republic Section, Latin American Studies Association

How music depicted in literature shapes Dominican and Dominican New Yorkers’ identities and links the homeland to the diaspora.

Music has played a large role in recent Dominican literature, whether of the island or the diaspora. Bridging Sonic Borders explores this sonic connection linking the homeland and far-flung locales—especially New York, the center of Dominican cultural production in the United States. Sharina Maíllo-Pozo argues that literary representations of popular music delineate a shared aesthetic territory for US and Caribbean Dominicans, fostering an inclusive and transnational Dominicanidad.

Examining works written in Spanish, English, and Dominicanish, Maíllo-Pozo focuses on Dominican/Dominicanyork writings that have nurtured a borderless aesthetics through their shared investment in hip-hop, jazz, blues, pop, rock, and merengue. For Dominican writers, popular music has become a way of exploring memory and nostalgia and a means of centering people rejected from hegemonic identity formation—the working class, those of African descent, rural and queer people. For example, many works focused on the life of rocker Luis “Terror” Días have emphasized the in-between identity of being both Dominican and a New Yorker. Collectively, these writings have created a space in which boundaries of nation and diaspora are revealed for their fundamental porosity.

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Bringing Aztlan to Mexican Chicago

My Life, My Work, My Art

Jose Gamaliel Gonzalez, Edited and with an Introduction by Marc Zimmerman

University of Illinois Press, 2010

Bringing Aztlán to Mexican Chicago is the autobiography of Jóse Gamaliel González, an impassioned artist willing to risk all for the empowerment of his marginalized and oppressed community. Through recollections emerging in a series of interviews conducted over a period of six years by his friend Marc Zimmerman, González looks back on his life and his role in developing Mexican, Chicano, and Latino art as a fundamental dimension of the city he came to call home. Born near Monterey, Mexico, and raised in a steel mill town in northwest Indiana, González studied art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame. Settling in Chicago, he founded two major art groups: El Movimiento Artístico Chicano (MARCH) in the 1970s and Mi Raza Arts Consortium (MIRA) in the 1980s. With numerous illustrations, this book portrays González's all-but-forgotten community advocacy, his commitments and conflicts, and his long struggle to bring quality arts programming to the city. By turns dramatic and humorous, his narrative also covers his bouts of illness, his relationships with other artists and arts promoters, and his place within city and barrio politics.

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Brown Trans Figurations

Rethinking Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Chicanx/Latinx Studies

By Francisco J. Galarte

University of Texas Press, 2021

Honorable Mention for the National Women’s Studies Association's 2021 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize
2021 Finalist Best LGBTQ+ Themed Book, International Latino Book Awards
2022 John Leo & Dana Heller Award for Best Single Work, Anthology, Multi-Authored, or Edited Book in LGBTQ Studies, Popular Culture Association
The Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize, GL/Q Caucus, Modern Language Association (MLA)
2022 AAHHE Book of the Year Award, American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education

Within queer, transgender, and Latinx and Chicanx cultural politics, brown transgender narratives are frequently silenced and erased. Brown trans subjects are treated as deceptive, unnatural, nonexistent, or impossible, their bodies, lives, and material circumstances represented through tropes and used as metaphors. Restoring personhood and agency to these subjects, Francisco J. Galarte advances “brown trans figuration” as a theoretical framework to describe how transness and brownness coexist within the larger queer, trans, and Latinx historical experiences.

Brown Trans Figurations presents a collection of representations that reveal the repression of brown trans narratives and make that repression visible and palpable. Galarte examines the violent deaths of two transgender Latinas and the corresponding narratives that emerged about their lives, analyzes the invisibility of brown transmasculinity in Chicana feminist works, and explores how issues such as transgender politics can be imagined as part of Chicanx and Latinx political movements. This book considers the contexts in which brown trans narratives appear, how they circulate, and how they are reproduced in politics, sexual cultures, and racialized economies.

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Brown in the Windy City

Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago

Lilia Fernández

University of Chicago Press, 2012

Brown in the Windy City is the first history to examine the migration and settlement of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in postwar Chicago. Lilia Fernández reveals how the two populations arrived in Chicago in the midst of tremendous social and economic change and, in spite of declining industrial employment and massive urban renewal projects, managed to carve out a geographic and racial place in one of America’s great cities. Through their experiences in the city’s central neighborhoods over the course of these three decades, Fernández demonstrates how Mexicans and Puerto Ricans collectively articulated a distinct racial position in Chicago, one that was flexible and fluid, neither black nor white.

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Building Confianza

Empowering Latinos/as Through Transcultural Health Care Communication

Dalia Magaña

The Ohio State University Press, 2021

Dalia Magaña’s Building Confianza demonstrates that effective doctor-patient communication in Spanish requires that practitioners not only have knowledge of Spanish but also have transcultural knowledge of Latino/a values and language use. Using linguistic analysis to study real-time doctor-patient interactions, Magaña probes the role of interpersonal language and transcultural competency in improving patient-centered health care with Spanish-speaking Latino/as, highlighting successful examples of how Latino/a cultural constructs of confianza (trust), familismo (family-orientation), personalismo (friendliness), respeto (respect), and simpatía (kindness) can be deployed in medical interactions. She proposes that transcultural interactions entail knowing patients’ cultural values and being mindful about creating an interpersonal connection with patients through small talk, humor, self-disclosure, politeness, and informal language, including language switching and culturally appropriate use of colloquialisms. By explicitly articulating discourse strategies doctors can use in communicating with Spanish-speaking patients, Building Confianza will aid both students and providers in connecting to communities of Spanish speakers in health care contexts and advancing transcultural competence.

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Building Sustainable Worlds

Latinx Placemaking in the Midwest

Edited by Theresa Delgadillo, Ramon H. Rivera-Servera, Geraldo L. Cadava, and Claire F. Fox

University of Illinois Press, 2022

Latina/o/x places exist as both tangible physical phenomena and gatherings created and maintained by creative cultural practices. In this collection, an interdisciplinary group of contributors critically examines the many ways that varied Latina/o/x communities cohere through cultural expression. Authors consider how our embodied experiences of place, together with our histories and knowledge, inform our imagination and reimagination of our surroundings in acts of placemaking. This placemaking often considers environmental sustainability as it helps to sustain communities in the face of xenophobia and racism through cultural expression ranging from festivals to zines to sanctuary movements. It emerges not only in specific locations but as movement within and between sites; not only as part of a built environment, but also as an aesthetic practice; and not only because of efforts by cultural, political, and institutional leaders, but through mass media and countless human interactions.

A rare and crucial perspective on Latina/o/x people in the Midwest, Building Sustainable Worlds reveals how expressive culture contributes to, and sustains, a sense of place in an uncertain era.

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