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In 1977, George Lucas created a galaxy far, far away that somehow contained no Latinos. Forty-seven years later, Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor speaks unapologetically accented English as he leads a rebel cell against the Empire, Pedro Pascal’s Din Djarin anchors Disney’s flagship series, and Oscar Isaac’s Poe Dameron commands X-wing squadrons with a confidence that refuses to apologize for difference. The transformation didn’t happen by accident—it was fought for character by character, film by film, against resistance both corporate and cultural.

In Galactic Herencia, Christopher González uses personal, historical, and critical reflection to trace this long arc from erasure to visibility, examining how Latinx actors bring cultural resonance to roles in a fictional universe that never explicitly acknowledges their heritage—and what it means when so few performers must carry the hopes of so many. The book moves from the painful absences of the original trilogy through the breakthrough moments of Rogue One and The Mandalorian, to the current struggles over authentic representation in an era of franchise expansion and toxic fandom. By centering Latinx perspectives on a globally dominant franchise, Galactic Herencia makes visible the cultural work that representation does—demonstrating that genuine inclusion isn’t about quotas but about empowering stories that affirm our full humanity.

Explores how Latino gang culture mirrors the most destructive aspects of the American Dream through a look at novels and memoirs

"There’s a place for us / Somewhere a place for us." With the emergence of a rich body of literature chronicling the experiences of Latino and Latina gang members, popular understanding of this outlaw culture has advanced far beyond West Side Story. However, the diverse works discussed in this important book—ranging from the breakthrough 1967 memoir Down These Mean Streets and the crime novel Carlito’s Way to the play Zoot Suit and the World War II-era historical novel Don’t Spit on My Corner, to more recent works such as Always Running/La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. and Chicana gang narratives like Locas and Two Badges—all share with the award-winning musical a crucial discourse on nationality, citizenship, and belonging.

Following the end of the draft in 1973, the US military increasingly offered women the opportunity to transform their lives—to obtain an education, receive healthcare, provide for their families, and prove their worth to the nation. By the time the US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan at the turn of the twenty-first century, the labor of women—and Black women in particular—was critical to the military’s ability to simultaneously wage two wars. Within the context of counterinsurgencies fought amid civilian populations, the US military discovered the value of women’s gender difference as a weapon of war.

Through ethnographic and archival research with women soldiers and Marines, as well as military and government officials, Gender Is a Weapon contextualizes women’s service in Iraq and Afghanistan against the promises of liberal inclusion unfolding throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Centered on narratives of Black and Indigenous women, women of color, immigrant women, and queer women, the book analyzes the transformations of martial citizenship; the racialized language of cultural difference in the US’s revitalized counterinsurgency doctrine; the gendered performances of women in combat and civilian engagement missions; and ultimately, the irreparable injuries of body and mind with which these women returned home. The epilogue discusses the recent dismantling of DEI in the military and US government more broadly, reflecting on what we can learn from the violent history of military liberal inclusion to help us better understand our contemporary moment. By carefully attending to both the discursive construction and performative enactment of gender in militarized and securitized contexts, the book advances theoretical frames for studying gender in state militaries, militarism, and late liberalism.
 

What does it mean to center joy in a world that insists on Latinx suffering? Genealogies of Joy: The Pleasure of Latinx Literature argues that joy is not a luxury or distraction but a radical, sustaining force woven through Latinx literature and culture. From humor and food to protest, friendship, sexuality, and aging, the essays gathered here reveal joy as an embodied, communal practice—one that refuses racialized shame and imagines liberatory futures.
 
Organized into three sections—Memory, Method, and Maps—the volume traces a genealogy of joy across time and space. Contributors explore how writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Julia de Burgos, Erika Sánchez, Javier Zamora, Myriam Gurba, Aidan Thomas, and Sandra Cisneros transform grief into resilience, invert dominant narratives, and reclaim pleasure as political praxis. Whether through irreverent laughter, queer desire, culinary memory, or vulnerable resistance, Latinx authors insist that pleasure and politics are bound together.
 
Engaging affect theory, Black joy scholarship, borderlands studies, and archival studies, this collection asserts that Latinx joy resists the quantification and commodification of late-stage capitalism. At once rigorous and celebratory, Genealogies of Joy invites readers to recognize joy as a human right and a vital source of connection, creativity, and collective flourishing.

Contributors
Soffía Blystra
Norma Cantú
Margaret Cantú-Sánchez
Karina Diaz
Stephanie Fetta
Elena Foulis
Eva Maria Geicht
Leigh Johnson
Mark J. Mascia
Regina Marie Mills
Erin Murrah-Mandril
Jeannine Ortega
Nancy Ríos
Rey M. Rodríguez
Rosarito Rodríguez-González
Alexandra Rodríguez Sabogal
Karen Roybal
Bianca S. Rubalcava
Suzanne Uzzilia
Natalia Villanueva-Nieves
Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán

This book explores the experiences of Genoese immigrants in the sixteenth-century Iberian Atlantic, focusing on how they navigated issues of identity and community membership across generations and transnational movement. Moving to cities like Seville, as well as Santo Domingo and Mexico City, Genoese families encountered both tremendous opportunities and significant challenges in establishing their lives, reaching a communal apogee—the “Genoese Century”—while they faced increasing Iberian anxieties. While some found ways to integrate into Iberian society through religious and charitable activities, retaining references to their Genoese past, others dissimulated or renounced their Genoese identity. Through a combination of notarial and inquisition records, litigation to prove nobility (hidalguía) and purity of blood (limpieza de sangre), literary narratives, and funerary monuments, Richard Ibarra provides insights into the changing identity claims of Genoese families and the broader attitudes toward foreigners in Iberian society that reached beyond perceived religious and ethnic difference. 
 

An interpretive history of Asian American independent media since the 1960s

Asian American filmmakers and video artists have created a substantial, diverse, and challenging body of work that reimagines the cultural and political representation of Asian Americans. Yet much of this work remains unknown.

Questions traditional assumptions about power and agency in slave women’s everyday lives.

Through their open defiance, women like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth had a significant impact on the institution of slavery. But what of the countless other women who did not commit public or even private acts of resistance? Are their stories worthy of our attention? While some scholars imply that only the struggle for freedom was legitimate, Jenny Sharpe complicates the linear narrative-from slavery to freedom and literacy-that emerged from the privileging of autobiographical accounts like that of Frederick Douglass. She challenges a paradigm that equates agency with resistance and self-determination, and introduces new ways to examine negotiations for power within the constraints of slavery.

Many Filipino Americans feel obligated to give charitably to their families, their communities, or social development projects and organizations back home. Their contributions provide relief to poor or vulnerable Filipinos, and address the forces that maintain poverty, vulnerability, and exploitative relationships in the Philippines. This philanthropy is a result of both economic globalization and the migration of Filipino professionals to the United States. But it is also central to the moral economies of Filipino migration, immigration, and diasporic return. Giving-related practices and concerns—and the bonds maintained through giving—infuse what it means to be Filipino in America.

Giving Back shows how integral this system is for understanding Filipino diaspora formation. Joyce Mariano “follows the money” to investigate the cultural, social, economic, and political conditions of diaspora giving. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to reveal how power operates through this charity and the ways the global economic and cultural dimensions of this practice reinforce racial subordination and neocolonialism. Giving Back explores how this charity can stabilize overlapping systems of inequality as well as the contradictions of corporate social responsibility programs in diaspora.

Living history is a style of instructive and entertaining performance that seeks to bring history to life with the use of costumes, tools, and reenactments appropriate to a specific time period. Done well, living history performances illuminate human experience in powerful, unforgettable ways.

The fifteen living history plays in this collection were commissioned by museums and historic sites in Texas to show the interdependence of African American experiences and contributions to the living history of Texas. The plays cover subject matter ranging from slave celebrations, family breakups, and running away, to the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction. Each play is research based and performed by Talking Back Living History Theatre as a festival production. These scripts are easily performed, and author Naomi Mitchell Carrier has included production notes in the overviews that precede each play. Lesson plans are also included, which add to the collection's appeal as a classroom tool.

Carrier's talent for bringing historical figures to life is exceptional. The names of most primary characters in these plays are real. By giving them faces, feelings, intelligence, and dignity, Carrier aims to give them new life.