Results by title

767 books match the query 'Hispanic & Latino Studies' and 64 start with l

cover of LULAC: The Evolution of a Mexican American Political Organization

LULAC

The Evolution of a Mexican American Political Organization

By Benjamin Márquez

University of Texas Press, 1993

The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) is one of the best-known and active national organizations that represent Mexican Americans and their political interests. Since its founding in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1929, it has served as a vehicle through which Mexican Americans can strive for equal rights and economic assimilation into Anglo American society.

This study is the first comprehensive political history of LULAC from its founding through the 1980s. Márquez explores the group’s evolution from an activist, grassroots organization in the pre– and post–World War II periods to its current status as an institutionalized bureaucracy that relies heavily on outside funding to further its politically conservative goals. His information is based in part on many primary source materials from the LULAC archives at the University of Texas at Austin, the Houston Public Library, and the University LULAC publications, as well as interviews with present and past LULAC activists.

Márquez places this history within the larger theoretical framework of incentive theory to show how changing, and sometimes declining, membership rewards have influenced people’s participation in LULAC and other interest groups over time. Ironically, as of 1988, LULAC could claim fewer than 5,000 dues-paying members, yet a dedicated and skillful leadership secured sufficient government and corporate monies to make LULAC one of the most visible and active groups in Mexican American politics.

Given the increasing number of interest groups and political action committees involved in national politics in the United States, this case study of a political organization’s evolution will be of interest to a wide audience in the political and social sciences, as well as to students of Mexican American and ethnic studies.

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cover of La Calle: Spatial Conflicts and Urban Renewal in a Southwest City

La Calle

Spatial Conflicts and Urban Renewal in a Southwest City

Lydia R. Otero

University of Arizona Press, 2010

On March 1, 1966, the voters of Tucson approved the Pueblo Center Redevelopment Project—Arizona’s first major urban renewal project—which targeted the most densely populated eighty acres in the state. For close to one hundred years, tucsonenses had created their own spatial reality in the historical, predominantly Mexican American heart of the city, an area most called “la calle.” Here, amid small retail and service shops, restaurants, and entertainment venues, they openly lived and celebrated their culture. To make way for the Pueblo Center’s new buildings, city officials proceeded to displace la calle’s residents and to demolish their ethnically diverse neighborhoods, which, contends Lydia Otero, challenged the spatial and cultural assumptions of postwar modernity, suburbia, and urban planning.

Otero examines conflicting claims to urban space, place, and history as advanced by two opposing historic preservationist groups: the La Placita Committee and the Tucson Heritage Foundation. Otero gives voice to those who lived in, experienced, or remembered this contested area, and analyzes the historical narratives promoted by Anglo American elites in the service of tourism and cultural dominance.

La Calle explores the forces behind the mass displacement: an unrelenting desire for order, a local economy increasingly dependent on tourism, and the pivotal power of federal housing policies. To understand how urban renewal resulted in the spatial reconfiguration of downtown Tucson, Otero draws on scholarship from a wide range of disciplines: Chicana/o, ethnic, and cultural studies; urban history, sociology, and anthropology; city planning; and cultural and feminist geography.
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cover of La Gente: Struggles for Empowerment and Community Self-Determination in Sacramento

La Gente

Struggles for Empowerment and Community Self-Determination in Sacramento

Lorena V. Márquez

University of Arizona Press, 2020

La Gente traces the rise of the Chicana/o Movement in Sacramento and the role of everyday people in galvanizing a collective to seek lasting and transformative change during the 1960s and 1970s. In their efforts to be self-determined, la gente contested multiple forms of oppression at school, at work sites, and in their communities.

Though diverse in their cultural and generational backgrounds, la gente were constantly negotiating acts of resistance, especially when their lives, the lives of their children, their livelihoods, or their households were at risk. Historian Lorena V. Márquez documents early community interventions to challenge the prevailing notions of desegregation by barrio residents, providing a look at one of the first cases of outright resistance to desegregation efforts by ethnic Mexicans. She also shares the story of workers in the Sacramento area who initiated and won the first legal victory against canneries for discriminating against brown and black workers and women, and demonstrates how the community crossed ethnic barriers when it established the first accredited Chicana/o and Native American community college in the nation. 

Márquez shows that the Chicana/o Movement was not solely limited to a handful of organizations or charismatic leaders. Rather, it encouraged those that were the most marginalized—the working poor, immigrants and/or the undocumented, and the undereducated—to fight for their rights on the premise that they too were contributing and deserving members of society.
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cover of La India María: Mexploitation and the Films of María Elena Velasco

La India María

Mexploitation and the Films of María Elena Velasco

By Seraina Rohrer

University of Texas Press, 2017

La India María—a humble and stubborn indigenous Mexican woman—is one of the most popular characters of the Mexican stage, television, and film. Created and portrayed by María Elena Velasco, La India María has delighted audiences since the late 1960s with slapstick humor that slyly critiques discrimination and the powerful. At the same time, however, many critics have derided the iconic figure as a racist depiction of a negative stereotype and dismissed the India María films as exploitation cinema unworthy of serious attention. By contrast, La India María builds a convincing case for María Elena Velasco as an artist whose work as a director and producer—rare for women in Mexican cinema—has been widely and unjustly overlooked.

Drawing on extensive interviews with Velasco, her family, and film industry professionals, as well as on archival research, Seraina Rohrer offers the first full account of Velasco’s life; her portrayal of La India María in vaudeville, television, and sixteen feature film comedies, including Ni de aquí, ni de allá [Neither here, nor there]; and her controversial reception in Mexico and the United States. Rohrer traces the films’ financing, production, and distribution, as well as censorship practices of the period, and compares them to other Mexploitation films produced at the same time. Adding a new chapter to the history of a much-understudied period of Mexican cinema commonly referred to as “la crisis,” this pioneering research enriches our appreciation of Mexploitation films.

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cover of La Verdad: An International Dialogue on Hip Hop Latinidades

La Verdad

An International Dialogue on Hip Hop Latinidades

Edited by Melissa Castillo-Garsow and Jason Nichols

The Ohio State University Press, 2016

From its earliest days, hip hop was more than just music, encapsulating the ideas of community and exchange. Artists like Mellow Man Ace and Kid Frost opened doors by infusing Spanish into their lyrics, calling for racial and social equality; others employed hip hop to comment on the effects of neo-liberalization and global capital. In recent decades, the cultural exchange has expanded—the music traveling from the United States to Latin America and back as visual artists, music producers, MCs, vocalists, and dancers combine their Latin cultures with influences from north of the U.S. border to create new artistic experiences. And while there is an extensive body of work on U.S. hip hop, it continues to evolve in an increasingly multilingual, multiethnic, intergenerational, and global collection of cultural expressions.
 
A truly international effort, La Verdad: An International Dialogue on Hip Hop Latinidades brings together exciting new work about Latino/a hip hop across more than a dozen countries, from scholars and practitioners in the United States and in Latin America, highlighting in new ways the participation of women, indigenous peoples, and Afro-descendants in a reimagined global, hip hop nation. From graffitera crews in Costa Rica and Nicaragua to Mexican hip hop in New York, from Aymara rap in Bolivia to Chicano rap in Taiwan, this volume explodes stereotypes of who and how hip hop is consumed, lived, and performed.  Examining hip hop movements in Spanish, English, Portuguese, Aymara, and Creole, La Verdad demonstrates that Latino hip hop is a multilingual expression of gender, indigeneity, activism, and social justice.
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cover of La Voz Latina: Contemporary Plays and Performance Pieces by Latinas

La Voz Latina

Contemporary Plays and Performance Pieces by Latinas

Edited by Elizabeth C. Ramirez and Catherine Casiano

University of Illinois Press, 2011

Elizabeth C. Ramírez and Catherine Casiano bring together a collection of plays and performance pieces by innovative Latina playwrights. Surveying Latina theatre in the United States from the 1980s to the twenty-first century, the editors present works displaying a variety of forms, themes, and genres, expanding the field of Latina theatre while situating it in the larger spectrum of American stage and performance studies. Ramírez and Casiano provide historical context and a production history for each work and a biography of, and artistic statement from, each playwright.

Contributors: Yareli Arizmendi, Josefina Báez, The Colorado Sisters, Migdalia Cruz, Evelina Fernández, Cherríe Moraga, Carmen Peláez, Carmen Rivera, Celia H. Rodríguez, Diane Rodriguez, and Milcha Sanchez-Scott. The volume also includes commentary by Kathy Perkins and Caridad Svich.

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cover of La proyección del neoliberalismo: Las transformaciones del cine mexicano (1988–2012)

La proyección del neoliberalismo

Las transformaciones del cine mexicano (1988–2012)

Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado

Vanderbilt University Press, 2019

Cavernosa, usualmente fría, siempre oscura, con un ligero olor a palomitas de maíz en el aire: la experiencia de ir al cine es universal. No es menos intensa en México, donde la experiencia ha evolucionado de formas complejas en años recientes. Películas como Y tu mamá también, El Mariachi, Amores perros y las obras de los paradigmáticos Guillermo del Toro y Salma Hayek, reflejan mucho más un renovado interés por el cine en México. En La proyección del neoliberalismo, Ignacio Sánchez Prado explora precisamente los eventos que tuvieron lugar en la industria del cine mexicano durante las últimas décadas. Lejos de ser una simple historia del periodo, La proyección del neoliberalismo examina cuatro aspectos esenciales de las transformaciones ocurridas en la industria del cine mexicano: la caída del nacionalismo, un nuevo enfoque en audiencias de clase media, la redefinición del concepto de cine político y el impacto de la globalización. Este análisis incluye a directores y películas que han alcanzado notoriedad internacional o relevancia en la construcción de un mercado nacional. La proyección del neoliberalismo expone las consecuencias de una industria del cine forzada a encontrar nuevas audiencias entre la clase media mexicana para poder alcanzar el ansiado éxito económico y la aprobación cultural.
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cover of Labor and Community: Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in a Southern California County, 1900-1950

Labor and Community

Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in a Southern California County, 1900-1950

Gilbert G. González

University of Illinois Press, 1994

The emergence, maturity, and decline of the southern California citrus industry is seen here through the network of citrus worker villages that dotted part of the state's landscape from 1910 to 1960.  Labor and Community shows how Mexican immigrants shaped a partially independent existence within a fiercely hierarchical framework of economic and political relationships. González relies on a variety of published sources and interviews with longtime residents to detail the education of village children; the Americanization of village adults; unionization and strikes; and the decline of the citrus picker village and rise of the urban barrio. His insightful study of the rural dimensions of Mexican-American life prior to World War II adds balance to a long-standing urban bias in Chicano historiography.
 
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cover of Land Uprising: Native Story Power and the Insurgent Horizons of Latinx Indigeneity

Land Uprising

Native Story Power and the Insurgent Horizons of Latinx Indigeneity

Simón Ventura Trujillo

University of Arizona Press, 2020

Land Uprising reframes Indigenous land reclamation as a horizon to decolonize the settler colonial conditions of literary, intellectual, and activist labor. Simón Ventura Trujillo argues that land provides grounding for rethinking the connection between Native storytelling practices and Latinx racialization across overlapping colonial and nation-state forms.

Trujillo situates his inquiry in the cultural production of La Alianza Federal de Mercedes, a formative yet understudied organization of the Chicanx movement of the 1960s and 1970s. La Alianza sought to recover Mexican and Spanish land grants in New Mexico that had been dispossessed after the Mexican-American War. During graduate school, Trujillo realized that his grandparents were activists in La Alianza. Written in response to this discovery, Land Uprising bridges La Alianza’s insurgency and New Mexican land grant struggles to the writings of Leslie Marmon Silko, Ana Castillo, Simon Ortiz, and the Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. In doing so, the book reveals uncanny connections between Chicanx, Latinx, Latin American, and Native American and Indigenous studies to grapple with Native land reclamation as the future horizon for Chicanx and Latinx indigeneities.
 
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cover of Las Hermanas: Chicana/Latina Religious-Political Activism in the U. S. Catholic Church

Las Hermanas

Chicana/Latina Religious-Political Activism in the U. S. Catholic Church

Lara Medina

Temple University Press, 2005

In this historical study, Lara Medina examines the early development and continuing influence of Las Hermanas, a feminist organization established in 1971 to counter the patriarchy and Eurocentrism of the U.S. Catholic Church.Lara Medina weaves archival research and oral interviews into a cohesive narrative that highlights the keen ethnic and political awareness among the movement's leaders and participants. Medina also illuminates the strides made by Las Hermanas in undermining and reorienting the male-dominated structure of both the Catholic ministry and the Chicano civil rights movement.By showing how the group has engaged such issues as moral authority, sexuality, and domestic abuse through its religiously informed efforts in grassroots community organizing and education, Lara Medina showcases the crucial role played by Las Hermanas in the articulation of a spiritually and politically grounded Latina/Chicana identity.
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cover of Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours

Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours

Octavio Quintanilla; Translated by Octavio Quintanilla and Natalia Treviño

University of Arizona Press, 2025

In Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, Octavio Quintanilla takes us on a profound journey to witness what it means to erase those boundaries devised by genre and politics intent on stifling memory, imagination, and creativity.
 
Presented in Spanish with English translations, this poetry collection comprises lyric and concrete poems—or frontextos—that explore intimacy and different shades of violence as a means to reconcile the speaker’s sense of belonging in the world. From the opening poem to the last in the first section, Quintanilla captures the perilous journeys that migrants undertake crossing borders as well as the paths that lovers forge to meet their endless longing. These themes are skillfully woven by Quintanilla, guiding us back and forth across the Rio Grande to encounter the apparitions of the disappeared and to witness the willingness of many to risk life and limb for a better life. The second half of the collection is one long poem, a letter addressed to a lost lover who will never get to read the speaker’s secret thoughts. Haunted by loss—of parents, of children, of the self—the speaker reaches an inevitable epiphany: “[A]nd sometimes it’s hard to know / on which side of the river I stand.” Stylistically, these poems destabilize our notions and expectations of genre and lyricism.
 
Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours is more than just an exercise in poetic virtuosity; it is an excavation into the complexities of what it means to be a human being in our contemporary world.
 
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cover of Latin American Migrations to the U.S. Heartland: Changing Social Landscapes in Middle America

Latin American Migrations to the U.S. Heartland

Changing Social Landscapes in Middle America

Edited by Linda Allegro and Andrew Grant Wood

University of Illinois Press, 2019

This collection examines Latina/o immigrants and the movement of the Latin American labor force to the central states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa. Contributors look at outside factors affecting migration, including corporate agriculture, technology, globalization, and government. They also reveal how cultural affinities like religion, strong family ties, farming, and cowboy culture attract these newcomers to the Heartland. Throughout, essayists point to how hostile neoliberal policy reforms have made it difficult for Latin American immigrants to find social and economic stability.

Filled with varied and eye-opening perspectives, Latin American Migrations to the U.S. Heartland reveals how identities, economies, and geographies are changing as Latin Americans adjust to their new homes, jobs, and communities.

Contributors: Linda Allegro, Tisa M. Anders, Scott Carter, Caitlin Didier, Miranda Cady Hallett, Edmund Hamann, Albert Iaroi, Errol D. Jones, Jane Juffer, László J. Kulcsár, Janelle Reeves, Jennifer F. Reynolds, Sandi Smith-Nonini, and Andrew Grant Wood.

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cover of Latin Numbers: Playing Latino in Twentieth-Century U.S. Popular Performance

Latin Numbers

Playing Latino in Twentieth-Century U.S. Popular Performance

Brian Eugenio Herrera

University of Michigan Press, 2015

Latin Numbers is a work of performance history, examining the way in which Latino actors on the twentieth-century stage and screen communicated and influenced American ideas about race and ethnicity. Brian Eugenio Herrera looks at how these performances and performers contributed to American popular understanding of Latinos as a distinct racial and ethnic group. His book tracks the conspicuously “Latin” musical number; the casting of Latino actors; the history of West Side Story; how Latina/o performers confront stereotypes; and the proliferation of the gay Latino character in the AIDS era. With a flair for storytelling and a unique ability to see the deeper meanings embedded in popular culture, Herrera creates a history that will appeal to popular culture enthusiasts, theater aficionados, and those interested in the cultural history of Latinos. The book will also delight readers interested in the memorable (and many of the lesser-known) Latino performances on stage and screen.
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cover of Latin* Students in Engineering: An Intentional Focus on a Growing Population

Latin* Students in Engineering

An Intentional Focus on a Growing Population

Lara Perez-Felkner

Rutgers University Press, 2024

Winner of the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education Edited Volume Book of the Year Award

Winner of the 2026 Distinguished Contributions to Gender Equity in Educational Research Award from the American Educational Research Association

The growing population of engineering students who identify as Latin* are underrepresented in the field of engineering. Latin* refers to an individual of Latin American origin or descent, without restricting to a specific gender. The asterisk (*) includes related identity terms such as Latina/é/o/u/x.There is, however, a rising need to train U.S. students in engineering skills to meet the demands of our increasingly technological workforce. Structurally excluding Latin* students hinders their economic and educational opportunities in engineering. Latin* Students in Engineering examines the state of Latin* engineering education at present as well as considerations for policy and practice regarding engineering education aimed at enhancing opportunity and better serving Latin* students. The essays in this volume first consider, theoretically and empirically, the experiences of Latin* students in engineering education and then expand beyond the student level to focus on institutional and social structures that challenge Latin* students' success and retention. Finally, it illuminates emergent work and considers future research, policy, and practice.
 

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cover of Latin@s' Presence in the Food Industry: Changing How We Think about Food

Latin@s' Presence in the Food Industry

Changing How We Think about Food

Meredith E. Abarca

University of Arkansas Press, 2016

Latin@s' Presence in the Food Industry takes the holistic culinary approach of bringing together multidisciplinary criticism to explore the diverse, and not always readily apparent, ways that Latin@s relate to food and the food industry.

The networks Latin@s create, the types of identities they fashion through food, and their relationship to the US food industry are analyzed to understand Latin@s as active creators of food-based communities, as distinctive cultural representations, and as professionals. This vibrant new collection acknowledges issues of labor conditions, economic politics, and immigration laws—structural vulnerabilities that certainly cannot be ignored—and strives to understand more fully the active and conscious ways that Latina@s create spaces to maneuver global and local food systems.
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cover of LatinX

LatinX

Claudia Milian

University of Minnesota Press, 2019

Nationality is not enough to understand “Latin”-descended populations in the United States

LatinX has neither country nor fixed geography. LatinX, according to Claudia Milian, is the most powerful conceptual tool of the Latino/a present, an itinerary whose analytic routes incorporate the Global South and ecological devastation. Milian’s trailblazing study deploys the indeterminate but thunderous “X” as intellectual armor, a speculative springboard, and a question for our times that never stops being asked. LatinX sorts out and addresses issues about the unknowability of social realities that exceed our present knowledge.

Forerunners: Ideas First
Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

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cover of Latina Lives in Milwaukee

Latina Lives in Milwaukee

Theresa Delgadillo

University of Illinois Press, 2015

Milwaukee's small but vibrant Mexican and Mexican American community of the 1920s grew over succeeding decades to incorporate Mexican, Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central American, and Caribbean migration to the city. Drawing on years of interviews and collaboration with interviewees, Theresa Delgadillo offers a set of narratives that explore the fascinating family, community, work, and career experiences of Milwaukee's Latinas during this time of transformation. Through the stories of these women, Delgadillo caringly provides access to a wide variety of Latina experiences: early Mexican settlers entering careers as secretaries and entrepreneurs; Salvadoran and Puerto Rican women who sought educational opportunity in the U.S., sometimes in flight from political conflicts; Mexican women becoming leather workers and drill press operators; and second-generation Latinas entering the professional classes. These women show how members of diverse generations, ethnicities, and occupations embraced interethnic collaboration and coalition but also negotiated ethnic and racial discrimination, domestic violence, workplace hostilities, and family separations. A one-of-a-kind collection, Latina Lives in Milwaukee sheds light on the journeys undertaken then and now by Latinas in the region, and lays the foundation for the further study of the Latina experience in the Midwest. With contributions from Ramona Arsiniega, María Monreal Cameron, Daisy Cubías, Elvira Sandoval Denk, Rosemary Sandoval Le Moine, Antonia Morales, Carmen Murguia, Gloria Sandoval Rozman, Margarita Sandoval Skare, Olga Valcourt Schwartz, and Olivia Villarreal.
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cover of Latina Politics, Latino Politics: Gender, Culture, and Political Participation in Boston

Latina Politics, Latino Politics

Gender, Culture, and Political Participation in Boston

Carol Hardy-Fanta

Temple University Press, 1993

Through an in-depth study of the Latino community in Boston, Carol hardy-Fanta addressees three key debates in American politics: how to look at the ways in which women and men envision the meaning of politics and political participation; how to understand culture and the political life of expanding immigrant populations; and how to create a more participatory America. The author's interviews with Latinos from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Central and South America and her participation in community events in North Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, and the South End document the often ignored contribution of Latina women as candidates, political mobilizers, and community organizers. Hardy-Fanta examines critical gender differences in how politics is defined, what strategies Latina women and Latino men use to generate political participation, and how culture and gender interact in the political empowerment of the ethic communities.

Hardy-Fanta challenges the notion of political apathy among Latinos and presents factors that stimulate political participation. She finds that the vision of politics promoted by Latina women—one based on connectedness, collectivity, community, and consiousness-raising—contrasts sharply with a male political concern for status, hierarchy, and personal opportunity.

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cover of Latina/o Midwest Reader

Latina/o Midwest Reader

Omar Valerio-Jimenez , Santiago Vaquera-Vasquez

University of Illinois Press, 2017

From 2000 to 2010, the Latino population increased by more than 73 percent across eight midwestern states. These interdisciplinary essays explore issues of history, education, literature, art, and politics defining today’s Latina/o Midwest. Some contributors delve into the Latina/o revitalization of rural areas, where communities have launched bold experiments in dual-language immersion education while seeing integrated neighborhoods, churches, and sports teams become the norm. Others reveal metro areas as laboratories for emerging Latino subjectivities, places where for some, the term Latina/o itself corresponds to a new type of lived identity as different Latina/o groups interact in shared neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces.
 
Eye-opening and provocative, The Latina/o Midwest Reader rewrites the conventional wisdom on today's Latina/o community and how it faces challenges—and thrives—in the heartland.
 
Contributors: Aidé Acosta, Frances R. Aparicio, Jay Arduser, Jane Blocker, Carolyn Colvin, María Eugenia Cotera, Theresa Delgadillo, Lilia Fernández, Claire F. Fox, Felipe Hinojosa, Michael D. Innis-Jiménez, José E. Limón, Marta María Maldonado, Louis G. Mendoza, Amelia María de la Luz Montes, Kim Potowski, Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, Rebecca M. Schreiber, Omar Valerio-Jiménez, Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez, Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, Janet Weaver, and Elizabeth Willmore
 
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cover of Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes: The Making and Meanings of Film and TV Stardom

Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes

The Making and Meanings of Film and TV Stardom

Mary C. Beltran

University of Illinois Press, 2008

This book explores the role film and television stardom has played in establishing, reinforcing, and challenging popular ethnic notions of Latina/os in the United States since the silent film era of the 1920s. In addition to documenting the importance of Latina and Latino stars to American film and television history, Mary C. Beltrán focuses on key moments in the construction of "Hollywood Latinidad" by analyzing the public images of these stars as promoted by Hollywood film studios, television networks, producers, and the performers themselves. Critically surveying the careers of such film and television stars as Dolores Del Rio, Desi Arnaz, Rita Moreno, Freddie Prinze, Edward James Olmos, Jessica Alba, and Jennifer Lopez, Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes also addresses the impact of the rise in Latina and Latino media producers and the current status of Latina/o stardom.
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cover of Latina/o/x Education in Chicago: Roots, Resistance, and Transformation

Latina/o/x Education in Chicago

Roots, Resistance, and Transformation

Edited by Isaura Pulido, Angelica Rivera, and Ann M. Aviles

University of Illinois Press, 2022

In this collection, local experts use personal narratives and empirical data to explore the history of Mexican American and Puerto Rican education in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system. The essays focus on three themes: the historical context of segregated and inferior schooling for Latina/o/x students; the changing purposes and meanings of education for Latina/o/x students from the 1950s through today; and Latina/o/x resistance to educational reforms grounded in neoliberalism. Contributors look at stories of student strength and resistance, the oppressive systems forced on Mexican American women, the criminalization of Puerto Ricans fighting for liberatory education, and other topics of educational significance. As they show, many harmful past practices remain the norm--or have become worse. Yet Latina/o/x communities and students persistently engage in transformative practices shaping new approaches to education that promise to reverberate not only in the city but nationwide.

Insightful and enlightening, Latina/o/x Education in Chicago brings to light the ongoing struggle for educational equity in the Chicago Public Schools.

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cover of Latina/os and World War II: Mobility, Agency, and Ideology

Latina/os and World War II

Mobility, Agency, and Ideology

Edited by Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez and B.V. Olguín

University of Texas Press, 2014

The first book-length study of Latina/o experiences in World War II over a wide spectrum of identities and ancestries—from Cuban American, Spanish American, and Mexican American segments to the under-studied Afro-Latino experience—Latina/os and World War II probes the controversial aspects of Latina/o soldiering and citizenship in the war, the repercussions of which defined the West during the twentieth century. The editors also offer a revised, more accurate tabulation of the number of Latina/os who served in the war.

Spanning imaginative productions, such as vaudeville and the masculinity of the soldado razo theatrical performances; military segregation and the postwar lives of veterans; Tejanas on the homefront; journalism and youth activism; and other underreported aspects of the wartime experience, the essays collected in this volume showcase rarely seen recollections. Whether living in Florida in a transformed community or deployed far from home (including Mexican Americans who were forced to endure the Bataan Death March), the men and women depicted in this collection yield a multidisciplinary, metacritical inquiry. The result is a study that challenges celebratory accounts and deepens the level of scholarly inquiry into the realm of ideological mobility for a unique cultural crossroads. Taking this complex history beyond the realm of war narratives, Latina/os and World War II situates these chapters within the broader themes of identity and social change that continue to reverberate in postcolonial lives.

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cover of Latinas and Latinos on TV: Colorblind Comedy in the Post-racial Network Era

Latinas and Latinos on TV

Colorblind Comedy in the Post-racial Network Era

Isabel Molina-Guzmán

University of Arizona Press, 2018

Since ABC’s George Lopez Show left the airwaves in 2007 as the only network television show to feature a Latino lead, the representational landscape of Latina and Latino actors has shifted from media invisibility toward an era of increasing inclusion.
 
Sofia Vergara became the highest paid woman and Latina on TV for her starring role on Modern Family. In the first successful dramedy starring a Latina since ABC’s Ugly Betty, Gina Rodriguez gained critical acclaim for her role on the CW’s Jane the Virgin. And the first Latina leading lady of TV, America Ferrera (Ugly Betty), returned to TV stardom in NBC’s Superstore.
 
This period of diversity brought U.S. Latina and Latino lives to the screen, yet a careful look at TV comedic content and production reveals a more troubling terrain for Latinas/os producers, writers, actors, and audiences.
 
Interweaving discussions about the ethnic, racial, and linguistic representations of Latinas/os within network television comedies, Isabel Molina-Guzmán probes published interviews with producers and textual examples from hit programs like Modern Family, The Office, and Scrubs to understand how these primetime sitcoms communicate difference in the United States.
 
Understanding the complex ways that audiences interpret these programs, Molina-Guzmán situates her analysis within the Obama era, a period when ethnicity and race became increasingly grounded in “hipster racism,” and argues that despite increased inclusion, the feel-good imperative of TV comedies still inevitably leaves racism, sexism, and homophobia uncontested.
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cover of Latinas on the Line: Invisible Information Workers in Telecommunications

Latinas on the Line

Invisible Information Workers in Telecommunications

Melissa Villa-Nicholas

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Latinas on the Line provides a compelling analysis and historical and theoretical grounding of the oral histories, never before seen, of Latina information workers in the Bell System from their entrance in 1973 to their retirements by 2015. Author Melissa Villa-Nicholas demonstrates the importance of Latinas of the field of telecommunications through their own words and uses supporting archival research to provide an overview of how Latinas engage and remember a critical analysis of their work place, information technologies, and the larger globalized economy and shifting borderlands through their intersectional identities as information workers. The book offers a rich and engaging portrait of the critical history of Latinas in telecommunications, from their manual to automated to digitized labor.

 
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cover of Latinas/os in New Jersey: Histories, Communities, and Cultures

Latinas/os in New Jersey

Histories, Communities, and Cultures

Aldo A. Lauria Santiago

Rutgers University Press, 2025

Since the 1890s, New Jersey has attracted hundreds of thousands of Caribbean and Latin American migrants. The state’s rich economic history, high-income suburbs, and strong public sector have all contributed to attracting, retaining, and setting the stage for Latin American and Caribbean immigrants and secondary-step migrants from New York City. Since the 1980s, however, Latinos have developed a more complex presence in the state’s political landscape and institutions. The emergence of Latino-majority towns and cities and coalition politics facilitated the election of Latino mayors, council persons, and many social and community leaders, as well as the election of statewide officers. This collection brings together innovative and empirically grounded scholarship from different disciplines and interdisciplinary fields of study and addresses topics including the demographic history of Latinos in the state, Latino migration from gateway cities to suburban towns, Latino urban enclaves, Latino economic and social mobility, Latino students and education, the New Jersey Dream Act and in-state tuition act organizing, Latinos and criminal justice reform, Latino electoral politics and leadership, and undocumented communities. 

Contributors: Yamil Avivi; Jennifer Ayala; Ulla D. Berg; Giovani Burgos; Elsa Candelario; Laura Curran; Lilia Fernández; Ismael García Colón; Olga Jiménez de Wagenheim; Benjamin Lapidus; Aldo A. Lauria Santiago; Johana Londoño; Kathleen Lopez; Giancarlo Muschi; Melanie Z. Plasencia; Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas; Elena Sabogal; Raymond Sanchez Mayers; William Suárez Gómez; Alex F. Trillo; Daniela Valdez; Anil Venkatesh; Lyna L. Wiggins
[more]
cover of Latino Colorado: The Struggle for Equality in the Centennial State

Latino Colorado

The Struggle for Equality in the Centennial State

Ernesto Sagás

University Press of Colorado, 2026

Mexican Americans and other Latinos make up more than 22 percent of Colorado’s population, play a vital role in its major economic sectors, and are becoming a political force to be reckoned with. Yet most official histories of the state mention them only in passing. Latino Colorado fills this gap in the literature by examining the multifaceted experience of Latinos in Colorado from the nineteenth century to the present, from the old Hispano families of southern Colorado to the new arrivals, and from metro Denver to the state’s rural areas of the Western Slope and Eastern Plains.
 
Author Ernesto Sagás also explores the ways in which Latinos—as a racialized, subordinate group—have historically interacted with Colorado’s Anglo society in carving out their own spaces while struggling for social and legal equality. He presents a demographic and socioeconomic profile of Latinos in Colorado based on field research and the latest US Census data to dispel common stereotypes while also pointing out areas of concern for state policymakers.
 
Latino Colorado sheds light on this marginalized community and advances the understanding of the state’s racialized dynamics. It is about everyone in the American West—Anglos, Latinos, and others—and how they interact with and continue to (re)define one another in real and imagined ways in the most mythologized of American regions.
 
[more]
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Latino Lives in America

Making It Home

Luis R. Fraga, John A. Garcia, Rodney E. Hero, Michael Jones-Correa, Valerie Martinez-Ebers and Gary Segura

Temple University Press, 2010

Latinos are the largest and fastest growing ethnic group in the United States, with increased levels of political mobilization and influence. In the timely and thoroughgoing Latino Lives in America, six prominent Latino scholars explore the profound implications of Latinos’ population growth and geographic dispersion for American politics and society, tracking key changes and continuities in Latinos' attitudes, behavior, and social experiences.

Utilizing a unique set of “narratives” from focus group interviews, supplemented with quantitative findings from the 2006 Latino National Survey, the authors provide a snapshot of Latino life in America. The Latinos interviewed provide their thoughts regarding their sense of belonging and group identification, assimilation and transnationalism, housing, education, civic engagement, and perceptions of discrimination, as well as their experiences in new destinations, where they are trying to realize the “Americano” dream.

Latino Lives in America uses these conversations and the survey data to offer both a micro and macro look at how Latinos are transforming various aspects of American politics, culture, and life and how their experiences in the United States are changing them and their families.

[more]
cover of Latino Los Angeles: Transformations, Communities, and Activism

Latino Los Angeles

Transformations, Communities, and Activism

Edited by Enrique C. Ochoa and Gilda L. Ochoa

University of Arizona Press, 2005

As the twenth-first century begins, Latinas/os represent 45 percent of the residents of Los Angeles County, making them the largest racial/ethnic group in the region. At the same time, the shift from manufacturing to a service-based economy in the area has contributed to a decline in good-paying jobs, significantly impacting working class families. These transformations have created a backlash that has included state propositions impacting Latinas/os and escalating anti-immigrant rhetoric—and Latina/os of all backgrounds are making their voices heard. Until recently, most research on Latinas/os in the U.S. has ignored historical and contemporary dynamics in Latin America, just as scholars of Latin America have generally stopped their studies at the border. This volume roots Los Angeles in the larger arena of globalization, exploring the demographic changes that have transformed the Latino presence in LA from primarily Mexican-origin to one that now includes peoples from throughout the hemisphere. Bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines, it combines historical perspectives with analyses of power and inequality to consider how Latinas/os are responding to exclusionary immigration, labor, and schooling practices and actively creating communities. The contributors examine Latina/o Los Angeles in the context of historical, economic and social factors that have shaped the region. The first section provides contexts for understanding Latina/o migration, with chapters focusing on such factors as U.S. economic and military domination, labor and economic integration in the Americas, and Los Angeles’ economic history. The second section considers how various Latina/o groups have settled and formed communities and interacted with the existing Mexican-origin populations, showing how Zapotecs, Salvadorans, and other peoples are remaking urban demographics. The final section on labor organizing and political activism examines the role of Latina/o immigrants in such actions as the janitors’ strike and also considers the contemporary role of students in political activism. The volume concludes with an up-to-date compilation of contemporary scholarship on immigration, the economy, schools, neighborhoods, gender and activism as they relate to Central American and Mexican immigrants. Reflecting a range of methodologies—statistical, historical, ethnographic, and participatory research—this collection is relevant not only to ethnic studies but also to broader concerns in political science, sociology, history, economics, and urban studies. In addition, some chapters focus explicitly on women, and gender issues are interwoven throughout the text. Latino Los Angeles is an important work that contributes to contemporary scholarship on transnationalism as it reexamines the changing face of America’s largest western metropolis.
[more]
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Latino Mayors

Political Change in the Postindustrial City

Marion Orr

Temple University Press, 2018

As recently as the early 1960s, Latinos were almost totally excluded from city politics. This makes the rise of Latino mayors in the past three decades a remarkable American story—one that explains ethnic succession, changing urban demography, and political contexts. The vibrant collection Latino Mayors features case studies of eleven Latino mayors in six American cities: San Antonio, Los Angeles, Denver, Hartford, Miami, and Providence.

The editors and contributors analyze Latino mayors for their governing styles and policies. They describe how candidates shaped race, class, and economic issues—particularly in deracialized campaigns. Latino Mayors also addresses coalition politics, political incorporation, and how community groups operate, as well as the challenges these pioneers have faced in office from political tensions and governance issues that sometimes even harm Latinos. 

Ultimately, Latino Mayors charts the performances, successes, and failures of these elected officials to represent their constituents in a changing economic and urban environment.

Contributors include: Stefanie Chambers, Carlos E. Cuéllar, Emily M. Farris, Maria Ilcheva, Robert Preuhs, Heywood T. Sanders, Ellen Shiau, and the editors.

[more]
cover of Latino Placemaking and Planning: Cultural Resilience and Strategies for Reurbanization

Latino Placemaking and Planning

Cultural Resilience and Strategies for Reurbanization

Jesus J. Lara

University of Arizona Press, 2018

Latinos are currently the second-largest ethnic group demographically within the United States. By the year 2050 they are projected to number nearly 133 million, or approximately one third of the country’s total population. As the urban component of this population increases, the need for resources to support it will generate new cultural and economic stresses.
 
Latino Placemaking and Planning offers a pathway to define, analyze, and evaluate the role that placemaking can have with respect to Latino communities in the context of contemporary urban planning, policy, and design practices. Using strategically selected case studies, Jesus J. Lara examines how Latinos contribute to the phenomenon of urban revitalization through the (re)appropriation of physical space for their own use and the consequent transformation of what were previously economically downtrodden areas into vibrant commercial and residential centers.
 
The book examines the formation of urban cultures and reurbanization strategies from the perspective of Latino urbanism and is divided into four key sections, which address (1) emerging new urban geographies; (2) the power of place and neighborhood selection; (3) Latino urbanism case studies; and (4) lessons and recommendations for “reurbanizing” the city. Latino Placemaking and Planning illustrates the importance of placemaking for Latino communities and provides accessible strategies for planners, students, and activists to sustainable urban revitalization.
[more]
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Latino Urban Ethnography and the Work of Elena Padilla

Merida M. Rua

University of Illinois Press, 2010

This study reclaims and builds upon the classic work of anthropologist Elena Padilla in an effort to examine constructions of space and identity among Latinos. The volume includes an annotated edition of Padilla's 1947 University of Chicago master's thesis, "Puerto Rican Immigrants in New York and Chicago: A Study in Comparative Assimilation," which broke with traditional urban ethnographies and examined racial identities and interethnic relations. Weighing the importance of gender and the interplay of labor, residence, and social networks, Padilla examined the integration of Puerto Rican migrants into the social and cultural life of the larger community where they settled. Also included are four comparative and interdisciplinary original essays that foreground the significance of Padilla's early study about Latinos in Chicago. Contributors discuss the implications of her groundbreaking contributions to urban ethnographic traditions and to the development of Puerto Rican studies and Latina/o studies.
 
Contributors are Nicholas De Genova, Zaire Z. Dinzey-Flores, Elena Padilla, Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas, Mérida M. Rúa, and Arlene Torres.
[more]
cover of Latinos and Nationhood: Two Centuries of Intellectual Thought

Latinos and Nationhood

Two Centuries of Intellectual Thought

Nicolás Kanellos

University of Arizona Press, 2023

Spanning from the early nineteenth century to today, this intellectual history examines the work of Latino writers who explored the major philosophic and political themes of their day, including the meaning and implementation of democracy, their democratic and cultural rights under U.S. dominion, their growing sense of nationhood, and the challenges of slavery and disenfranchisement of women in a democratic republic that had yet to realize its ideals.

Over the course of two centuries, these Latino or Hispanic intellectuals were natural-born citizens of the United States, immigrants, or political refugees. Many of these intellectuals, whether citizens or not, strove to embrace and enliven such democratic principles as freedom of speech and of the press, the protection of minorities in the Bill of Rights and in subsequent laws, and the protection of linguistic and property rights, among many others, guaranteed by treaties when the United States incorporated their homelands into the Union.

The first six chapters present the work of lesser-known historical figures—most of whom have been consistently ignored by Anglo- and Euro-centric history and whose works have been widely inaccessible until recently—who were revolutionaries, editors of magazines and newspapers, and speechmakers who influenced the development of a Latino consciousness. The last three chapters deal with three foundational figures of the Chicano Movement, the last two of whom either subverted the concept of nationhood or went beyond it to embrace internationalism in an outreach to humanity as a whole.

Latinos and Nationhood sheds new light on the biographies of Félix Varela, José Alvarez de Toledo y Dubois, Francisco Ramírez, Tomás Rivera, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, and Gloria E. Anzaldúa, among others.
[more]
cover of Latinos and the 2012 Election: The New Face of the American Voter

Latinos and the 2012 Election

The New Face of the American Voter

Gabriel R. Sanchez

Michigan State University Press, 2015

In giving President Obama a record level of support (75 percent) and reaching a watershed 10 percent of the voting population, Latinos proved to be decisive in the 2012 election outcome—an unprecedented mark of influence for this segment of the wider electorate. This shift also signaled a radical reenvisioning of mobilization strategies by both parties and created a sea change in the way political organizations conduct outreach and engagement efforts. In this groundbreaking volume, experts in Latino politics ask: What is the scope of Latino voter influence, where does this electorate have the greatest impact, and what issues matter to them most? They examine a key national discussion—immigration reform—as it relates to voter behavior, and also explore the influence of Latinos within key states, including California, Colorado, New Mexico, Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, Nevada, and Florida. While some of these states have traditionally had strong Latino voting blocs, in others Latinos are just emerging as major players electorally. The book also discusses the extent to which Latinos were mobilized during the 2012 campaign and analyzes election outcomes using new tools created by Latino Decisions. A blend of rigorous data analysis and organizational commentary, the book offers a variety of perspectives on the past, present, and future of the Latino electorate.
[more]
cover of Latinos and the 2016 Election: Latino Resistance and the Election of Donald Trump

Latinos and the 2016 Election

Latino Resistance and the Election of Donald Trump

Gabriel R. Sanchez

Michigan State University Press, 2020

The 2016 election saw more Latino votes than the record voter turnout of the 2012 election. The essays in this volume provide a highly detailed analysis of the state and national impact Latino voters had in what will be remembered as one of the biggest surprises in presidential election history. Contrary to much commentary, Latino voters increased their participation rates in all states beyond the supposed peak levels that they attained in 2012. Moreover, they again displayed their overwhelming support of Democratic candidates and even improved their Democratic support in Florida. Nonetheless, their continued presence and participation in national elections was not sufficient to prevent the election of Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate who vilified Latinos and especially Latino immigrants. Each essay provides insights as to how these two competing realities coexist, while the conclusion addresses the implications of this coexistence for the future of Latinos in American politics.
[more]
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Latinos in Chicago

Quest for a Political Voice

Wilfredo Cruz

Southern Illinois University Press, 2022

WINNER, 2023 Illinois State Historical Society Certificate of Excellence in “Books, Scholarly”!

The path to political power for Latinos in Chicago

In the Midwest’s largest city, Latinos have been fighting for political representation for more than half a century. In this exploration of urban politics in Chicago, Wilfredo Cruz shows for the first time how Latinos went from being ignored by the Irish-controlled political machine to becoming a respected constituency.

Beginning with the Latino community’s first attempt to acquire a political voice in Chicago politics in 1911 and continuing through Latino officeholders of the early twenty-first century, Cruz surveys not only the struggles of this community—specifically the two largest Latino groups in the city, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans—but also the ways in which Chicago’s Latinos overcame those challenges to gain their political voice.

For most of the twentieth century, Chicago politicians ignored the growing Latino community. This disregard changed with the 1983 election of Mayor Harold Washington, an African American who defied the political machine and actively recruited Latinos to his administration and helped them win city and statewide political offices. His actions opened the doors of government for Latinos in Chicago. Subsequent mayors, seeing the political success of Washington’s move, continued his policies.

Many up-and-coming Latino politicians making strides in Chicago, including state representative Aarón Ortíz, Alderman Andre Vasquez, and Alderman Rossana Rodríguez-Sanchez, contribute their takes on the struggle for political power and the challenges facing the rising new generation of elected officials. With this book, Cruz asks and answers this question: What does the future hold for Latinos politically in Chicago?
[more]
cover of Latinos in Nevada: A Political, Economic, and Social Profile

Latinos in Nevada

A Political, Economic, and Social Profile

John P. Tuman

University of Nevada Press, 2021

Throughout history, the Latinx population has contributed substantially to Nevada’s mining, railroad, farming, ranching, and tourism industries. Latinos in Nevada provides a comprehensive analysis of this fastest-growing and diverse ethnic group, exploring the impact of the Hispanic/Latinx population on the Silver State in the past, present, and future.

This extensive study by a distinguished and multidisciplinary team of scholars discusses the impact of the Latinx population from the early development of the state of Nevada and highlights their roles in society, as well as the specific implications of their growing presence in the state. It also contemplates the future of the Latinx population and the role they will continue to play in politics and the economy.

This in-depth examination of a large and relatively understudied population will be of interest to scholars and students who study disparities in health and education opportunities as well as the political and economic climate among Latinos and other groups in Nevada and beyond. A political, economic, and demographic profile, this book:
  • Explores the history, growth, and diversity of the Latinx population.
  • Draws on an array of census data, voter surveys, statistics, interviews, and health, education, employment, wages, and immigration statistics.
  • Evaluates key trends in employment, education, religion, and health.
  • Analyzes the dynamics of political participation, including implications of a growing Latino political electorate in a western swing state.
  • Assesses key determinants of health disparities, educational inequities, and civic engagement among Latinos in the state.
  • Demonstrates the impact of the Great Recession of 2008 and provides a preliminary assessment of the COVID-19 pandemic on Latino employment.
[more]
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Latinos in New England

edited by Andrés Torres

Temple University Press, 2006

More than one million Latinos now live in New England. This is the first book to examine their impact on the region's culture, politics, and economics. At the same time, it investigates the effects of the locale on Latino residents' lives, traditions, and institutions.Employing methodologies from a variety of disciplines, twenty-one contributors explore topics in three broad areas: demographic trends, migration and community formation, and identity and politics. They utilize a wide range of approaches, including oral histories, case studies, ethnographic inquiries, focus group research, surveys, and statistical analyses. From the "Dominicanization" of the Latino community in Waterbury, Connecticut, to the immigration experiences of Brazilians in Massachusetts, from the influence of Latino Catholics on New England's Catholic churches to the growth of a Latino community in Providence, Rhode Island, the essays included here contribute to a new and multifaceted view of the growing Pan-Latino presence in the birthplace of the United States.
[more]
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Latinos in the Midwest

Rubén O. Martinez

Michigan State University Press, 2011

Over the past twenty years, the Latino population in the Midwest has grown rapidly, both in urban and rural areas. As elsewhere in the country, shifting demographics in the region have given rise to controversy and mixed reception. Where some communities have greeted Latinos openly, others have been more guarded. In spite of their increasing presence, Latinos remain the most marginalized major population group in the country. In coming years, the projected growth of this population will require greater attention from policymakers concerned with helping to incorporate them into the nation’s core institutions. This eye-opening collection of essays examines the many ways in which an increase in the Latino population has impacted the Midwest—culturally, economically, educationally, and politically. Drawing on studies, personal histories, legal rulings, and other sources, this book takes an interdisciplinary approach to an increasingly important topic in American society and offers a glimpse into the nation’s demographic future.
[more]
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Latinx Art

Artists, Markets, and Politics

Arlene Dávila

Duke University Press, 2020

In Latinx Art Arlene Dávila draws on numerous interviews with artists, dealers, and curators to explore the problem of visualizing Latinx art and artists. Providing an inside and critical look of the global contemporary art market, Dávila's book is at once an introduction to contemporary Latinx art and a call to decolonize the art worlds and practices that erase and whitewash Latinx artists. Dávila shows the importance of race, class, and nationalism in shaping contemporary art markets while providing a path for scrutinizing art and culture institutions and for diversifying the art world.
[more]
cover of Latinx Belonging: Community Building and Resilience in the United States

Latinx Belonging

Community Building and Resilience in the United States

Edited by Natalia Deeb-Sossa and Jennifer Bickham Mendez

University of Arizona Press, 2022

What does it mean to be Latinx? This pressing question forms the core of Latinx Belonging, which brings together cutting-edge research to discuss the multilayered ways this might be answered.

Latinx Belonging is anchored in the claim that Latinx people are not defined by their marginalization but should instead be understood as active participants in their communities and contributors to U.S. society. The volume’s overarching analytical approach recognizes the differences, identities, and divisions among people of Latin American origin in the United States, while also attending to the power of mainstream institutions to shape their lives and identities. Contributors to this volume view “belonging” as actively produced through struggle, survival, agency, resilience, and engagement.

This work positions Latinxs’ struggles for recognition and inclusion as squarely located within intersecting power structures of gender, race, sexuality, and class and as shaped by state-level and transnational forces such as U.S. immigration policies and histories of colonialism. From the case of Latinxs’ struggles for recognition in the arts, to queer Latinx community resilience during COVID-19 and in the wake of mass shootings, to Indigenous youth’s endurance and survival as unaccompanied minors in Los Angeles, the case studies featured in this collection present a rich and textured picture of the diversity of the U.S. Latinx experience in the twenty-first century.

Contributors
Andrés Acosta
Jack “Trey” Allen
Jennifer Bickham Mendez
Stephanie L. Canizales
Christopher Cuevas
Natalia Deeb-Sossa
Yvette G. Flores
Melanie Jones Gast
Monika Gosin
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo
Nolan Kline
Verónica Montes
Yvonne Montoya
Michael De Anda Muñiz
Suzanne Oboler
Gilda L. Ochoa
Dina G. Okamoto
Marco Antonio Quiroga
Michelle Téllez

[more]
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Latinx Ciné in the Twenty-First Century

Edited by Frederick Luis Aldama

University of Arizona Press, 2019

Today’s Latinx motion pictures are built on the struggles—and victories—of prior decades. Earlier filmmakers threw open doors and cleared new paths for those of the twenty-first century to willfully reconstruct Latinx epics as well as the daily tragedies and triumphs of Latinx lives.

Twenty-first-century Latinx film offers much to celebrate, but as noted pop culture critic Frederick Luis Aldama writes, there’s still room to be purposefully critical. In Latinx Ciné in the Twenty-First Century contributors offer groundbreaking scholarship that does both, bringing together a comprehensive presentation of contemporary film and filmmakers from all corners of Latinx culture.

The book’s seven sections cover production techniques and evolving genres, profile those behind and in front of the camera, and explore the distribution and consumption of contemporary Latinx films. Chapters delve into issues that are timely, relevant, and influential, including representation or the lack thereof, identity and stereotypes, hybridity, immigration and detention, historical recuperation, and historical amnesia.

With its capacious range and depth of vision, this timeless volume of cutting-edge scholarship blazes new paths in understanding the full complexities of twenty-first century Latinx filmmaking.

Contributors
Contributors  
Iván Eusebio Aguirre Darancou
Frederick Luis Aldama
Juan J. Alonzo
Lee Bebout
Debra A. Castillo
Nikolina Dobreva
Paul Espinosa
Mauricio Espinoza
Camilla Fojas
Rosa-Linda Fregoso
Desirée J. Garcia
Enrique García
Clarissa Goldsmith
Matthew David Goodwin
Monica Hanna
Sara Veronica Hinojos
Carlos Gabriel Kelly
Jennifer M. Lozano
Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez
J. V. Miranda
Valentina Montero Román
Danielle Alexis Orozco
Henry Puente
John D. “Rio” Riofrio
Richard T. Rodríguez
Ariana Ruiz
Samuale Saldívar III
Jorge Santos
Rebecca A. Sheehan
[more]
cover of Latinx Comics Studies: Critical and Creative Crossings

Latinx Comics Studies

Critical and Creative Crossings

Fernanda Díaz-Basteris

Rutgers University Press, 2025

Latinx Comics Studies: Critical and Creative Crossings offers an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach to analyzing Latinx studies and comics studies. The book draws together groundbreaking critical essays, practical pedagogical reflections, and original and republished short comics. The works in this collection discuss the construction of national identity and memory, undocumented narratives, Indigenous and Afro-Latinx experiences, multiracial and multilingual identities, transnational and diasporic connections, natural disasters and unnatural colonial violence, feminist and queer interventions, Latinx futurities, and more. Together, the critical and creative works in this collection begin to map out the emerging and evolving field of Latinx comics studies and to envision what might be possible in and through Latinx comics.
 
This collection moves beyond simply cataloguing and celebrating Latinx representation within comics. It examines how comics by, for, and about Latinx peoples creatively and conceptually experiment with the very boundaries of “Latinx” and portray the diverse lived experiences therein.
[more]
cover of Latinx Fandoms

Latinx Fandoms

Edited by Frederick Luis Aldama

University of Arizona Press, 2027

What makes one a fan? What’s the difference between cultivating taste for a genre and dedicating time, space, labor, and resources to collecting, practicing, and following in a singularly focused way? What does fandom look like and what does it do when racialized communities embrace media that rarely imagined them?

Latinx Fandoms is the first book to theorize the intersection of fandoms and Latinx identity. This groundbreaking collection examines how Latinx fans create meaning, build community, and imagine new worlds through their engagement with popular culture. From comics, science fiction, and gaming to music, sports, wrestling, television, and fan fiction, the essays demonstrate how fandoms become powerful sites of identity formation, cultural expression, and belonging for communities often overlooked in both media industries and academic scholarship.

Spanning thirty-six chapters organized into eight thematic sections, Latinx Fandoms explores a remarkable range of fan practices and cultural phenomena. Contributors examine topics as diverse as Pokémon, Barbie, Star Wars, Hello Kitty, Taylor Swift, BTS, Bad Bunny, lucha libre, fútbol, Nintendo, cosplay, fan fiction, bodybuilding, and Latinx goth subcultures. Through historical analysis, personal narrative, ethnography, and cultural critique, the essays reveal how Latinx fans transform global media into spaces of creativity, resistance, joy, and connection. The collection confronts enduring questions about race, representation, gender, sexuality, language, and power within contemporary fan cultures.

A foundational volume in the Latinx Pop Culture series, this collection shows that Latinx fans are not simply consumers of culture but active creators of scenes of joy and struggle, memory and invention, resistance, and sometimes complicity.

Contributors
Paloma Ada Aguirre
Frederick Luis Aldama
René X. Arteaga
Ryan Banfi
Lucas Leite Borba
Jennifer Caroccio Maldonado
Melissa Castillo-Garsow
Samantha Ceballos
Nicholas F. Centino
Andrea M. Escalante
Mauricio Espinoza
Laura Fernández
Elena Foulis
Kathryn M. Frank
Jennifer Gómez Menjívar
Christopher González
Rachel V. González-Martin
Itzayana Gutiérrez Arillo
Cristina Herrera
Dan Johnson
Carlos Gabriel Kelly González
Alexander Lalama
Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste
Regina Marie Mills
Guilherme Sfredo Miorando
Josh Mishaw
Meagan Negron
Dante Olivas
Rose Padilla
Domino Perez
Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo
Nayeli Rincon
Jessica Rutherford
Martín Alejandro Salinas
Alexandra Sanchez
Nicholas Villanueva Jr.
Ralph Villanueva
Benjamin Woo
Cassandra Yatron
Irma J. Zamora Fuerte

[more]
cover of Latinx Shakespeares: Staging U.S. Intracultural Theater

Latinx Shakespeares

Staging U.S. Intracultural Theater

Carla Della Gatta

University of Michigan Press, 2023

2024 American Society for Theatre Research Barnard Hewitt Award Finalist

  • 2023 Theatre Library Association George Freedley Memorial Award Finalist
  • Best Academic-Themed Book, College-Level - English at the International Latino Book Awards Honorable Mention

Latinx peoples and culture have permeated Shakespearean performance in the United States for over 75 years—a phenomenon that, until now, has been largely overlooked as Shakespeare studies has taken a global turn in recent years. Author Carla Della Gatta argues that theater-makers and historians must acknowledge this presence and influence in order to truly engage the complexity of American Shakespeares. Latinx Shakespeares investigates the history, dramaturgy, and language of the more than 140 Latinx-themed Shakespearean productions in the United States since the 1960s—the era of West Side Story. This first-ever book of Latinx representation in the most-performed playwright’s canon offers a new methodology for reading ethnic theater looks beyond the visual to prioritize aural signifiers such as music, accents, and the Spanish language.

The book’s focus is on textual adaptations or performances in which Shakespearean plays, stories, or characters are made Latinx through stage techniques, aesthetics, processes for art-making (including casting), and modes of storytelling. The case studies range from performances at large repertory theaters to small community theaters and from established directors to emerging playwrights. To analyze these productions, the book draws on interviews with practitioners, script analysis, first-hand practitioner insight, and interdisciplinary theoretical lenses, largely by scholars of color. Latinx Shakespeares moves toward healing by reclaiming Shakespeare as a borrower, adapter, and creator of language whose oeuvre has too often been mobilized in the service of a culturally specific English-language whiteness that cannot extricate itself from its origins within the establishment of European/British colonialism/imperialism.

[more]
cover of Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics

Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics

Frederick Luis Aldama; Foreword by John Jennings; Afterword by Javier Hernandez

University of Arizona Press, 2017

Winner of the 2018 Eisner Award Winner for Best Scholarly/Academic Work

Whether good or evil, beautiful or ugly, smart or downright silly, able-bodied or differently abled, gay or straight, male or female, young or old, Latinx superheroes in mainstream comic book stories are few and far between. It is as if finding the Latinx presence in the DC and Marvel worlds requires activation of superheroic powers.

Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics blasts open barriers with a swift kick. It explores deeply and systematically the storyworld spaces inhabited by brown superheroes in mainstream comic book storyworlds: print comic books, animation, TV, and film. It makes visible and lets loose the otherwise occluded and shackled. Leaving nothing to chance, it sheds light on how creators (authors, artists, animators, and directors) make storyworlds that feature Latinos/as, distinguishing between those that we can and should evaluate as well done and those we can and should evaluate as not well done.

The foremost expert on Latinx comics, Frederick Luis Aldama guides us through the full archive of all the Latinx superheros in comics since the 1940s. Aldama takes us where the superheroes live—the barrios, the hospitals, the school rooms, the farm fields—and he not only shows us a view to the Latinx content, sometimes deeply embedded, but also provokes critical inquiry into the way storytelling formats distill and reconstruct real Latinos/as.

Thoroughly entertaining but seriously undertaken, Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics allows us to truly see how superhero comic book storyworlds are willfully created in ways that make new our perception, thoughts, and feelings.
[more]
cover of Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century

Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century

Edited by Frederick Luis Aldama

University of Arizona Press, 2022

Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century offers an expansive and critical look at contemporary television by and about U.S. Latinx communities. This volume is comprehensive in its coverage while diving into detailed and specific examples as it navigates the complex and ever-changing world of Latinx representation and creation in television.

In this volume, editor Frederick Luis Aldama brings together leading experts who show how Latinx TV is shaped by historical, social, cultural, regional, and global contexts. Contributors address head on harmful stereotypes in Latinx representation while giving key insights to a positive path forward. TV narratives by and about Latinx people exist across all genres. In this century, we see Latinx people in sitcoms, sci-fi, noir, soap operas, rom-coms, food shows, dramas, action-adventure, and more. Latinx people appear in television across all formats, from quick webisodes, to serialized big-arc narratives, to animation and everything in between. The diverse array of contributors to this volume delve into this rich landscape of Latinx TV from 2000 to today, spanning the ever-widening range of genres and platforms.

Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century argues that Latinx TV is not just television—it’s an entire movement. Digital spaces and streaming platforms today have allowed for Latinx representation on TV that speaks to Latinx people and non-Latinx people alike, bringing rich and varied Latinx cultures into mainstream television and addressing urbanization, immigration, family life, language, politics, gender, sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity.

Once heavily underrepresented and harmfully stereotypical, Latinx representation on TV is beginning to give careful nuance to regional, communal, and familial experiences among U.S. Latinx people. This volume unpacks the negative implications of older representation and celebrates the progress of new representation, recognizing that television has come a long way, but there is still a lot of important work to do for truly diverse and inclusive representation.
 
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cover of Latinx Teens: U.S. Popular Culture on the Page, Stage, and Screen

Latinx Teens

U.S. Popular Culture on the Page, Stage, and Screen

Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera

University of Arizona Press, 2022

What can Latinx youth contribute to critical conversations on culture, politics, identity, and representation? Latinx Teens answers this question and more by offering an energetic, in-depth look at how Latinx teenagers influence twenty-first-century U.S. popular culture.

In this exciting new book, Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera explore the diverse ways that contemporary mainstream film, television, theater, and young adult literature invokes, constructs, and interprets adolescent Latinidad. Latinx Teens shows how coming-of-age Latinx representation is performed in mainstream media, and how U.S. audiences consume Latinx characters and stories. Despite the challenges that the Latinx community face in both real and fictional settings, Latinx teens in pop culture forge spaces that institutionalize Latinidad. Teen characters make Latinx adolescence mainstream and situate teen characters as both in and outside their Latinx communities and U.S. mainstream culture, conveying the complexities of “fitting in,” and refusing to fit in all at the same time.

Fictional teens such as Spider-Man’s Miles Morales, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter’s Julia Reyes, Party of Five’s Acosta siblings, and In the Heights’s Nina Rosario comprise a growing body of pop culture media that portray young Latinxs as three-dimensional individuals who have agency, authenticity, and serious charisma. Teenagers and young adults have always had the power to manifest social change, and this book acknowledges, celebrates, and investigates how Latinx teens in popular culture take on important current issues.

With a dynamic interdisciplinary approach, Latinx Teens explores how Latinxs on the cusp of adulthood challenge, transform, expand, and reimagine Latinx identities and their relationships to mainstream U.S. popular culture in the twenty-first century.

The book makes a critical intervention into Latinx studies, youth studies, and media cultures. Students and scholars alike will benefit from the book’s organization, complete with chapters that focus on specific mediums and conclude with suggestions for further reading and viewing. As the first book that specifically examines Latinx adolescence in popular culture, Latinx Teens insists that we must privilege the stories of Latinx teenagers in television, film, theater, and literature to get to the heart of Latinx popular culture. Exploring themes around representation, identity, gender, sexuality, and race, the works explored in this groundbreaking volume reveal that there is no single way to be Latinx, and show how Latinx youth are shaping the narrative of the Latinx experience for a more inclusive future.
 
 
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cover of Leadership From the Margins: Women and Civil Society Organizations in Argentina, Chile, and El Salvador

Leadership From the Margins

Women and Civil Society Organizations in Argentina, Chile, and El Salvador

Cosgrove, Serena

Rutgers University Press, 2010

Women have experienced decades of economic and political repression across Latin America, where many nations are built upon patriarchal systems of power. However, a recent confluence of political, economic, and historical factors has allowed for the emergence of civil society organizations (CSOs) that afford women a voice throughout the region.

Leadership from the Margins describes and analyzes the unique leadership styles and challenges facing the women leaders of CSOs in Argentina, Chile, and El Salvador. Based on ethnographic research, Serena Cosgrove's analysis offers a nuanced account of the distinct struggles facing women, and how differences of class, political ideology, and ethnicity have informed their outlook and organizing strategies. Using a gendered lens, she reveals the power and potential of women's leadership to impact the direction of local, regional, and global development agendas.
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cover of Learning to Be Latino: How Colleges Shape Identity Politics

Learning to Be Latino

How Colleges Shape Identity Politics

Reyes, Daisy Verduzco

Rutgers University Press, 2018

In Learning to Be Latino, sociologist Daisy Verduzco Reyes paints a vivid picture of Latino student life at a liberal arts college, a research university, and a regional public university, outlining students’ interactions with one another, with non-Latino peers, and with faculty, administrators, and the outside community. Reyes identifies the normative institutional arrangements that shape the social relationships relevant to Latino students’ lives, including school size, the demographic profile of the student body, residential arrangements, the relationship between students and administrators, and how well diversity programs integrate students through cultural centers and retention centers. Together these characteristics create an environment for Latino students that influences how they interact, identify, and come to understand their place on campus.
 
Drawing on extensive ethnographic observations, Reyes shows how college campuses shape much more than students’ academic and occupational trajectories; they mold students’ ideas about inequality and opportunity in America, their identities, and even how they intend to practice politics.  
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cover of Learning to Lead: Grassroots Organizing in Immigrant Communities

Learning to Lead

Grassroots Organizing in Immigrant Communities

Veronica Terriquez

Russell Sage Foundation, 2026

Children of immigrants make up more than one in four people in the United States under the age of thirty. Amid today’s multipronged attacks on immigrant communities and growing threats to democratic participation, these young people often encounter significant barriers to political participation. Despite these challenges, some children of immigrants and refugees engage in nonpartisan grassroots campaigns, addressing issues such as education, health, environmental justice, immigrant rights, housing, and voting rights. In Learning to Lead, sociologist Veronica Terriquez examines how youth organizing groups facilitate the civic and political engagement of low-income, second-generation immigrant adolescents, enabling them to collectively exercise power alongside their non-immigrant peers and adult allies.

Drawing on extensive survey, semi-structured interview, and other data, Terriquez shows that nonprofit youth organizing groups strengthen adolescents’ capacity to address the systemic challenges facing their communities through political engagement. Although these groups vary in the quality of their programming, they generally share a commitment to supporting young people’s healthy development, offer a critical form of civics education, and provide extensive guidance on how to participate in civic life. These groups adapt their programming in response to local demographic and political dynamics.

Many adolescents who join grassroots organizing groups face overlapping stresses related to poverty, immigration status, neighborhood violence, and other hardships. In response, youth organizing groups create spaces that support emotional well-being while also encouraging academic success and job-readiness. At the same time, they help young people develop a critical understanding of social inequality, power, and public policy. Through ethnic studies workshops and other activities, youth explore their own identities and learn about the histories and struggles of diverse communities.

This education often motivates second-generation immigrant and refugee youth to work in solidarity with their non-immigrant Black and Indigenous peers and deepens their understanding of the historical, economic, and political roots of community problems, as well as potential policy solutions. Unlike many youth-focused interventions, organizing groups also provide sustained, hands-on training in how to collectively exercise their voice in policy debates and government elections, effectively functioning as civic apprenticeships. Staff and experienced members mentor newer participants in basic civic skills such as public speaking, event planning, and community outreach, while also coaching them on strategies for mobilize peers and adult allies to contribute to nonpartisan campaigns.

Because of these intensive and formative experiences, adolescents who participate in youth organizing during high school tend to remain highly active in civic life into early adulthood. Terriquez concludes that these groups offer important lessons for schools and other youth-serving institutions seeking to strengthen engagement in a multiracial democracy. 

Learning to Lead offers a thorough examination of the role of how young people acquire the capacities to become a meaningful political force.

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