Results by title

• 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.

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

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

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.

Reclaiming Southern history through the voices, memories, and experiences of African Americans.

In Laying Claim: African American Cultural Memory and Southern Identity, Patricia Davis identifies the Civil War as the central narrative around which official depictions of southern culture have been defined. Because that narrative largely excluded African American points of view, the resulting southern identity was monolithically white. Davis traces how the increasing participation of black public voices in the realms of Civil War memory—battlefields, museums, online communities—has dispelled the mirage of “southernness” as a stolid cairn of white culture and has begun to create a more fluid sense of southernness that welcomes contributions by all of the region’s peoples.

Laying Claim offers insightful and penetrating examinations of African American participation in Civil War reenactments; the role of black history museums in enriching representations of the Civil War era with more varied interpretations; and the internet as a forum within which participants exchange and create historical narratives that offer alternatives to unquestioned and dominant public memories. From this evolving cultural landscape, Davis demonstrates how simplistic caricatures of African American experiences are giving way to more authentic, expansive, and inclusive interpretations of southernness.

As a case-study and example of change, Davis cites the evolution of depictions of life at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Where visitors to the site once encountered narratives that repeated the stylized myth of Monticello as a genteel idyll, modern accounts of Jefferson’s day offer a holistic, inclusive, and increasingly honest view of Monticello as the residents on every rung of the social ladder experienced it.

Contemporary violence and attacks about or inspired by the causes, outcomes, and symbols of the Civil War, even one hundred and fifty years after its end, add urgency to Davis’s argument that the control and creation of public memories of that war is an issue of concern not only to scholars but all Americans. Her hopeful examination of African American participation in public memory illuminates paths by which this enduring ideological impasse may find resolutions.

A steel town daughter’s search for truth and beauty in Birmingham, Alabama

“As Birmingham goes, so goes the nation,” Fred Shuttlesworth observed when he invited Martin Luther King Jr. to the city for the transformative protests of 1963. From the height of the Civil Rights Movement through its long aftermath, images of police dogs, fire hoses and four girls murdered when Ku Klux Klan members bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church have served as an uncomfortable racial mirror for the nation. Like many white people who came of age in the Civil Rights Movement’s wake, Julie Buckner Armstrong knew little about this history. Only after moving away and discovering writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker did she realize how her hometown and family were part of a larger, ongoing story of struggle and injustice.

When Armstrong returned to Birmingham decades later to care for her aging mother, Shuttlesworth’s admonition rang in her mind. By then an accomplished scholar and civil rights educator, Armstrong found herself pondering the lessons Birmingham holds for a twenty-first century America. Those lessons extended far beyond what a 2014 Teaching Tolerance report describes as the common distillation of the Civil Rights Movement into “two names and four words: Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parks, and ‘I have a dream.’” Seeking to better understand a more complex local history, its connection to broader stories of oppression and resistance, and her own place in relation to it, Armstrong embarked on a journey to unravel the standard Birmingham narrative to see what she would find.

Beginning at the center, with her family’s 1947 arrival to a housing project near the color line, within earshot of what would become known as Dynamite Hill, Armstrong works her way over time and across the map. Weaving in stories of her white working-class family, classmates, and others not traditionally associated with Birmingham’s civil rights history, including members of the city’s LGBTQ community, she forges connections between the familiar and lesser-known. The result is a nuanced portrait of Birmingham--as seen in public housing, at old plantations, in segregated neighborhoods, across contested boundary lines, over mountains, along increasingly polluted waterways, beneath airport runways, on highways cutting through town, and under the gaze of the iconic statue of Vulcan.

In her search for truth and beauty in Birmingham, Armstrong draws on the powers of place and storytelling to dig into the cracks, complicating easy narratives of civil rights progress. Among the discoveries she finds in America’s racial mirror is a nation that has failed to recognize itself in the horrific images from Birmingham’s past and to acknowledge the continuing inequalities that make up the Civil Right’s Movement’s unfinished business. Learning from Birmingham reminds us that stories of civil rights, structural oppression, privilege, abuse, race and gender bias, and inequity are difficult and complicated, but their telling, especially from multiple stakeholder perspectives, is absolutely necessary.
 

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.

For decades queer women in the Sinophone world have followed a strict dating custom: a lesbian relationship usually consists of a masculine partner, known as a tomboy, and a feminine counterpart. In the 2010s, however, many queer women have come to reject this custom and abandon their own former identities as tomboys. Leaving The Tomboy Behind follows their journey moving beyond lesbian masculinity and turning towards global LGBTQ+ media from Japan, Thailand, and the United States to explore new forms of gender expressions. Carman K. M. Fung offers a rich ethnography of the impacts media has had on queer Sinophone women’s lives, focusing on transnational interpretations and misinterpretations, and how media globalization shapes viewers’ perceptions of unfamiliar places. Through a combination of personal interviews and analysis of the global media these communities consume, Fung traces the genealogy of the tomboy identity in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in relation to global queer and trans cultures.

Despite St. Louis’s mid-twentieth-century reputation as a conservative and sleepy midwestern metropolis, the city and its surrounding region have long played host to dynamic forms of social-movement organizing. This was especially the case during the 1960s and 1970s, when a new generation of local activists lent their energies to the ongoing struggles for Black freedom, lesbian and gay liberation, feminist social transformations, environmental protection, an end to the Vietnam War, and more. This volume, the first of its kind, offers fifteen scholarly contributions that together bring into focus the exceptional range of progressive activist projects that took shape in a single midwestern city during these tumultuous decades.

In contrast to scholarship that seeks to interpret the era’s social-movement initiatives in a primarily national context, the works presented in this expansive collection emphasize the importance of locality, neighborhood, community institutions, and rooted social networks. Documenting wrenching forces of metropolitan change as well as grassroots resilience, Left in the Midwest shows us how place powerfully shaped agendas, worldviews, and opportunities for the disparate groups that dedicated themselves to progressive visions for their city. By revising our sense of the region’s past, this volume also expands our sense of the possibilities that the future may hold for activist movements seeking change in St. Louis and beyond.
 

Traces the changing meanings of lynching and examines the political power of lynching as metaphor

Between 1880 and 1930, thousands of African Americans were lynched in the United States. Beyond the horrific violence inflicted on these individuals, lynching terrorized whole communities and became a defining characteristic of Southern race relations in the Jim Crow era. As spectacle, lynching was intended to serve as a symbol of white supremacy. Yet, Jonathan Markovitz notes, the act's symbolic power has endured long after the practice of lynching has largely faded away.

Liberation and Education brings together a collection of essays about Black educators’ and organizations’ quests to cultivate and employ educational strategies for the liberation of Black people. The contributions examine the enduring nature of Black people’s thinking about education prior to and through enslavement to the present. It documents a variety of critical accounts of how Black people have developed ways to free themselves mentally from the legacies of slavery, the view of Black inferiority, and historical and systemic racism.