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Out of the “lemons” handed to Mexican American workers in Corona, California--low pay, segregated schooling, inadequate housing, and racial discrimination--Mexican men and women made “lemonade” by transforming leisure spaces such as baseball games, parades, festivals, and churches into politicized spaces where workers voiced their grievances, debated strategies for  advancement, and built solidarity. Using oral history interviews, extensive citrus company records, and his own experiences in Corona, José Alamillo argues that Mexican Americans helped lay the groundwork for civil rights struggles and electoral campaigns in the post-World War II era.

Based on more than a decade of research, Making a Global Immigrant Neighborhood charts the evolution of Sunset Park--with a densely concentrated working-poor and racially diverse immigrant population--from the late 1960s to its current status as one of New York City's most vibrant neighborhoods. 

Tarry Hum shows how processes of globalization, such as shifts in low-wage labor markets and immigration patterns, shaped the neighborhood. She explains why Sunset Park's future now depends on Asian and Latino immigrant collaborations in advancing common interests in community building, civic engagement, entrepreneurialism, and sustainability planning. She shows, too, how residents' responses to urban development policies and projects and the capital represented by local institutions and banks foster community activism. 

Hum pays close attention to the complex social, political, and spatial dynamics that forge a community and create new models of leadership as well as coalitions. The evolution of Sunset Park so astutely depicted in this book suggests new avenues for studying urban change and community development.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2023

Large numbers of Latino migrants began to arrive in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the 1950s. They joined a small but established Spanish-speaking community of people from Texas, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. Delia Fernández-Jones merges storytelling with historical analysis to recapture the placemaking practices that these Mexicans, Tejanos, and Puerto Ricans used to create a new home for themselves. Faced with entrenched white racism and hostility, Latinos of different backgrounds formed powerful relationships to better secure material needs like houses and jobs and to recreate community cultural practices. Their pan-Latino solidarity crossed ethnic and racial boundaries and shaped activist efforts that emphasized working within the system to advocate for social change. In time, this interethnic Latino alliance exploited cracks in both overt and structural racism and attracted white and Black partners to fight for equality in social welfare programs, policing, and education.

Groundbreaking and revelatory, Making the MexiRican City details how disparate Latino communities came together to respond to social, racial, and economic challenges.

This poignant collection brings together powerful testimonios from Chicanx and Latinx patients, family members, caregivers, and community advocates who have faced el maldito cáncer. Authors share first-person narratives of illness, fear, love, solidarity, and resilience, illuminating how Latinx communities navigate cancer journeys within a complex and often inequitable health-care system.

The contributors—ranging from students and community members to renowned scholars and artists—offer their stories through essays, creative nonfiction, poetry, bilingual chapters, and drawings. 

These testimonios honor the diverse ways Latinxs process and communicate the emotional, physical, and cultural realities of cancer. Each section is framed by a short editor introduction that highlights key themes and invites readers to reflect on the resonant insights each story brings. Across four sections—patient voices, family members, community perspectives, and closing reflections—the book reveals how individuals confront illness with courage and how families and communities create networks of care grounded in culture, love, and collective strength.

Exposing physical and emotional vulnerabilities, instances of pain, suffering, worry, and anguish, Maldito Cáncer also opens a space for healing and connection. It offers a new lens to understanding cancer through culturally informed, justice-centered narratives. These acts of testimoniando offer a gift to us: resistance, connection, and hope.

Contributors
Alfonso Aranda
Cathy Arellano
Estela Mara Bensimon
Cindy Camacho-Gutierrez
Daniela A. Carreon
Angie Chabram
Natalia Deeb-Sossa
Yvette G. Flores
Fran García Vásquez
Jennifer Gottlieb
Osa Hidalgo de la Riva
Ekta Kandhway
Skye Kelty
Jorge Antonio Losoya
Dalia Magaña
Maribel Martínez
Pedro Noguera
Lorraine Ramos
Mónica Torreiro-Casal
Rita E. Urquijo-Ruiz
Patricia Zavella

2020 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) Book Award Winner
Honorable Mention, Ramirez Family Award for Most Significant Scholarly Book, Texas Institute of Letters, 2019

Managed Migrations examines the concurrent development of a border agricultural industry and changing methods of border enforcement in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas during the past century.

Needed at one moment, scorned at others, Mexican agricultural workers have moved back and forth across the US–Mexico border for the past century. In South Texas, Anglo growers’ dreams of creating a modern agricultural empire depended on continuous access to Mexican workers. While this access was officially regulated by immigration laws and policy promulgated in Washington, DC, in practice the migration of Mexican labor involved daily, on-the-ground negotiations among growers, workers, and the US Border Patrol. In a very real sense, these groups set the parameters of border enforcement policy.

Managed Migrations examines the relationship between immigration laws and policy and the agricultural labor relations of growers and workers in South Texas and El Paso during the 1940s and 1950s. Cristina Salinas argues that immigration law was mainly enacted not in embassies or the halls of Congress but on the ground, as a result of daily decisions by the Border Patrol that growers and workers negotiated and contested. She describes how the INS devised techniques to facilitate high-volume yearly deportations and shows how the agency used these enforcement practices to manage the seasonal agricultural labor migration across the border. Her pioneering research reveals the great extent to which immigration policy was made at the local level, as well as the agency of Mexican farmworkers who managed to maintain their mobility and kinship networks despite the constraints of grower paternalism and enforcement actions by the Border Patrol.

Son Jarocho was born as the regional sound of Veracruz but over time became a Mexican national genre, even transnational, genre—a touchstone of Chicano identity in the United States. Mario Barradas and Son Jarocho traces a musical journey from the Gulf Coast to interior Mexico and across the border, describing the transformations of Son Jarocho along the way.

This comprehensive cultural study pairs ethnographic and musicological insights with an oral history of the late Mario Barradas, one of Son Jarocho’s preeminent modern musicians. Chicano musician Francisco González offers an insider’s account of Barradas’s influence and Son Jarocho’s musical qualities, while Rafael Figueroa Hernández delves into Barradas’s recordings and films. Yolanda Broyles-González examines the interplay between Son Jarocho’s indigenous roots and contemporary role in Mexican and US society. The result is a nuanced portrait of a vital and evolving musical tradition.

Merengue—the quintessential Dominican dance music—has a long and complex history, both on the island and in the large immigrant community in New York City. In this ambitious work, Paul Austerlitz unravels the African and Iberian roots of merengue and traces its growth under dictator Rafael Trujillo and its renewed popularity as an international music.

Using extensive interviews as well as written commentaries, Austerlitz examines the historical and contemporary contexts in which merengue is performed and danced, its symbolic significance, its social functions, and its musical and choreographic structures. He tells the tale of merengue's political functions, and of its class and racial significance. He not only explores the various ethnic origins of this Ibero-African art form, but points out how some Dominicans have tried to deny its African roots.

In today's global society, mass culture often marks ethnic identity. Found throughout Dominican society, both at home and abroad, merengue is the prime marker of Dominican identity. By telling the story of this dance music, the author captures the meaning of mass and folk expression in contemporary ethnicity as well as the relationship between regional, national, and migrant culture and between rural/regional and urban/mass culture. Austerlitz also traces the impact of migration and global culture on the native music, itself already a vibrant intermixture of home-grown merengue forms.

From rural folk idiom to transnational mass music, merengue has had a long and colorful career. Its well-deserved popularity will make this book a must read for anyone interested in contemporary music; its complex history will make the book equally indispensable to anyone interested in cultural studies.

Through the concept of mestiza/o melancholia, scholar Gabriela Spears-Rico offers a new way to think about the relationship between mestizaje and indigeneity in Mexico. For Spears-Rico, the concept is a longing for the lost part of one’s identity, manifested in touristic visits and material appropriations of folklorized indigeneity, yet unconcerned with political reparations for Indigenous people.

Relying on a rich ethnography in mestiza/o and P’urhépecha pueblos in Michoacán, the book examines mestiza/o mourning and melancholia as it appears in Day of the Dead tourism and in Virgin of Guadalupe worship among Mexican mestizos. This book centers Indigenous resistance, articulating a P’urhépecha critique of regional necropolitics and obstinate appropriations, arguing for the need to decolonize mestizaje. A deep conversation with P’urhépecha dissent, this book elevates the need for solidarity with current Indigenous movements in a region fraught by extractive settler colonialism.

Mestiza/o Melancholia challenges readers to rethink identity, tourism, and belonging in Mexico.

The Mexican American population is the fastest growing major racial/ethnic group in the United States. During the decade 1970–1980, the Mexican origin population increased from 4.5 million to 8.7 million persons. High fertility, not immigration, was responsible for nearly two-thirds of this growth.

Recent and historical evidence shows that women of Mexican origin or descent bear significantly more children than other white women in the United States. Mexican American Fertility Patterns clarifies the nature and magnitude of these fertility differences by analyzing patterns of childbearing both across ethnic groups and within the Mexican American population.

Using data from the 1970 and 1980 U.S. Censuses and from the 1976 Survey of Income and Education, the authors evaluate various hypotheses of cultural, social, demographic, and/or economic factors as determinants of fertility differences. Empirical analyses center on the interrelationships between fertility and generational status, language usage and proficiency, and female education. This timely report concludes that Mexican American fertility is closest to that of other whites under conditions of greater access to the opportunity structures of the society.

Honorable Mention, Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award, presented by the Racial and Ethnic Minorities Section of the American Sociological Association, 2015

With Mexican Americans constituting a large and growing segment of U.S. society, their assimilation trajectory has become a constant source of debate. Some believe Mexican Americans are following the path of European immigrants toward full assimilation into whiteness, while others argue that they remain racialized as nonwhite. Drawing on extensive interviews with Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants in Texas, Dowling’s research challenges common assumptions about what informs racial labeling for this population. Her interviews demonstrate that for Mexican Americans, racial ideology is key to how they assert their identities as either in or outside the bounds of whiteness. Emphasizing the link between racial ideology and racial identification, Dowling offers an insightful narrative that highlights the complex and highly contingent nature of racial identity.

Today, ethnic Mexicans and other Latinos make up the largest population group in California, and in the Santa Clara Valley they represent roughly 30 percent of residents, a proportion that has remained steady for nearly two centuries. Despite this population’s long presence as some of the earliest non-Indigenous settlers in the region and their major contributions to its economy, culture, and development, the history of ethnic Mexicans and other Latinos in the valley has been left untold. Much historical writing by local scholars has focused on ethnic Mexicans before 1846, often implying that their meaningful presence declined after the U.S. gained control of California. As a result, few scholarly works address ethnic Mexican history in the Santa Clara Valley after statehood.

Mexican Colonias in the Santa Clara Valley examines the formation and growth of ethnic Mexican neighborhoods from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. Author Gregorio Mora-Torres traces continuity from Californios in the San José Pueblo to later arrivals of ethnic Mexicans from Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, highlighting their efforts to build community while working in agriculture and other manual labor. Despite economic hardship, these communities developed rich cultural and social traditions, including celebrations, entertainment, sports, and civic life. The book also explores midcentury transformation, including tensions between assimilation and cultural retention and the rise of political activism in the early 1960s.

Drawing on Anglo-American newspaper accounts and Mexican, Mexican American, and other Latino perspectives from El Excentrico (1949–1981), the study reconstructs narratives of identity, visibility, and change in the Santa Clara Valley over time.

Urban Los Angeles is the setting in which Elaine Miller has collected her narratives from Mexican-Americans. The Mexican folk tradition, varied and richly expressive of the inner life not only of a people but also of the individual as each lives it and personalizes it, is abundantly present in the United States. Since it is in the urban centers that most Mexican-Americans have lived, this collection represents an important contribution to the study of that tradition and to the study of the changes urban life effects on traditional folklore.

The collection includes sixty-two legendary narratives and twenty traditional tales. The legendary narratives deal with the virgins and saints as well as with such familiar characters as the vanishing hitchhiker, the headless horseman, and the llorona. Familiar characters appear in the traditional tales—Juan del Oso, Blancaflor, Pedro de Ordimalas, and others. Elaine Miller concludes that the traditional tales are dying out in the city because tale telling itself is not suited to the fast pace of modern urban life, and the situations and characters in the tales are not perceived by the people to be meaningfully related to the everyday challenges and concerns of that life. The legendary tales survive longer in an urban setting because, although containing fantastic elements, they are related to the beliefs and hopes of the narrator—even in the city one may be led to buried treasure on some dark night by a mysterious woman.

The penchant of the informants for the fantastic in many of their tales often reflects their hopes and fears, such as their dreams of suddenly acquiring wealth or their fears of being haunted by the dead. Miller closely observes the teller's relation to the stories—to the duendes, the ánimas, Death, God, the devil—and she notes the tension on the part of the informant in his relation to their religion.

The material is documented according to several standard tale and motif indices and is placed within the context of the larger body of Hispanic folk tradition by the citation of parallel versions throughout the Hispanic world. The tales, transcribed from taped interviews, are presented in colloquial Spanish accompanied by summaries in English.

A fascinating examination of masculinity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexico

The first of its kind and a powerful challenge to customary views of gender and sexuality in the life and literature of Mexico, this book traces literary representations of masculinity in Mexico from independence in 1810 to the 1960s, and shows how these intersect with the constructions of nation and nationality.