Results by title

Weaving narratives with gendered analysis and historiography of Mexicans in the Midwest, Mexican Women and the Other Side of Immigration examines the unique transnational community created between San Ignacio Cerro Gordo, Jalisco, and Detroit, Michigan, in the last three decades of the twentieth century, asserting that both the community of origin and the receiving community are integral to an immigrant's everyday life, though the manifestations of this are rife with contradictions.

Exploring the challenges faced by this population since the inception of the Bracero Program in 1942 in constantly re-creating, adapting, accommodating, shaping, and creating new meanings of their environments, Luz María Gordillo emphasizes the gender-specific aspects of these situations. While other studies of Mexican transnational identity focus on social institutions, Gordillo's work introduces the concept of transnational sexualities, particularly the social construction of working-class sexuality. Her findings indicate that many female San Ignacians shattered stereotypes, transgressing traditionally male roles while their husbands lived abroad. When the women themselves immigrated as well, these transgressions facilitated their adaptation in Detroit. Placed within the larger context of globalization, Mexican Women and the Other Side of Immigration is a timely excavation of oral histories, archival documents, and the remnants of three decades of memory.

Carlos Pereda’s Mexico Unveiled is a fresh, idiosyncratic synthesis of twentieth-century Mexican philosophy that puts contemporary debates about Mexican identity politics into a critical perspective. This edition—translated, edited, and introduced by Noell Birondo—brings the Mexican thinker’s ideas to a new English-language audience.

In three engaging essays written in a peerless prose style, Pereda considers the persistent influence of European colonialism on Mexican intellectual life, the politics of inclusion, and the changing ideas of what it means to be Mexican. He identifies three “vices”—social habits, customs, and beliefs inherited from European colonialism—that have influenced the development of Mexican national identity: subaltern fervor, craving for novelty, and nationalist zeal. Pereda demonstrates that these three tendencies have led Mexican intellectuals, and Mexican society more generally, to uncritically adopt a politics of exclusion and destructive nationalist attitudes.

Using a strategy he calls “nomadic” thinking—the act of moving beyond our cultural preconceptions and habits of thinking—Pereda guides readers through a number of examples drawn from Mexican philosophy and culture that illustrate these tendencies. At its core, Mexico Unveiled is an accessible and entertaining introduction to the philosophical themes that have long occupied Pereda’s life and work and Mexican philosophy more generally.

Mexico and Mexicans have been involved in every aspect of making the United States from colonial times until the present. Yet our shared history is a largely untold story, eclipsed by headlines about illegal immigration and the drug war. Placing Mexicans and Mexico in the center of American history, this volume elucidates how economic, social, and cultural legacies grounded in colonial New Spain shaped both Mexico and the United States, as well as how Mexican Americans have constructively participated in North American ways of production, politics, social relations, and cultural understandings.

Combining historical, sociological, and cultural perspectives, the contributors to this volume explore the following topics: the Hispanic foundations of North American capitalism; indigenous peoples’ actions and adaptations to living between Mexico and the United States; U.S. literary constructions of a Mexican “other” during the U.S.-Mexican War and the Civil War; the Mexican cotton trade, which helped sustain the Confederacy during the Civil War; the transformation of the Arizona borderlands from a multiethnic Mexican frontier into an industrializing place of “whites” and “Mexicans”; the early-twentieth-century roles of indigenous Mexicans in organizing to demand rights for all workers; the rise of Mexican Americans to claim middle-class lives during and after World War II; and the persistence of a Mexican tradition of racial/ethnic mixing—mestizaje—as an alternative to the racial polarities so long at the center of American life.

The digital storytelling project Humanizing Deportation invites migrants to present their own stories in the world’s largest and most diverse archive of its kind. Since 2017, more than 300 community storytellers have created their own audiovisual testimonial narratives, sharing their personal experiences of migration and repatriation. With Migrant Feelings, Migrant Knowledge, the project’s coordinator, Robert Irwin, and other team members introduce the project’s innovative participatory methodology, drawing out key issues regarding the human consequences of contemporary migration control regimes, as well as insights from migrants whose world-making endeavors may challenge what we think we know about migration.

In recent decades, migrants in North America have been treated with unprecedented harshness. Migrant Feelings, Migrant Knowledge outlines this recent history, revealing stories both of grave injustice and of seemingly unsurmountable obstacles overcome. As Irwin writes, “The greatest source of expertise on the human consequences of contemporary migration control are the migrants who have experienced them,” and their voices in this searing collection jump off the page and into our hearts and minds.

Death threatens migrants physically during perilous border crossings between Central and North America, but many also experience legal, social, and economic mortality. Rooted in histories of colonialism and conquest, exclusionary policies and practices deliberately take aim at racialized, dispossessed people in transit. Once in the new land, migrants endure a web of systems across every facet of their world—work, home, healthcare, culture, justice—that strips them of their personhood, denies them resources, and creates additional obstacles that deprive them of their ability to live fully.

As laws and policies create ripe conditions for the further extraction of money, resources, and labor power from the dispossessed, the contributors to this vibrant anthology, Migration and Mortality, examine restrictive immigration policies and the broader capitalist systems of exploitation and inequality while highlighting the power of migrants’ collective resistance and resilience. 

The case studies in this timely collection explore border deaths, detention economies, asylum seeking, as well as the public health and mental health of migrants. Ultimately, these examples of oppression and survival contribute to understanding broader movements for life and justice in the Americas.

As interracial unions and multiracial people become more common in the United States, mixed-heritage people have come to be regarded by some as a bellwether of race relations in the country. Is the growth of this population a sign that we are now in a post-racial era and our racial identities no longer impact our daily lives? In Mixed Heritage in the Family,sociologists Carolyn A. Liebler and Miri Song explore how racially mixed people navigate racial boundaries as they choose spouses and raise families.
Liebler and Song break new ground by being the first to combine and integrate the study of three aspects of life for people of mixed racial heritage – identity, spouse choice, and childrearing. This integrated approach reveals how complicated racial identification can be, and how it can be expressed in one’s choice of partner or in how one raises their children. The authors draw on census data and interviews with Asian-White, Black-White, and American Indian/Alaska Native-White mixed people to better understand how their identity choices are related to their choice of spouse and how they racially identify and raise their children.
Increasingly, mixed people in the United States are identifying with multiple races. However, the authors find that mixed-race people are not a monolith and that how and why they identify varies considerably between and within each group. They found several common factors that influenced whether mixed-race people choose to identify as biracial, solely White, or solely as a racial minority. These factors include the history of the specific minority race in the U.S., the racial demographics of where they were raised, their social and cultural exposure to their White and non-White backgrounds, their attachment to their racial backgrounds, and how they are seen racially by others. 
 
The way mixed-heritage people identify was closely tied to the race of their spouse. However, having a White spouse did not necessarily mean the mixed-race person felt disconnected from their non-White heritage. White spouses varied in their racial consciousness and their interest in the culture of their mixed-race spouse’s minority ancestry. The spouse’s race, and the nature of racial overlap between the spouses, was also key in the racial upbringing of a mixed-heritage person’s child. In families where the parents share a minority racial heritage, couples lean into their shared ‘family race’, which guides their parenting choices and family life. Many mixed heritage parents found it important to foster racial pride in their children and combat negative racial stereotypes. 
 
Liebler and Song caution against making superficial predictions about the state of race relations in the U.S. based on an increase in the multiracial population. They show that race has not become less salient in the lives of many mixed-race people—American society is not post-racial. 
 
Mixed Heritage in the Family breaks new ground, provides compelling insights in its examination of the lives of mixed-race people, and shows how complicated racial identification can be.
 
 

Founded in 1997, Mujeres de Maiz (MdM) is an Indigenous Xicana–led spiritual artivist organization and movement by and for women and feminists of color. Chronicling its quarter-century-long herstory, this collection weaves together diverse stories with attention to their larger sociopolitical contexts. The book crosses conventional genre boundaries through the inclusion of poetry, visual art, testimonios, and essays.

MdM’s political-ethical-spiritual commitments, cultural production, and everyday practices are informed by Indigenous and transnational feminist of color artistic, ceremonial, activist, and intellectual legacies. Contributors fuse stories of celebration, love, and spirit-work with an incisive critique of interlocking oppressions, both intimate and structural, encouraging movement toward “a world where many worlds fit.”

The multidisciplinary, intergenerational, and critical-creative nature of the project coupled with the unique subject matter makes the book a must-have for high school and college students, activist-scholars, artists, community organizers, and others invested in social justice and liberation.

2020 Second Place, Best Nonfiction Multi Author, International Latino Book Awards

Collecting the perspectives of scholars who reflect on their own relationships to particular garments, analyze the politics of dress, and examine the role of consumerism and entrepreneurialism in the production of creating and selling a style, meXicana Fashions examines and searches for meaning in these visible, performative aspects of identity.

Focusing primarily on Chicanas but also considering trends connected to other Latin American communities, the authors highlight specific constituencies that are defined by region (“Tejana style,” “L.A. style”), age group (“homie,” “chola”), and social class (marked by haute couture labels such as Carolina Herrera and Oscar de la Renta). The essays acknowledge the complex layers of these styles, which are not mutually exclusive but instead reflect a range of intersections in occupation, origin, personality, sexuality, and fads. Other elements include urban indigenous fashion shows, the shifting quinceañera market, “walking altars” on the Days of the Dead, plus-size clothing, huipiles in the workplace, and dressing in drag. Together, these chapters illuminate the full array of messages woven into a vibrant social fabric.

Community voices are often an underrepresented aspect of our historical and cultural knowledge of the U.S. Southwest.

In this collection, established and emerging scholars draw upon their rootedness in the U.S. Southwest and U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The meXicana contributors use personal and scholarly inquiry to discuss what it means to cultivate spaces of belonging, navigate language policies, and explore and excavate silences in various spaces, among other important themes.

From the recruitment of Latinas for the U.S. Benito Juárez Squadron in World War II, to the early twentieth-century development of bilingual education in Arizona, to new and insightful analyses of Bracero Program participants and their families, the book details little-known oral histories and archival material to present a rich account of lives along the border with emphasis on women and the working class.

As the inaugural publication of the Arizona Crossroads series, readers will find Arizona featured as a central node of borderlands roots and routes. Each section of the book intentionally centers Arizona within broader comparative and cross-state dialogues, alongside chapters that reflect regional concerns in other southwestern states, including Texas, California, Colorado, and New Mexico. Throughout, this volume highlights the ways in which personal experience, community building, and scholarly perspectives can provide a powerful space for community voices.

Contributors 
Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez
Lillian Gorman 
Gloria Holguín Cuádraz
Anita Huízar-Hernández
Christine Marin
Valerie A. Martínez 
Alina R. Méndez
Karen R. Roybal
Yvette J. Saavedra
Liliana Toledo-Guzmán
Andrea Tovar