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Unlock the stories of Pablo Neruda’s rare nineteenth-century carved-wood ship figurehead collection in Chile, why they mattered in his tumultuous life, and how we benefit from them now.

Poet Pablo Neruda’s nineteenth-century ship figurehead collection in Chile is one of the most significant in the world. Containing carved wood images of dramatically postured men and women, these figures are now better understood due to years of research, a willingness to challenge Neruda’s ever-changing stories about them, and a realization that the names Neruda chose for his figureheads perhaps had more to do with his life than theirs. The rhythm and beauty of Neruda’s worn wood figures is counterpoint to his own tumultuous life as an author, politician, and communist dissident.

Collecting ship figureheads was central to Neruda’s passion for owning things made of wood, a material he said was his best friend, and for standing out among others as he gradually built the public persona that helped move him toward winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. With his choir of immobilized figureheads stationed upright in his living room and facing the Pacific Ocean, Neruda was surrounded by dramatic images from the sea that ignited his most powerful feelings. 

The nineteenth century saw figureheads on the bows of ships of sail and steam, yet when a figurehead was lost or removed, its history soon disappeared. The significant ship figureheads that Neruda avidly collected preserve that history and reveal new dimensions concerning his life and work. Each year, his collection is viewed by thousands of visitors to the Pablo Neruda Foundation’s house museum at Isla Negra.

An in-depth look at how Latina/x artists transform art into activism and reclaim space in the Twin Cities

In Place-Keepers, Jessica Lopez Lyman examines how Latina/x artists in the Twin Cities navigate and challenge the region’s deep-seated racial injustices. Using “Inter-Latina movidas”—subtle yet strategic actions through which Latina/x artists forge solidarities, mobilize for justice, and reclaim space—these artists respond to systemic oppression through public performances and behind-the-scenes negotiations with the state, nonprofits, and other institutions.

Centering Latina/x women and gender nonconforming artists from Chicana/Mexicana, U.S. Central American, and Caribbean backgrounds, Place-Keepers confronts reductionist theories of Latinidad that flatten ethnic and racial identities. It demonstrates how the creative and activist practices of these cultural organizers address urgent social struggles from resisting gentrification and environmental destruction to opposing police violence. Lopez Lyman situates these efforts within the broader history of racial justice organizing in Minnesota, tracing a lineage of resistance that long precedes the 2020 Minneapolis uprising following the murder of George Floyd.

Through firsthand accounts and revealing case studies, Place-Keepers charts how these artists harness aesthetics as a tool for movement-building, strategically redistributing resources and transforming policy. Expanding the foundational concept of “movidas” in Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x studies by highlighting maneuvers of infiltration, improvisation, individual ritual, and interdependence, Lopez Lyman establishes a crucial framework for understanding art as activism.

After World War II, the concept of borders became unsettled, especially after the rise of subaltern and multicultural studies in the 1980s. Art at the U.S.-Mexico border came to a turning point at the beginning of that decade with the election of U.S. President Ronald Reagan. Beginning with a political history of the border, with an emphasis on the Chicano movement and its art production, Ila Sheren explores the forces behind the shift in thinking about the border in the late twentieth century.

Particularly in the world of visual art, borders have come to represent a space of performance rather than a geographical boundary, a cultural terrain meant to be negotiated rather than a physical line. From 1980 forward, Sheren argues, the border became portable through performance and conceptual work. This dematerialization of the physical border after the 1980s worked in two opposite directions—the movement of border thinking to the rest of the world, as well as the importation of ideas to the border itself. Beginning with site-specific conceptual artwork of the 1980s, particularly the performances of the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, Sheren shows how these works reconfigured the border as an active site. Sheren moves on to examine artists such as Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Coco Fusco, and Marcos Ramirez “ERRE.” Although Sheren places emphasis on the Chicano movement and its art production, this groundbreaking book suggests possibilities for the expansion of the concept of portability to contemporary art projects beyond the region.

In recent decades, Chicana/o literary and cultural productions have dramatically shifted from a nationalist movement that emphasized unity to one that openly celebrates diverse experiences. Charting this transformation, Postnationalism in Chicana/o Literature and Culture looks to the late 1970s, during a resurgence of global culture, as a crucial turning point whose reverberations in twenty-first-century late capitalism have been profound.

Arguing for a postnationalism that documents the radical politics and aesthetic processes of the past while embracing contemporary cultural and sociopolitical expressions among Chicana/o peoples, Hernández links the multiple forces at play in these interactions. Reconfiguring text-based analysis, she looks at the comparative development of movements within women's rights and LGBTQI activist circles. Incorporating economic influences, this unique trajectory leads to a new conception of border studies as well, rethinking the effects of a restructured masculinity as a symbol of national cultural transformation. Ultimately positing that globalization has enhanced the emergence of new Chicana/o identities, Hernández cultivates important new understandings of borderlands identities and postnationalism itself.

2025 ATHE Outstanding Book Award Finalist

• 2025 ATDS John W. Frick Book Award Finalist
• 2025 MLA Prize in U.S. Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies Honorable Mention

Pragmatic Liberation and the Politics of Puerto Rican Diasporic Drama explores the work of a unique group of playwrights—Puerto Rican dramatists writing in the United States—who offer a model of political engagement. As members of the Puerto Rican diaspora, they have a heightened awareness of the systematic discrimination and the colonial citizenship created by Puerto Rico’s territorial status. Pragmatic Liberation analyzes the work of established playwrights as well as work that has previously received little attention in the world of theater studies, including René Marqués’s Palm Sunday. The book demonstrates the strategies these playwrights use to model a nuanced way of moving toward liberation while being sensitive to the potential impact these actions might have on those closest to us. This is a crucially important model that needs more attention in our currently polarized political moment.

In big cities, major museums and elite galleries tend to dominate our idea of the art world. But beyond the cultural core ruled by these moneyed institutions and their patrons are vibrant, local communities of artists and art lovers operating beneath the high-culture radar. Producing Local Color is a guided tour of three such alternative worlds that thrive in the Chicago neighborhoods of Bronzeville, Pilsen, and Rogers Park.

These three neighborhoods are, respectively, historically African American, predominantly Mexican American, and proudly ethnically mixed. Drawing on her ethnographic research in each place, Diane Grams presents and analyzes the different kinds of networks of interest and support that sustain the making of art outside of the limelight. And she introduces us to the various individuals—from cutting-edge artists to collectors to municipal planners—who work together to develop their communities, honor their history, and enrich the experiences of their neighbors through art. Along with its novel insights into these little examined art worlds, Producing Local Color also provides a thought-provoking account of how urban neighborhoods change and grow.

This volume offers the most wide-ranging and comprehensive collection of Puerto Rican poetry available in English. It includes the work of sixty-four poets, as well as many previously inaccessible selections from Puerto Rico's tradition of popular verse forms—coplas, décimas, bombas—produced by anonymous writers. All are presented in English, contextualized and individually introduced by Roberto Márquez, a distinguished translator and literary scholar.

Book I, “Before Columbus and After, 1400–1820,” focuses on the foundational origins of Puerto Rican poetry and the clash of competing visions embodied in the rich and heterogeneous corpus of anonymous popular verse forms. Book II, “The Creole Matrix: Notions of Nation, 1821–1950s,” concentrates on the period in which a distinctively Puerto Rican consciousness emerged and the island's subsequent experience as a U. S. colony in the decades after the Spanish-Cuban-American War up to formal establishment of Commonwealth status. Books III and IV are devoted, respectively, to the era of insular “Critique, Revolt, and Renewal” in the mid-twentieth century, and to the “New Creoles, New Definitions” that developed in the late twentieth century, including the distinct and parallel growth of Puerto Rican poetry in the mainland United States.

In addition to a general introduction and concise biographical profiles of each poet, Márquez provides a detailed “Chronology” of the history of the island that has shaped the poets and informed their work. The resulting volume is a major contribution to our understanding and appreciation of Puerto Rican literature and the heterogeneous society in which it has been produced.