Results by title

4531 books match the query 'Cultural & Ethnic Studies' and 21 start with q

cover of Q&A: Voices from Queer Asian North America

Q&A

Voices from Queer Asian North America

Edited by Martin F. Manalansan IV, Alice Y. Hom, and Kale Bantigue Fajardo

Temple University Press, 2021

First published in 1998, Q & A: Queer in Asian America, edited by David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom, became a canonical work in Asian American studies and queer studies. This new edition of Q & A is neither a sequel nor an update, but an entirely new work borne out of the progressive political and cultural advances of the queer experiences of Asian North American communities. 

The artists, activists, community organizers, creative writers, poets, scholars, and visual artists that contribute to this exciting new volume make visible the complicated intertwining of sexuality with race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Sections address activism, radicalism, and social justice; transformations in the meaning of Asian-ness and queerness in various mass media issues of queerness in relation to settler colonialism and diaspora; and issues of bodies, health, disability, gender transitions, death, healing, and resilience.

The visual art, autobiographical writings, poetry, scholarly essays, meditations, and analyses of histories and popular culture in the new Q & Agesture to enduring everyday racial-gender-sexual experiences of mis-recognition, micro-aggressions, loss, and trauma when racialized Asian bodies are questioned, pathologized, marginalized, or violated. This anthology seeks to expand the idea of Asian and American in LGBTQ studies.

Contributors: Marsha Aizumi, Kimberly Alidio, Paul Michael (Mike) Leonardo Atienza, Long T. Bui, John Paul (JP) Catungal, Ching-In Chen, Jih-Fei Cheng, Kim Compoc, Sony Coráñez Bolton, D’Lo, Patti Duncan, Chris A. Eng, May Farrales, Joyce Gabiola, C. Winter Han, Douglas S. Ishii, traci kato-kiriyama, Jennifer Lynn Kelly, Mimi Khúc, Anthony Yooshin Kim, Việt Lê, Danni Lin, Glenn D. Magpantay, Leslie Mah, Casey Mecija, Maiana Minahal, Sung Won Park, Thea Quiray Tagle, Emily Raymundo, Vanita Reddy, Eric Estuar Reyes, Margaret Rhee, Thomas Xavier Sarmiento, Pahole Sookkasikon, Amy Sueyoshi, Karen Tongson, Kim Tran, Kay Ulanday Barrett, Reid Uratani, Eric C. Wat, Sasha Wijeyeratne, Syd Yang, Xine Yao, and the editors

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cover of Queer Contiguities of Nigerian Literature

Queer Contiguities of Nigerian Literature

Kerry Manzo

Michigan State University Press, 2026

Queer Contiguities of Nigerian Literature explores how normative ideas of sex and gender have shaped the development of Nigerian literature. Tracing this influence from the rise of mid-twentieth-century modernist writing to the contemporary appearance of LGBTQIA literature, Kerry Manzo presents a new framework for understanding Nigerian literature, one in which sexuality and gender—or more specifically, their containment through national discourses of heteronormativity in colonial and postcolonial Nigeria—are central to its problematics and poetics. Drawing on interdisciplinary research and archival materials, including institutional records, personal letters, small publications, and other ephemera, Manzo illuminates the historical and material conditions that have placed limitations on the literary representation of women and sexual minorities and shaped the national masculine tradition of letters.
 
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cover of Queer Emergent: Scandalous Stories from the Twilight of AIDS in Peru

Queer Emergent

Scandalous Stories from the Twilight of AIDS in Peru

Justin Perez

Duke University Press, 2025

In Queer Emergent, Justin Perez explores how advances in HIV prevention work alongside broader economic and political shifts in global health to shape queer subjectivities. Drawing on ethnographic research among gay and transgender communities in urban Amazonian Peru, Perez describes how queer social worlds emerge through scandalous storytelling—a practice of exaggerating and embellishing stories about everyday life that transgresses social norms and hierarchies. Perez shows that through such storytelling, gay and transgender communities contested the assumptions of global HIV prevention’s shift from the provision of costly antiretrovirals to the mitigation of social conditions like discrimination and stigma. He argues that the global ambition to “End AIDS” by 2030 is not just a technical project oriented at ending the epidemic, but also a project of sexual subjectification and ongoing social transformation. By taking seriously the scandalous stories that gay and transgender Peruvians circulated as they responded to new forms of HIV prevention, Perez reveals how they imagine possibilities of what could be as the effort to end AIDS continues to play out in the present.
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cover of Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan

Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan

Brainer, Amy

Rutgers University Press, 2019

Winner of the 2019 Ruth Benedict Prize for Outstanding Single-Authored Monograph

Interweaving the narratives of multiple family members, including parents and siblings of her queer and trans informants, Amy Brainer analyzes the strategies that families use to navigate their internal differences. In Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan, Brainer looks across generational cohorts for clues about how larger social, cultural, and political shifts have materialized in people’s everyday lives. Her findings bring light to new parenting and family discourses and enduring inequalities that shape the experiences of queer and heterosexual kin alike.
 
Brainer’s research takes her from political marches and support group meetings to family dinner tables in cities and small towns across Taiwan. She speaks with parents and siblings who vary in whether and to what extent they have made peace with having a queer or transgender family member, and queer and trans people who vary in what they hope for and expect from their families of origin. Across these diverse life stories, Brainer uses a feminist materialist framework to illuminate struggles for personal and sexual autonomy in the intimate context of family and home.
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cover of Queer Korea

Queer Korea

Todd A. Henry, editor

Duke University Press, 2020

Since the end of the nineteenth century, the Korean people have faced successive waves of foreign domination, authoritarian regimes, forced dispersal, and divided development. Throughout these turbulent times, “queer” Koreans were ignored, minimized, and erased in narratives of their modern nation, East Asia, and the wider world. This interdisciplinary volume challenges such marginalization through critical analyses of non-normative sexuality and gender variance. Considering both personal and collective forces, the contributors extend individualized notions of queer neoliberalism beyond those typically set in Western queer theory. Along the way, they recount a range of illuminating topics, from shamanic rituals during the colonial era and B-grade comedy films under Cold War dictatorship to female masculinity among today’s youth and transgender confrontations with the resident registration system. More broadly, Queer Korea offers readers new ways of understanding the limits and possibilities of human liberation under exclusionary conditions of modernity in Asia and beyond.

Contributors. Pei Jean Chen, John (Song Pae) Cho, Chung-kang Kim, Todd A. Henry, Merose Hwang, Ruin, Layoung Shin, Shin-ae Ha, John Whittier Treat
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cover of Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings

Queer Migrations

Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings

Eithne Luibheid

University of Minnesota Press, 2005

Emmigration from Latin America and Asia has influenced every aspect of social, political, economic, and cultural life in the United States over the last quarter century. Within the vast scholarship on this wave of immigration, however, little attention has been paid to queer immigrants of color. Focusing particularly on migration from Mexico, Cuba, El Salvador, and the Philippines, Queer Migrations brings together scholars of immigration, citizenship, sexuality, race, and ethnicity to provide analyses of the norms, institutions, and discourses that affect queer immigrants of color, also providing ethnographic studies of how these newcomers have transformed established immigrant communities in Miami, San Francisco, and New York.
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cover of Queer Newark: Stories of Resistance, Love, and Community

Queer Newark

Stories of Resistance, Love, and Community

Whitney Strub

Rutgers University Press, 2024

NJSAA Edited Works Award Winner (2024) 

Histories of gay and lesbian urban life typically focus on major metropolitan areas like San Francisco and New York, opportunity-filled destinations for LGBTQ migrants from across the country. Yet there are many other queer communities in economically depressed cities with majority Black and Hispanic populations that receive far less attention. Though just a few miles from New York, Newark is one of these cities, and its queer histories have been neglected—until now. 
 
Queer Newark charts a history in which working-class people of color are the central actors and in which violence, poverty, and homophobia could never suppress joy, resistance, love, and desire. Drawing from rare archives that range from oral histories to vice squad reports, this collection’s authors uncover the sites and people of Newark’s queer past in bars, discos, ballrooms, and churches. Exploring the intersections of class, race, gender, and sexuality, they offer fresh perspectives on the HIV/AIDS epidemic, community relations with police, Latinx immigration, and gentrification, while considering how to best tell the rich and complex stories of queer urban life. Queer Newark reveals a new side of New Jersey’s largest city while rewriting the history of LGBTQ life in America. 

 
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cover of Queer Objects to the Rescue: Intimacy and Citizenship in Kenya

Queer Objects to the Rescue

Intimacy and Citizenship in Kenya

George Paul Meiu

University of Chicago Press, 2023

Examines forms of intimate citizenship that have emerged in relation to growing anti-homosexual violence in Kenya.
 
Campaigns calling on police and citizens to purge their countries of homosexuality have taken hold across the world. But the “homosexual threat” they claim to be addressing is not always easy to identify. To make that threat visible, leaders, media, and civil society groups have deployed certain objects as signifiers of queerness. In Kenya, for example, bead necklaces, plastics, and even diapers have come to represent the danger posed by homosexual behavior to an essentially “virile” construction of national masculinity.
 
In Queer Objects tothe Rescue, George Paul Meiu explores objects that have played an important and surprising role in both state-led and popular attempts to rid Kenya of various imagined threats to intimate life. Meiu shows that their use in the political imaginary has been crucial to representing the homosexual body as a societal threat and as a target of outrage, violence, and exclusion, while also crystallizing anxieties over wider political and economic instability. To effectively understand and critique homophobia, Meiu suggests, we must take these objects seriously and recognize them as potential sources for new forms of citizenship, intimacy, resistance, and belonging.
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cover of Queer Relajo: Feeling the Nightscapes of Mexicanidad

Queer Relajo

Feeling the Nightscapes of Mexicanidad

David Tenorio

University of Michigan Press, 2025

2026 Dance Studies Association de la Torre Bueno First Book Award Shortlist Finalist

In 2015, Mexico City declared itself a “gay-friendly” city and followed up with a gay tourist guide and new laws permitting changes to gender markers on legal documents, sanctioning same-sex marriage, and allowing joint adoption of children. At the same time, patterns of violence and discrimination against women, trans, and queer people have continued throughout the country. In Queer Relajo, David Tenorio argues that while Mexico City aims to bring visibility to queer sociality, the benefits of legitimizing queer space remain unclear. 

Combining readings of film, digital media, and performance with drag autoethnography, Queer Relajo quite literally plays with how relajo (or playfulness) structures the spaces of queer nightlife in urban contexts by revealing how nighttime intimacy can minimize the paralyzing effects of violence and precarity in a neoliberal Mexico. Considering the political implications of when a queer/trans person is present at night, Tenorio argues that queer feelings of play are not only essential to sexual liberation, but also resist neoliberal commodification and heteronormative extraction. 

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cover of Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora

Queer Ricans

Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes

University of Minnesota Press, 2009

Exploring cultural expressions of Puerto Rican queer migration from the Caribbean to New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes analyzes how artists have portrayed their lives and the discrimination they have faced in both Puerto Rico and the United States.

Highlighting cultural and political resistance within Puerto Rico’s gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender subcultures, La Fountain-Stokes pays close attention to differences of gender, historical moment, and generation, arguing that Puerto Rican queer identity changes over time and is experienced in very different ways. He traces an arc from 1960s Puerto Rico and the writings of Luis Rafael Sánchez to New York City in the 1970s and 1980s (Manuel Ramos Otero), Philadelphia and New Jersey in the 1980s and 1990s (Luz María Umpierre and Frances Negrón-Muntaner), and Chicago (Rose Troche) and San Francisco (Erika López) in the 1990s, culminating with a discussion of Arthur Avilés and Elizabeth Marrero’s recent dance-theater work in the Bronx.

Proposing a radical new conceptualization of Puerto Rican migration, this work reveals how sexuality has shaped and defined the Puerto Rican experience in the United States.
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cover of Queer Traffic: Sex, Panic, Free Trade

Queer Traffic

Sex, Panic, Free Trade

Jennifer Tyburczy

Duke University Press, 2025

In Queer Traffic, Jennifer Tyburczy traces how sexual dissidents across the Mexico-Canada-US borderlands transport the objects and experiences that nourish their sexual and social lives. She situates the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as a pivot point in the formation of panics aimed at stamping out these outlaw sex practices. Highlighting NAFTA’s erotic investments in hetero- and homonormativity, racial capitalism, markets of dispossession, and neocolonialism, Tyburczy directly engages with art, activism, and archives to revisit the struggles of people who invented circuits of sexual exchange through four decades of violence and criminalization. In conversing with actors from bureaucrats to pornographers and in studying choreographies, social movements, and street vocabularies, she examines an array of tactics that undermine the market logics of trade law and policy. Dreaming of other forms of living that go beyond mere survival, Queer Traffic guides us through the renegade pathways that circumvent the seemingly endless reach of free-trade capitalism toward other routes to pleasure.
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cover of Queer Voices in Hip Hop: Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance

Queer Voices in Hip Hop

Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance

Lauron J. Kehrer

University of Michigan Press, 2022

Notions of hip hop authenticity, as expressed both within hip hop communities and in the larger American culture, rely on the construction of the rapper as a Black, masculine, heterosexual, cisgender man who enacts a narrative of struggle and success.  In Queer Voices in Hip Hop, Lauron J. Kehrer turns our attention to openly queer and trans rappers and positions them within a longer Black queer musical lineage.  Combining musical, textual, and visual analysis with reception history, this book reclaims queer involvement in hip hop by tracing the genre’s beginnings within Black and Latinx queer music-making practices and spaces, demonstrating that queer and trans rappers draw on Ballroom and other cultural expressions particular to queer and trans communities of color in their work in order to articulate their subject positions. By centering the performances of openly queer and trans artists of color, Queer Voices in Hip Hop reclaims their work as essential to the development and persistence of hip hop in the United States as it tells the story of hip hop’s queer roots.
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cover of Queer in a Legal Sense: Brown Citizenship and Other Lawful Fictions

Queer in a Legal Sense

Brown Citizenship and Other Lawful Fictions

José A. de la Garza Valenzuela

University of Texas Press, 2026

Contrasting works by queer Chicano writers against the legal landscape of sexuality and migration to interrogate the “lawful fiction” that denies queer migrants citizenship and community.

Activists for immigrants and queer people under assault by US authorities focus overwhelmingly on protections presumed to be afforded by citizenship through narratives that have rarely had a place for queer immigrants, who have consistently faced special obstacles to legal entry and citizenship that only recently are being applied more widely. Queer in a Legal Sense studies literary works by gay Chicanx writers alongside instruments of law, showing through this juxtaposition how racialized queer people have been imagined as nonviable from the standpoint of citizenship. In stories by John Rechy, Arturo Islas, Rigoberto González, Michael Nava, and Jaime Cortez, José de la Garza Valenzuela finds what has gone missing in the migrant movement’s pursuit of gendered avenues to civic participation. Further, these works illuminate the production of fictions in canons of law, like those announced by the Florida legislature’s “Purple Pamphlet” and by the US Supreme Court in Boutilier v. INS and Bowers v. Hardwick. Queer in a Legal Sense argues that, through selective ommissions and inclusions, legal fictions place queerness outside the boundaries of citizenship and powerfully undermine queer representation in pro-migrant advocacy.

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cover of Queering the Global Filipina Body: Contested Nationalisms in the Filipina/o Diaspora

Queering the Global Filipina Body

Contested Nationalisms in the Filipina/o Diaspora

Gina K. Velasco

University of Illinois Press, 2020

Contemporary popular culture stereotypes Filipina women as sex workers, domestic laborers, mail order brides, and caregivers. These figures embody the gendered and sexual politics of representing the Philippine nation in the Filipina/o diaspora. Gina K. Velasco explores the tensions within Filipina/o American cultural production between feminist and queer critiques of the nation and popular nationalism as a form of resistance to neoimperialism and globalization.
 
Using a queer diasporic analysis, Velasco examines the politics of nationalism within Filipina/o American cultural production  to consider an essential question: can a queer and feminist imagining of the diaspora reconcile with gendered tropes of the Philippine nation? Integrating a transnational feminist analysis of globalized gendered labor with a consideration of queer cultural politics, Velasco envisions forms of feminist and queer diasporic belonging, while simultaneously foregrounding nationalist movements as vital instruments of struggle.
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cover of Quest for Kim: In Search of Kipling's Great Game

Quest for Kim

In Search of Kipling's Great Game

Peter Hopkirk

University of Michigan Press, 1999

This book is for all those who love Kim, the masterpiece of Indian life in which Kipling immortalized the Great Game, the centuries-old power struggle between Russia and Great Britain in the depths of Central Asia. Fascinated since childhood by this strange tale of an orphan boy's recruitment into the Indian secret service, Peter Hopkirk here explores the many mysteries surrounding Kipling's great novel.
"This is a fascinating, brilliantly written book, as interesting in its description of the author's journeys as it is in its investigation of the reality that lies behind 'the finest novel in the English language with an Indian theme,'" as Kim has been described by Nirad Chaudhuri." --T. J. Binyon, Times Literary Supplement
"In an original combination of autobiography, travel writing, and literary detective work, Hopkirk manages accessibly to tell the story of Kim and his own obsession with it. Hopkirk illustrates how creatively and thoroughly the reading of a work of fiction can shape a whole life's experience." -- John R. Bradley, Independent on Sunday
". . . a reminder of just how absorbing was the world Kipling knew, and how fabulous was his transformation of it into literature." --Richard Bernstein, New York Times
Peter Hopkirk has traveled widely over many years in the regions where his books are set--Central Asia, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and the Middle East. His nearly twenty years with The Times included work as an Asian affairs specialist. His previous books include The Great Game, Foreign Devils on the Silk Road, Trespassers on the Roof of the World, Setting the East Ablaze, and Our Secret Service East of Constantinople. His works have been translated into twelve languages.
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cover of Quicksand and Passing

Quicksand and Passing

Larsen, Nella

Rutgers University Press, 1986

"Quicksand and Passing are novels I will never forget. They open up a whole world of experience and struggle that seemed to me, when I first read them years  ago, absolutely absorbing, fascinating, and indispensable." —Alice Walker

"A tantalizing mix of moral fable and sensuous colorful narrative, exploring female sexuality and racial solidarity."—Women's Studies International Forum

Rutgers' all-time bestselling book, Nella Larsen's novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) document the historical realities of Harlem in the 1920s and shed a bright light on the social world of the black bourgeoisie. The novels' greatest appeal and achievement, however, is not sociological, but psychological. As noted in the editor's comprehensive introduction, Larsen takes the theme of psychic dualism, so popular in Harlem Renaissance fiction, to a higher and more complex level, displaying a sophisticated understanding and penetrating analysis of black female psychology.

Passing is now a major motion picture written, produced, and directed by Rebecca Hall. It premiered at Sundance in 2021 and is available on Netflix.

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cover of Quiet Dawn

Quiet Dawn

Jean-Claude Fignolé. Translated and with an Introduction by Kaiama L. Glover and Laurent Dubois.

Duke University Press, 2025

Jean-Claude Fignolé’s Quiet Dawn tells an enthralling story of Haiti’s transition from French colony to independent Black republic. The swirling, multilayered novel provides intimate portraits of an eighteenth-century slaveholder, his wife, and their enslaved laborers set against the devastating backdrop of enslavement and revolution. Into this Gothic colonial tale Fignolé interweaves a series of tragic events involving a present-day French nun doing penance for the sins of her ancestors. One of the few contemporary Haitian novels to explicitly grapple with Haiti’s revolution, Quiet Dawn foregrounds issues of race, power, the continuing legacy of historical trauma, and the unresolved tensions between the past and present. Published in French in 1990 and appearing here in English for the first time, Quiet Dawn forcefully pushes against the silencing of Haiti’s past, belying its title to depict a clamorous Atlantic world that comprises Europe, Africa, and the vast expanse of the Americas.
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cover of Quinceañera Style: Social Belonging and Latinx Consumer Identities

Quinceañera Style

Social Belonging and Latinx Consumer Identities

By Rachel Valentina González

University of Texas Press, 2019

Winner of the Emily Toth Award for Best Single Work in Women's Studies, Popular Culture Association
Co-winner of the Elli Kongas Maranda Prize, Women's Section of the American Folklore Society (AFS)

A dynamic study of social negotiation and consumerism in the coming-of-age quinceañera celebration and the impact of normalizing spectacles of luxury.

Quinceañera celebrations, which recognize a girl’s transition to young womanhood at age fifteen, are practiced in Latinx communities throughout the Americas. But in the consumer-driven United States, the ritual has evolved from a largely religious ceremony to an elaborate party where social status takes center stage. Examining the many facets of this contemporary debut experience, Quinceañera Style reports on ethnographic fieldwork in California, Texas, the Midwest, and Mexico City to reveal a complex, compelling story. Along the way, we meet a self-identified transwoman who uses the quinceañera as an intellectual space in her activist performance art. We explore the economic empowerment of women who own barrio boutiques specializing in the quinceañera’s many accessories and made-in-China gowns. And, of course, we meet teens themselves, including a vlogger whose quince-planning tips have made her an online sensation.

Disrupting assumptions, such as the belief that Latino communities in the United States can’t desire upward mobility without abandoning ethnoracial cultural legacies, Quinceañera Style also underscores the performative nature of class and the process of constructing a self in the public, digital sphere.

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cover of Quinceañeras: Latinidades and Girlhood in Popular Culture

Quinceañeras

Latinidades and Girlhood in Popular Culture

Edited by Jillian M. Báez, Diana Leon-Boys, and Angharad N. Valdivia

University of Illinois Press, 2026

From dramas to reality TV to advertising, quinceañeras are familiar across mainstream media in the United States. The celebration event for fifteen-year-old girls has evolved over time and today is immersed in gender politics and consumer culture while speaking to Latina/o/x assertions of culture, belonging, tradition, and assimilation.

Jillian M. Báez, Diana Leon-Boys, and Angharad N. Valdivia edit a collection that draws on the expanding field of girlhood studies to examine the increasing visibility of the event and the figure of the quinceañera herself in pop culture. The contributors focus on quinceañeras as a trope for English-language media’s treatment of Latina girlhoods and Latinx cultures but also examine how use of the quinceañera charts deepening openness and inclusivity within Latinx culture.

Timely and thought-provoking, Quinceañeras provides an interdisciplinary exploration of a celebration and its central figure within studies of Latina/o/x identity, race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Contributors: Sonya M. Alemán, Jillian M. Báez, Ariana A. Cano, Dolores Inés Casillas, Mari Castañeda, Michael Anthony DeAnda, Kelly Ferguson, Litzy Galarza, Rachel González-Martin, Jillian Hernandez, Karla Larrañaga, Diana Leon-Boys, Stephanie Melissa Pérez, Angharad N. Valdivia, and Claudia Evans-Zepeda
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cover of Quinoa: Food Politics and Agrarian Life in the Andean Highlands

Quinoa

Food Politics and Agrarian Life in the Andean Highlands

Linda J. Seligmann

University of Illinois Press, 2023

Quinoa’s new status as a superfood has altered the economic fortunes of Quechua farmers in the Andean highlands. Linda J. Seligmann journeys to the Huanoquite region of Peru to track the mixed blessings brought about by the surging worldwide popularity of this “exquisite grain.” Focusing on how Indigenous communities have confronted globalization, Seligmann examines the influence of food politics, development initiatives, and the region’s agrarian history on present-day quinoa production among Huanoquiteños. She also looks at the human stories behind these transformations, from the work of quinoa brokers to the ways Huanoquite’s men and women navigate the shifts in place and power occurring in their homes and communities. Finally, Seligmann considers how the consequences of nearby mining may impact Huanoquiteños’ ability to farm quinoa and thrive in their environment, and the efforts they are taking to resist these threats to their way of life.

The untold story behind the popular health food, Quinoa illuminates how Indigenous communities have engaged with the politics and policies surrounding their production of a traditional and minor crop that became a global foodstuff.

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cover of Quixote's Soldiers: A Local History of the Chicano Movement, 1966–1981

Quixote's Soldiers

A Local History of the Chicano Movement, 1966–1981

By David Montejano

University of Texas Press, 2010

In the mid-1960s, San Antonio, Texas, was a segregated city governed by an entrenched Anglo social and business elite. The Mexican American barrios of the west and south sides were characterized by substandard housing and experienced seasonal flooding. Gang warfare broke out regularly. Then the striking farmworkers of South Texas marched through the city and set off a social movement that transformed the barrios and ultimately brought down the old Anglo oligarchy. In Quixote’s Soldiers, David Montejano uses a wealth of previously untapped sources, including the congressional papers of Henry B. Gonzalez, to present an intriguing and highly readable account of this turbulent period. Montejano divides the narrative into three parts. In the first part, he recounts how college student activists and politicized social workers mobilized barrio youth and mounted an aggressive challenge to both Anglo and Mexican American political elites. In the second part, Montejano looks at the dynamic evolution of the Chicano movement and the emergence of clear gender and class distinctions as women and ex-gang youth struggled to gain recognition as serious political actors. In the final part, Montejano analyzes the failures and successes of movement politics. He describes the work of second-generation movement organizations that made possible a new and more representative political order, symbolized by the election of Mayor Henry Cisneros in 1981.
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