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2026 Gold Medal for the Best Women's Issues Book, Conference on Latin American History (CLAH)
How Latina voices in commercial radio and podcasting subvert cultural norms and bring feminism to the fore of their work.

What does Latina feminism sound like in popular culture? Drawing on case studies of commercial radio programs and podcasts hosted by Latinas and oriented toward Latinx listenership, Esther Díaz Martín explores how Latina voices create female-specific aural spaces that interrupt the misogynist status quo in US mainstream media.

Radiophonic Feminisms focuses on radio/podcasting as a medium in which women find methods for resisting oppressive gendered cultural imaginaries. Through their specific articulations—that is, the quality of their voices—their music choices, and the soundscapes they construct, Latina hosts since the early 1990s have offered feminist responses to a cultural moment marked by the demographic changes brought on by the political economy of migration and the social changes wrought by media in the digital age. Drawing attention to the invisible antisexist work of creating sound, and to its reception, Díaz Martín bridges the epistemic insights of Chicana feminist theory and sound studies, enriching and further decolonizing our thinking about auditory meaning making.

Vocals tinged with pain and desperation. The deep thuds of an upright bass. Women with short bangs and men in cuffed jeans. These elements and others are the unmistakable signatures of rockabilly, a musical genre normally associated with white male musicians of the 1950s. But in Los Angeles today, rockabilly's primary producers and consumers are Latinos and Latinas. Why are these "Razabillies" partaking in a visibly "un-Latino" subculture that's thought of as a white person's fixation everywhere else?

As a Los Angeles Rockabilly insider, Nicholas F. Centino is the right person to answer this question. Pairing a decade of participant observation with interviews and historical research, Centino explores the reasons behind a Rockabilly renaissance in 1990s Los Angeles and demonstrates how, as a form of working-class leisure, this scene provides Razabillies with spaces of respite and conviviality within the alienating landscape of the urban metropolis. A nuanced account revealing how and why Los Angeles Latinas/os have turned to and transformed the music and aesthetic style of 1950s rockabilly, Razabilly offers rare insight into this musical subculture, its place in rock and roll history, and its passionate practitioners.

The result of a twenty-year friendship between Joanne Mulcahy and Eva Castellanoz, Remedios traces the transformation of an indigenous Mexican migrant worker to a curandera (healer), community activist, and winner of a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Blending creative nonfiction and ethnographic research, Mulcahy shares Eva’s stories, from her early years in Mexico and the Rio Grande Valley to her adult years as a wife, mother, and grandmother in Nyssa, Oregon. Her testimonios capture the hardships and resilience of her life and the lives of others in her community. As a healer, Eva combines rituals, metaphors, and herbs to attend to those who seek her help. The floral crowns she fashions for young women’s quinceañeras and other arts preserve traditions while offering life lessons. Remedios gives us an intimate glimpse into Eva’s family life, her passionate activism, and her complex identity as an indigenous, Catholic curandera.

This updated edition includes revisions throughout the text and a new afterword by the author underscoring the changes in Eva’s life and in the larger world since Remedios’s original publication. For her important work, Eva has been recognized by several organizations and programs including the Oregon Arts Commission, Arts Build Communities, and the Portland Opera. The Crown Maker, a youth opera by the Portland Opera To Go program, celebrates Eva Castellanoz’s legacy and displays how even in a time of fear and divisiveness, hope endures through people who advocate for others and inspire social change.

"Remember the Alamo!" reverberates through Texas history and culture, but what exactly are we remembering? Over nearly two centuries, the Mexican victory over an outnumbered band of Alamo defenders has been transformed into an American victory for the love of liberty. Why did the historical battle of 1836 undergo this metamorphosis in memory and mythology to become such a potent master symbol in Texan and American culture?

In this probing book, Richard Flores seeks to answer that question by examining how the Alamo's transformation into an American cultural icon helped to shape social, economic, and political relations between Anglo and Mexican Texans from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. In the first part of the book, he looks at how the attempts of heritage society members and political leaders to define the Alamo as a place have reflected struggles within Texas society over the place and status of Anglos and Mexicans. In the second part, he explores how Alamo movies and the transformation of Davy Crockett into an Alamo hero/martyr have advanced deeply racialized, ambiguous, and even invented understandings of the past.

On February 2, 1848, representatives of the United States and Mexico signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, officially ending hostilities between the two countries and ceding over one-half million square miles of land to the northern victors. In Mexico, this defeat has gradually moved from the periphery of dishonor to the forefront of national consciousness. In the United States, the war has taken an opposite trajectory, falling from its once-celebrated prominence into the shadowy margins of forgetfulness and denial.

Why is the U.S.–Mexican War so clearly etched in the minds of Mexicans and so easily overlooked by Americans? This book investigates that issue through a transnational, comparative analysis of how the tools of collective memory—books, popular culture, historic sites, heritage groups, commemorations, and museums—have shaped the war's multifaceted meaning in the 160 years since it ended. Michael Van Wagenen explores how regional, ethnic, and religious differences influence Americans and Mexicans in their choices of what to remember and what to forget. He further documents what happens when competing memories clash in a quest for dominance and control.

In the end, Remembering the Forgotten War addresses the deeper question of how remembrance of the U.S.–Mexican War has influenced the complex relationship between these former enemies now turned friends. It thus provides a new lens through which to view today's cross-border rivalries, resentments, and diplomatic pitfalls.

Illuminating the impacts of ongoing dispossession across the modern American Southwest

Resisting Dispossession examines how Native/Indigenous, Chicana/o/x, and Black communities in the American Southwest have confronted displacement and dispossession from the nineteenth century to the present. Moving beyond abstract theory, Karen R. Roybal centers cultural expression and embodied knowledge, revealing how colonialism, preservation, urban renewal, and gentrification continue to shape relationships to land, place, and belonging.

Drawing on Indigenous, Chicana feminist, and Black epistemologies, Roybal explores a diverse cultural archive of photographs, literature, musical compositions, oral histories, and storytelling practices. Through analyses of figures such as Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Raven Chacon, and Louis Carlos Bernal, alongside the stories of Chicana land grant heirs in New Mexico and southern Colorado, she demonstrates how artistic and cultural expression becomes a powerful tool for resisting erasure and reclaiming presence. Contesting representations of the Southwest made popular by figures like Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keeffe, these works preserve alternative histories, challenge dominant narratives, and illuminate the ongoing impacts of dispossession across the region.

Interdisciplinary in scope, this work offers a fresh perspective on the intersections of aesthetics, embodiment, and power in the West and Southwest. 

2026 Bronze Medal for the Best LGBTQ+ Themed Book, Conference on Latin American History (CLAH)
2025 Honorable Mention, John Leo & Dana Heller Award for Best Single Work, Anthology, Multi-Authored, or Edited Book in LGBTQ Studies, Popular Culture Association (PCA)
2025 Honorable Mention, Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize, GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association and the Q/T Caucus of the American Studies Association

How indolent practices in Latinx LGBTQ culture challenge capitalist imperatives to be productive.

Revolting Indolence makes a case for laziness as an aesthetic-political strategy for countering the oppressive logics of cisheteronormative racial capitalism. Focusing on ways in which queer and trans Latinx people demonstrate the unwillingness of their participation in “productivist” ethics and allied respectability politics, Marcos Gonsalez argues that slacking off, lounging, daydreaming, and partying are liberatory practices—revolts that in turn are treated as revolting.

Gonsalez explores how queer and trans Latinx artists refute discourses in which work is a moral good. In Paris Is Burning, RuPaul's Drag Race, documentary photography of queer and trans Latinx life in Los Angeles, and other sources, Gonsalez identifies two lazy styles: first, flagrant refusals of work that critique capitalist reason; and second, the invention of alternative aesthetic worlds beyond racial capitalism and violence targeting queer and trans people, whose rejection of the cisgender nuclear family paradigm is rightly seen as threatening the stability of a functioning capitalist system. Reclaiming laziness as a resource for radical imagining, Revolting Indolence asks us to do that which we want most and which capitalist exploitation can least tolerate: to slow down.

Active from the late 1960s until the mid-1990s, the U.S. branch of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP) worked simultaneously to build support for Puerto Rican independence and to engage in radical social change within the United States.  

Revolution Around the Corner chronicles this unique social movement, describing various mass campaigns and the inner workings of the organization. The editors and contributors—all former members, leaders, and supporters of the PSP—offer a range of views and interpretations of their experience. 

Combining historical accounts, personal stories, interviews, and retrospective analysis, Revolution Around the Corner examines specific actions such as the National Day of Solidarity (El Acto Nacional), the Bicentennial without Colonies, the Save Hostos struggle, and the Vieques campaign. Testimonies recount the pros and cons of membership diversity, as well as issues of loyalty and compañerismo. In addition, essays describe the PSP’s participation in coalitions and alliances with Left and progressive movements. The book concludes with the editors’ reflections on the PSP’s achievements, mistakes, and contributions.

On September 11, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet led a bloody military coup in Chile that overthrew Salvador Allende’s democratically elected socialist government. The coup ushered in a cruelly repressive dictatorship that would govern the country for the next seventeen years, constituting a watershed moment in Cold War history. 

This book recounts the untold story of how Chicano Movement poets, artists, musicians, and theater groups in the United States used their work to express solidarity with the international campaign to restore democracy in Chile. Such expressions of solidarity were especially prominent in the San Francisco Bay Area, where hundreds of Chilean exiles settled following the coup. Upon arrival, they joined a diverse Latinx population that was home to a Chicanx arts community whose members’ political orientations primed them to lend their talents to anti-imperialist causes. These Chicanxs were also drawn to the campaign against the dictatorship through friendship and acquaintance with members of the Chilean exile community. 

David Spener shows how the Bay Area’s unique cosmopolitan social context offered Chicanxs and Chileans meaningful opportunities for dialogue and collaboration with each other as well as with Latinxs of other national origins. Chicanxs often adopted a pan-ethnic raza identity that they could share with Chilean, Nicaraguan, Puerto Rican, Salvadoran, and other Latinx activists. This did not mean, however, that they abandoned the political identities that they had gained from the Chicano Movement. Instead, many came to see themselves as uniting with other Latinxs, first Chileans and then Nicaraguans and Salvadorans, in a struggle against U.S. imperialism throughout the Americas.