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Following the California Gold Rush, writing by local Latinas was increasingly published in the California Spanish-language press, including many women who were not wealthy or of elite social standing. In Vasto Pensamiento, Vast Thought: Latinas in the Nineteenth-Century California Press, Vanessa Ovalle Perez identifies a diverse selection of Latina voices, focusing particularly on social justice messages and creative works. She traces how Latinas leveraged rhetorical strategies that were both socially performative and literary in a culturally specific Latinx context. In the oscillation between expressions of intimacy and self-conscious cultural and social positioning, these women sought platforms for both their personal ambitions and social justice causes. Taking an intersectional feminist approach paired with deep historical investigation, Vasto Pensamiento, Vast Thought centers the words and stories of these women writers and public speakers, providing transcriptions and translations of numerous key texts. These include Anastasia Leyva’s testimony of her brother’s lynching; speeches and toasts of women who participated in Mexican Patriotic Assemblies; fiction and poetry of sisters Guadalupe and Carlota Gutierrez; and verses by the anonymous poet “Josefina.” These texts offer insight related to nineteenth-century Latina personal and political investments across both sides of the border, allowing us to see the connectedness of rhetorical strategy and Latina self-fashioning in the public sphere.

2023 Outstanding Book Award, National Association for Ethnic Studies

A thorough examination of the political and economic exploitation of Latinx subjects, migrants, and workers through the lens of Latinx literature, photography, and film.

Globalization in the United States can seem paradoxical: free trade coincides with fortification of the southern border, while immigration is reimagined as a national-security threat. US politics turn aggressively against Latinx migrants and subjects even as post-NAFTA markets become thoroughly reliant on migrant and racialized workers. But in fact, there is no incongruity here. Rather, anti-immigrant politics reflect a strategy whereby capital uses specialized forms of violence to create a reserve army of the living, laboring dead.

Visible Borders, Invisible Economies turns to Latinx literature, photography, and films that render this unseen scheme shockingly vivid. Works such as Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends and Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer crystallize the experience of Latinx subjects and migrants subjugated to social death, their political existence erased by disenfranchisement and racist violence while their bodies still toil in behalf of corporate profits. In Kristy L. Ulibarri’s telling, art clarifies what power obscures: the national-security state performs anti-immigrant and xenophobic politics that substitute cathartic nationalism for protections from the free market while ensuring maximal corporate profits through the manufacture of disposable migrant labor.