Mexican American Studies

Winner, Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians, 1988; American Historical Association, Pacific Branch Book Award, 1989; Texas Institute of Letters Friends Of The Dallas Public Library Award, 1987; Texas Historical Commission T. R. Fehrenbach Award; Best Ethnic, Minority, And Women's History Publication, 1987. A major work on the history of Mexicans in Texas and the relations between Mexicans and Anglos.

Experimental, inventive, provocative and above all visionary, this work is widely recognized among scholars of Chicano/Latino, Gay and Lesbian, Women's, Postcolonial, Ethnic and Cultural Studies as a foundational elaboration of the politics and poetics of cultural hybridity. A "Best of 1987" Library Journal selection; One of the 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century - Hungry Mind Review (Spring 1999).

Jovita González and Eve Raleigh's Caballero: A Historical Novel, a milestone in Mexican-American and Texas literature written during the 1930s and 1940s, centers on a mid-nineteenth-century Mexican landowner and his family living in the heart of southern Texas during a time of tumultuous change. After covering the American military occupation of South Texas, the story involves the reader in romances between young lovers from opposing sides during the military conflict of the US-Mexico War. The young protagonists fall in love but face struggles with race, class, gender, and sexual contradictions. This work, long lost in a collection of private paper and unavailable until now, serves as a literary ethnography of South Texas-Mexican folklore customs and traditions as well as a feminist critique of rigid patriarchal culture.

Canicula--the dog days--a particularly intense part of the summer when most cotton is harvested in South Texas. In Norma Cantu's fictionalized memoir of Laredo in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, it also represents a time between childhood and an as yet unknown adulthood. Actual snapshots and the author's re-created memories allow readers to experience the pivotal events of this world--births, deaths, injuries, fiestas, rites of passage. This popular book won the 1995 Premio Aztlan. "A personalized ethnography that feels as familiar as my own family album, and as touching."--Ana Castillo "Intimate as a poem, and as large as the Texas sky, these stories are at once diminutive and grand."--Sandra Cisneros"

While activists have challenged discrimination, they also have worked for specific public school reforms and sought private schooling opportunities, utilizing new patterns of contestation and advocacy. The actions San Miguel describes have expanded, extended, and diversified the historic struggle for Mexican American education.

By approaching Chicana/o issues from the frames of feminism, social activism, and cultural studies, and by considering both lived experience and the latest research, Torres offers a more comprehensive understanding of current Chicana life. Through compelling prose, Torres masterfully weaves her own story as a first-generation Mexican American with interviews with activists and other Mexican-American women to document the present fight for social justice and the struggles of living between two worlds.

The first collection of short fiction to bring together writing by Latinas from both the US and Latin America.

Emma Pérez discusses the historical methodology which has created Chicano history and argues that the historical narrative has often omitted gender. She poses a theory which rejects the colonizer's methodological assumptions and examines new tools for uncovering the hidden voices of Chicanas who have been relegated to silence.

Farm labor leader and civil rights advocate Dolores Huerta first worked with César Chávez as a community organizer in Mexican American areas of southern California in the mid-1950s. Chávez dreamed of organizing farm workers, and in 1962 he started the National Farm Workers Association. He asked Huerta to work with them, and in the next three years they recruited a number of members. In 1965 the NFWA joined the AFL-CIO-affiliated Agricultural Workers' Committee in a strike against large grape growers in the San Joaquin Valley--a five-year strike that raised national awareness of the dismal treatment of the workers and led to the formation of the United Farm Workers union. Huerta's contributions to these efforts were invaluable in recruiting women for the cause, in keeping the union focused on nonviolent actions, and in gaining support in the eastern United States for the effective grape boycott that led to contracts for the union. Ten years after they started, they celebrated the passage of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act. They had made history. This is the first book to focus on Dolores Huerta. Throughout six decades of activism, she has made her own history and has been part of major events in the history of the country, standing alongside Robert Kennedy the night he was assassinated. Often called la Pasionaria, the passionate one, she continues to speak out on labor, environmental, antiwar, and women's issues. A Dolores Huerta Reader includes an informative biographical introduction, articles and book excerpts written about her, her own writing and speeches, and a recent interview with Mario García where she expresses her unbending dedication to social justice. Anyone who wants to know more about Dolores Huerta should start with this book.

Fiction. "An absorbing, heart-rending story told with sensitivity and wisdom.this book deserves a wide readership not only for its artistry but also for its subject matter" -Beaumont Enterprise.

A collection of stories by twenty Mexican Americans deal with the issues of growing up Chicano. What does it mean to grow up Chicana/o? When I was growing up, I never read anything in school by anyone who had a "Z" in their last name. This anthology is, in many ways, a public gift to that child who was always searching for herself within the pages of a book. As children we watched our abuelas lovingly make tortillas. In my own grandmother's kitchen, it was an opportunity for me to ask questions within the safety of that warm room...and the conversation carried resonance far beyond the kitchen... Sandra Cisneros remembers growing up in Chicago... Teachers thought if you were poor and Mexican you didn't have anything to say. Now I know, "We've got to tell our own history...making communication happen between cultures."

2015 Recipient of the American Book Award. The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples. Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire. Recipient of a 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.

The original academic text is fully adapted by renowned curriculum experts Debbie Reese and Jean Mendoza, for middle-grade and young adult readers to include discussion topics, archival images, original maps, recommendations for further reading, and other materials to encourage students, teachers, and general readers to think critically about their own place in history. 2020 American Indian Youth Literature Young Adult Honor Book; 2020 Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People; Best YA Nonfiction of 2019 (Kirkus Reviews); Best Nonfiction of 2019 (School Library Journal); Best Books for Teens (New York Public Library).

Using the territory that is now New Mexico as a case study, Manifest Destinies traces the origins of Mexican Americans as a racial group in the United States, paying particular attention to shifting meanings of race and law in the nineteenth century. Laura E. Gómez explores the central paradox of Mexican American racial status as entailing the law's designation of Mexican Americans as #;"white" and their simultaneous social position as non-white in American society. She tells a neglected story of conflict, conquest, cooperation, and competition among Mexicans, Indians, and Euro-Americans, the region's three main populations who were the key architects and victims of the laws that dictated what one's race was and how people would be treated by the law according to one's race.

Occupied America was the first textbook to be published for the growing number of Chicano History courses developing across the country and remains the bestseller. The Fourth Edition has been completely updated, containing a significant amount of new material on Mexican American history. In addition, the Fourth Edition contains a new introductory chapter, Not Just pyramids, Explorers, and Heroes, that includes the period before 1821. The Fourth Edition also looks at the question of gender and includes the role of gender throughout. Finally, a vast amount of new and updated sources have been added. Acuna's reputation as a radical and important voice of Chicano History has only increased since the first edition was published. The changes in the Fourth Edition make this edition of Occupied America the most comprehensive one yet.

First published in Portuguese in 1968, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was translated and published in English in 1970. The methodology of the late Paulo Freire has helped to empower countless impoverished and illiterate people throughout the world. Freire's work has taken on special urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is increasingly accepted as the norm. With a substantive new introduction on Freire's life and the remarkable impact of this book by writer and Freire confidant and authority Donaldo Macedo, this anniversary edition of Pedagogy of the Oppressed will inspire a new generation of educators, students, and general readers for years to come.

Since its original landmark publication in 1980, "A People's History of the United States" has been chronicling American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official version of history taught in schools--with its emphasis on great men in high places--to focus on the street, the home, and the, workplace. Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, "A People's History" is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of--and in the words of--America's women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers.As historian Howard Zinn shows, many of our country's greatest battles---the fights for a fair wage, an eight-hour workday, child-labor laws, health and safety standards, universal suffrage, women's rights, racial equality--were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance.

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.

Though based on the author's life work in higher education, her insights and approach apply equally to all teaching and learning contexts. "Defines seven steps to unlocking the potential of teachers and their students * Deeply informed by the author's educational journey as a minority woman from a background of rural povertyThe motivation for the quest that Laura Rendon shares in this book was the realization that she, along with many educators, had lost sight of the deeper, relationship-centered essence of education, and lost touch with the fine balance between educating for academics and educating for life. Her purpose is to reconnect readers with the original impulse that led them to become educators; and to help them rediscover, with her, their passion for teaching and learning in the service of others and for the well being of our society.She offers a transformative vision of education that emphasizes the harmonic, complementary relationship between the "sentir" of intuition and the inner life and the "pensar" of intellectualism and the pursuit of scholarship; between teaching and learning; formal knowledge and wisdom; and between Western and non-Western ways of knowing. In the process she develops a pedagogy that encompasses wholeness, multiculturalism, and contemplative practice, that helps students transcend limiting views about themselves; fosters high expectations, and helps students to become social change agents. She invites the reader to share her journey in developing sentipensante pedagogy, and to challenge seven entrenched agreements about education that act against wholeness and the appreciation of truth in all forms. She offers examples of her own teaching and of the classroom practices of faculty she encountered along the way; as well as guidance on the challenges, rewards and responsibilities that anyone embarking on creating a new vision of teaching and learning should attend to."

bell hooks--writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual--writes about a new kind of education, education as the practice of freedom.  Teaching students to "transgress" against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for hooks, the teacher's most important goal. bell hooks speaks to the heart of education today: how can we rethink teaching practices in the age of multiculturalism? What do we do about teachers who do not want to teach, and students who do not want to learn? How should we deal with racism and sexism in the classroom?

Telling to Live embodies the vision that compelled Latina feminists to engage their differences and find common ground. Its contributors reflect varied class, religious, ethnic, racial, linguistic, sexual, and national backgrounds. Yet in one way or another they are all professional producers of testimonios--or life stories--whether as poets, oral historians, literary scholars, ethnographers, or psychologists.

This groundbreaking collection reflects an uncompromised definition of feminism by women of color. 65,000 copies in print.

More than twenty years after the ground-breaking anthology This Bridge Called My Back called upon feminists to envision new forms of communities and practices, Gloria E. Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating have painstakingly assembled a new collection of over eighty original writings that offers a bold new vision of women-of-color consciousness for the twenty-first century. Written by women and men--both "of color" and "white"--this bridge we call home will challenge readers to rethink existing categories and invent new individual and collective identities.

Literary Nonfiction. Political Science. Latino/Latina Studies. LGBT Studies. A lively and accessible investigation of Mexican American militancy from the U.S. occupation of Northern Mexico in the 19th century to civil rights struggles in the present era. The authors describe monumental labor battles, survey the Raza youth movement, focus attention on the role of women, and examine issues such as police brutality, the emergence of Chicana/o lesbians and gays, and the role of radical organizations, while also exploring hotly debated theories about the source of discrimination against Chicanos. This book reveals the workings of race and nationality in the United States in relation to people of Mexican ancestry, a group that is too little understood though its members comprise this country's second largest population of people of color.