Research Guides
Hispanic Heritage
Discover resources available from Catawba College's collection that support Hispanic Heritage Month including a LatinX reading list highlighting titles from LatinX writers.
Latin X Reading List
About This List
This reading list is a curated selection of eBook titles available in the NC LIVE HomeGrown Collection. The collection includes titles from North Carolina publishers like Duke University Press, Algonquin Books, CrossRoad Press, UNC Press, McFarland, Press 53, Gryphon House, John F. Blair, and Workman.
No Holds. No Checkout Limits. No Wait Lists. HomeGrown titles are available in perpetuity with unlimited, simultaneous access. Immediate access for everyone, at any time, forever.
How to Access eBooks
1) Click on the title you would like to read
2) You will be directed to the Discovery search record for the book. Click the blue Access Online button to access the title.
3) If you are off campus, you may be prompted to enter your Catawba username and password to access the title.
Art, Music and Literature
Art, Music, and Literature
Rhythms of Race by
Among the nearly 90,000 Cubans who settled in New York City and Miami in the 1940s and 1950s were numerous musicians and entertainers, black and white, who did more than fill dance halls with the rhythms of the rumba, mambo, and cha cha chá. In her history of music and race in midcentury America, Christina D. Abreu argues that these musicians, through their work in music festivals, nightclubs, social clubs, and television and film productions, played central roles in the development of Cuban, Afro-Cuban, Latino, and Afro-Latino identities and communities. Abreu draws from previously untapped oral histories, cultural materials, and Spanish-language media to uncover the lives and broader social and cultural significance of these vibrant performers"--Provided by publisher.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781469620848Publication Date: 2015-05-04
García Márquez by
Gabriel García Márquez is one of the most influential writers of our time, with a unique literary creativity rooted in the history of his native Colombia. This revised and expanded edition of a classic work is the first book of criticism to consider in detail the totality of Garcia Marquez's magnificent oeuvre. In a beautifully written examination, Gene Bell-Villada traces the major forces that have shaped the novelist and describes his life, his personality, and his politics. For this edition, Bell-Villada adds new chapters to cover all of Garcia Marquez's fiction since 1988, from The General in His Labyrinth through Memories of My Melancholy Whores, and includes sections on his memoir, Living to Tell the Tale, and his journalistic account, News of a Kidnapping. Moreover, new information about Garcia Marquez's biography and artistic development make this the most comprehensive account of his life and work available.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780807895382Publication Date: 2010-01-01
Tequila, Senoritas and Teardrops by
"Relying on facts, opinions and personal testimonies from the artists themselves, this book takes a detailed look at the huge impact that Mexican music and culture has had--and continues to have--on Country music in its various forms"
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780786496730Publication Date: 2014-12-31
Biographies
Biographies
Liberators, Patriots, and Leaders of Latin America by
This book features biographies of 32 of the most notable figures in Latin American history. To the 23 individuals from the first edition, consisting mostly of revolutionary, political, and military figures of the past, are added nine new biographies of contemporary Latin American presidents, providing an updated view of the region's leadership. Several patterns run through the individual biographies. The concept of native identity is an important aspect in the stories of Malinche, Juarez, Sandino, and Zapata--profoundly affecting the politics of modern Brazil, Mexico, and Nicaragua. One also sees a continuing compulsion to rebel against overwhelming odds in the cases of Manuela Saenz, Che Guevara and Daniel Ortega.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780786455522Publication Date: 2010-01-18
A Wedding in Haiti by
The popular author talks about three of her most personal relationships--with her parents, with her husband, and with a young Haitian boy known as Piti.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781616202743Publication Date: 2013-03-19
Blowout! by
This fascinating oral history transcribed and presented in Castro's voice by historian Mario T. García, is a compelling, highly readable narrative of Castro, a young boy growing up in Los Angeles who made history by his leadership in the blowouts and in his career as a dedicated and committed teacher.
ISBN: 9780807877913Publication Date: 2011-03-21
Ordinary Girls by
One of the Must-Read Books of 2019 According to O: The Oprah Magazine * Time * Bustle * Electric Literature * Publishers Weekly * The Millions * The Week * Good Housekeeping "There is more life packed on each page of Ordinary Girls than some lives hold in a lifetime." --Julia Alvarez In this searing memoir, Jaquira Díaz writes fiercely and eloquently of her challenging girlhood and triumphant coming of age. While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, Díaz found herself caught between extremes. As her family split apart and her mother battled schizophrenia, she was supported by the love of her friends. As she longed for a family and home, her life was upended by violence. As she celebrated her Puerto Rican culture, she couldn't find support for her burgeoning sexual identity. From her own struggles with depression and sexual assault to Puerto Rico's history of colonialism, every page of Ordinary Girls vibrates with music and lyricism. Díaz writes with raw and refreshing honesty, triumphantly mapping a way out of despair toward love and hope to become her version of the girl she always wanted to be. Reminiscent of Tara Westover's Educated, Kiese Laymon's Heavy, Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, and Terese Marie Mailhot's Heart Berries, Jaquira Díaz's memoir provides a vivid portrait of a life lived in (and beyond) the borders of Puerto Rico and its complicated history--and reads as electrically as a novel.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781643750163Publication Date: 2019-10-29
When Rains Became Floods by
When Rains Became Floods is the gripping autobiography of Lurgio Gavilán Sánchez, who as a child soldier fought for both the Peruvian guerrilla insurgency Shining Path and the Peruvian military. After escaping the conflict, he became a Franciscan priest and is now an anthropologist. Gavilán Sánchez's words mark otherwise forgotten acts of brutality and kindness, moments of misery and despair as well as solidarity and love.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780822371441Publication Date: 2017-08-03
Isabel Allende by
"Isabel Allende--known as "la Famosa" to Chileans--is the most widely read Spanish-language author. This reference work provides an introduction to Allende's life as well as a guided overview of her body of work. It features an alphabetized, fully-annotated listing of major terms in the Allende canon, including fictional characters, motifs, historical events, and themes"--Provided by publisher.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781476601724Publication Date: 2013-03-12
Fiction
Fiction
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by
In the 1960s, political tension forces the García family away from Santo Domingo and towards the Bronx. The sisters all hit their strides in America, adapting and thriving despite cultural differences, language barriers, and prejudice. But Mami and Papi are more traditional, and they have far more difficulty adjusting to their new country. Making matters worse, the girls--frequently embarrassed by their parents--find ways to rebel against them.
ISBN: 1616200987Publication Date: 2010-01-12
In the Time of the Butterflies by
It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo's dictatorship. It doesn't have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas--"The Butterflies. "In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sisters--Minerva, Patria, Maria Teresa, and the survivor, Dede--speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from hair ribbons and secret crushes to gunrunning and prison torture, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo's rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez's imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human cost of political oppression.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781565129764Publication Date: 2010-01-12
How to Build a Heart by
Family isn't something you're born into -- it's something you build. One young woman's journey to find her place in the world as the carefully separated strands of her life -- family, money, school, and love -- begin to overlap and tangle. All sixteen-year-old Izzy Crawford wants is to feel like she really belongs somewhere. Her father, a marine, died in Iraq six years ago, and Izzy's moved to a new town nearly every year since, far from the help of her extended family in North Carolina and Puerto Rico. When Izzy's hardworking mom moves their small family to Virginia, all her dreams start clicking into place. She likes her new school--even if Izzy is careful to keep her scholarship-student status hidden from her well-to-do classmates and her new athletic and popular boyfriend. And best of all: Izzy's family has been selected by Habitat for Humanity to build and move into a brand-new house. Izzy is this close to the community and permanence she's been searching for, until all the secret pieces of her life begin to collide. How to Build a Heart is the story of Izzy's journey to find her place in the world and her discovery that the choices we make and the people we love ultimately define us and bring us home.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781643750040Publication Date: 2020-01-28
The Wisdom of Perversity by
I should have told. Julie's right: I would have saved dozens of others. Jeff, Julie, Sam, the academy kids, the Huck Finn boys, everyone else was ignorant or greedy or scared or confused or overwhelmed by bullies, but I was strong enough⁰́₄I could've pushed him away. I did push him away. I saved myself and let everyone else suffer. Me and the god of creation⁰́₄we're the villains of this story. Brian and Jeff were best friends, growing up together in New York City in the late 1960s. Then something happened that drove a wedge between them, ending both their friendship and their childhood, something that neither ever spoke about ... at least until their shared secret resurfaced some forty years later, forcing them to reunite and, along with Jeff's cousin Julie, to face the consequences of their years of silence. In The Wisdom of Perversity, Rafael Yglesias, the critically acclaimed, bestselling novelist and screenwriter and the author of A Happy Marriage, winner of the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize, and Fearless, the basis for the cult film by the same name, has crafted a novel that tells the stories of three childhood friends who join together as adults to acknowledge the ways in which their lives were altered by the actions of a predator, a predator who now, many years later, has been exposed by more recent victims yet is on the verge of escaping punishment⁰́₄thanks to his wealth and influence. Damaged in different ways by the events of the past but all sharing the same feelings of guilt and anger for allowing this man to go unpunished, leaving him free to abuse others, Julie, Jeff, and Brian band together to force a public outcry that will assure that he will finally face justice. With a tone that cleverly mixes humor with stark reality, The Wisdom of Perversity is a groundbreaking novel that by giving a voice to the youthful victims of sexual abuse will inspire both praise and debate. "Many contemporary works of fiction are bold, but few are this courageous ... Rafael Yglesias has written a frightening, evocative, and intensely compassionate novel that manages somehow to do the impossible, shedding light on one of the darkest corners of this human theater." ⁰́₄Helen Schulman, author of This Beautiful Life "The sly courage, the deft intelligence, and the fierceness of vision that we, his fans, have come to expect from a Raphael Yglesias novel all blaze brightly forth⁰́₄and cast very dark shadows⁰́₄in The Wisdom of Perversity." ⁰́₄Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize⁰́₃winning novelist.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781616204730Publication Date: 2015-03-24
Food
Food
The New Southern-Latino Table by
In this splendid cookbook, bicultural cook Sandra Gutierrez blends ingredients, traditions and culinary techniques, creatively marrying the diverse and delicious cuisines of more than 20 Latin American countries with the beloved food of the American south. The New Southern-Latino Table features 150 original and delightfully tasty recipes that combine the best of both culinary cultures. Gutierrez, who has taught thousands of people how to cook, highlights the surprising affinities between the foodways of the Latin and Southern regions--including a wide variety of ethnic roots in each tradition and many shared basic ingredients--while embracing their flavorful contrasts and fascinating histories. These lively dishes--including Jalapeno Deviled Eggs, Cocktail Chiles Rellenos with Latin Pimiento Cheese, Two-Corn Summer Salad, Latin Fried Chicken with Smoky Ketchup, Macaroni con Queso and Chile Chocolate Brownies--promise to spark the imaginations and the meals of home cooks, seasoned or novice, and of food lovers everywhere. Along with delectable appetizers, salads, entrees, side dishes and desserts, Gutierrez also provides a handy glossary, a section on how to navigate a Latin tienda and a guide to ingredient sources. The New Southern-Latino Table brings to your home innovative, vibrant dishes that meld Latin American and southern palates.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780807869215Publication Date: 2011-09-12
History
History
Fighting Their Own Battles by
Between 1940 and 1975, Mexican Americans and African Americans in Texas fought a number of battles in court, at the ballot box, in schools, and on the streets to eliminate segregation and state-imposed racism. Although both groups engaged in civil rights struggles as victims of similar forms of racism and discrimination, they were rarely unified. In Fighting Their Own Battles, Brian Behnken explores the cultural dissimilarities, geographical distance, class tensions, and organizational differences that all worked to separate Mexican Americans and blacks. Behnken further demonstrates that prejudices on both sides undermined the potential for a united civil rights campaign. Coalition building and cooperative civil rights efforts foundered on the rocks of perceived difference, competition, distrust, and, oftentimes, outright racism. Behnken's in-depth study reveals the major issues of contention for the two groups, their different strategies to win rights, and significant thematic developments within the two civil rights struggles. By comparing the histories of these movements in one of the few states in the nation to witness two civil rights movements, Behnken bridges the fields of Mexican American and African American history, revealing the myriad causes that ultimately led these groups to "fight their own battles."
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780807877876Publication Date: 2011-05-02
Home Grown by
Historian Isaac Campos combines wide-ranging archival research with the latest scholarship on the social and cultural dimensions of drug-related behavior in this telling of marijuana's remarkable history in Mexico. Introduced in the sixteenth century by the Spanish, cannabis came to Mexico as an industrial fiber and symbol of European empire. But, Campos demonstrates, as it gradually spread to indigenous pharmacopoeias, then prisons and soldiers' barracks, it took on both a Mexican name--marijuana--and identity as a quintessentially "Mexican" drug. A century ago, Mexicans believed that marijuana could instantly trigger madness and violence in its users, and the drug was outlawed nationwide in 1920. Home Grown thus traces the deep roots of the antidrug ideology and prohibitionist policies that anchor the drug-war violence that engulfs Mexico today. Campos also counters the standard narrative of modern drug wars, which casts global drug prohibition as a sort of informal American cultural colonization. Instead, he argues, Mexican ideas were the foundation for notions of "reefer madness" in the United States. This book is an indispensable guide for anyone who hopes to understand the deep and complex origins of marijuana's controversial place in North American history.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780807882689Publication Date: 2012-04-23
Braceros by
At the beginning of World War II, the United States and Mexico launched the bracero program, a series of labor agreements that brought Mexican men to work temporarily in U.S. agricultural fields. In "Braceros", historian Deborah Cohen asks why these migrants provoked so much concern and anxiety in the United States and what the Mexican government expected to gain in participating in the program. Cohen creatively links the often unconnected themes of exploitation, development, the rise of consumer cultures, and gendered class and race formation to show why those with connections beyond the nation have historically provoked suspicion, anxiety, and retaliatory political policies.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780807833599Publication Date: 2011-02-15
Securing Sex by
" ... A transnational network of right-wing cultural activists. They subsequently joined the powerful hardline constituency supporting Brazil's brutal military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. There, they lent their weight to a dictatorship that, Cowan argues, operationalized a moral panic that conflated communist subversion with manifestations of modernity, coalescing around the crucial nodes of gender and sexuality, particularly in relation to youth, women, and the mass media"-- Provided by publisher
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781469627502Publication Date: 2016-04-11
Conceiving Freedom by
"In Conceiving Freedom, Camillia Cowling shows how gender shaped urban routes to freedom for the enslaved during the process of gradual emancipation in Cuba and Brazil, which occurred only after the rest of Latin America had abolished slavery and even after the American Civil War. Focusing on late nineteenth-century Havana and Rio de Janeiro, Cowling argues that enslaved women played a dominant role in carving out freedom for themselves and their children through the courts. Cowling examines how women, typically illiterate but with access to scribes, instigated myriad successful petitions for emancipation, often using "free-womb" laws that declared that the children of enslaved women were legally free. She reveals how enslaved women's struggles connected to abolitionist movements in each city and the broader Atlantic World, mobilizing new notions about enslaved and free womanhood. She shows how women conceived freedom and then taught the "free-womb" generation to understand and shape the meaning of that freedom. Even after emancipation, freed women would continue to use these claims-making tools as they struggled to establish new spaces for themselves and their families in post emancipation society"-- Provided by publisher.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781469610870Publication Date: 2013-12-20
The Guatemala Reader by
An interdisciplinary anthology on the largest, most populous nation in Central America, covering Guatemalan history, culture, literature and politics and containing many primary sources not previously published in English.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780822394679Publication Date: 2011-10-31
Allende's Chile and the Inter-American Cold War by
"Drawing on firsthand interviews and recently declassified documents from archives in North America, Europe, and South America, Harmer provides the most comprehensive account to date of Cuban involvement in Latin America in the early 1970s, Chilean foreign relations during Allende's presidency, Brazil's support for counterrevolution in the Southern Cone, and the Nixon administration's Latin American policies. Harmer argues that this battle was part of a dynamic inter-American Cold War struggle to determine Latin America's future"--Provided by publisher."Fidel Castro described Salvador Allende's democratic election as president of Chile in 1970 as the most important revolutionary triumph in Latin America after the Cuban revolution. Yet celebrations were short lived. In Washington, the Nixon administration vowed to destroy Allende's left-wing government while Chilean opposition forces mobilized against him. The result was a battle for Chile that ended in 1973 with a right-wing military coup and a brutal dictatorship lasting nearly twenty years. Tanya Harmer argues that this battle was part of a dynamic inter-American Cold War struggle to determine Latin America's future, shaped more by the contest between Cuba, Chile, the United States, and Brazil than by a conflict between Moscow and Washington. Drawing on firsthand interviews and recently declassified documents from archives in North America, Europe, and South America--including Chile's Foreign Ministry Archive--Harmer provides the most comprehensive account to date of Cuban involvement in Latin America in the early 1970s, Chilean foreign relations during Allende's presidency, Brazil's support for counterrevolution in the Southern Cone, and the Nixon administration's Latin American policies. The Cold War in the Americas, Harmer reveals, is best understood as a multidimensional struggle, involving peoples and ideas from across the hemisphere"--Provided by publisher.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781469602721Publication Date: 2014-06-24
The Chile Reader by
Perfect for the student or traveler, The Chile Reader covers more than 500 years of Chilean history, with an emphasis on the past half-century. Its many selections include interviews, travel diaries, diplomatic cables, cartoons, and photographs.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780822353461Publication Date: 2013-11-29
Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico by
In this history of childbirth and contraception in Mexico, Nora E. Jaffary chronicles colonial and nineteenth-century beliefs and practices surrounding conception, pregnancy and its prevention, and birth. Tracking Mexico's transition from colony to nation, Jaffary demonstrates the central role of reproduction in ideas about female sexuality and virtue, the development of modern Mexico, and the growth of modern medicine in the Latin American context. The story encompasses networks of people in all parts of society, from state and medical authorities to mothers and midwives, husbands and lovers, employers and neighbors. Jaffary focuses on key topics including virginity, conception, contraception and abortion, infanticide, "monstrous" births, and obstetrical medicine. Her approach yields surprising insights into the emergence of modernity in Mexico. Over the course of the nineteenth century, for example, expectations of idealized womanhood and female sexual virtue gained rather than lost importance. In addition, rather than being obliterated by European medical practice, features of pre-Columbian obstetrical knowledge, especially of abortifacients, circulated among the Mexican public throughout the period under study. Jaffary details how, across time, localized contexts shaped the changing history of reproduction, contraception, and maternity provided by publisher
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781469629391Publication Date: 2016-11-28
The Corner of the Living by
Interest remains high in the story of the Shining Path, the Maoist guerrilla insurgency founded in Peru in the late 1960s. Miguel La Serna's history of key roles played by Peru's indigenous peoples in the conflict adds a major new dimension to our understanding of Peru's war, especially with La Serna's fresh, unique emphasis on the years leading up to the peak years of violence from 1980-1992. On a broader level, La Serna's work drives home how localized, culturally particular perspectives contributed to the internationally significant political events in Peru that shaped much of the world during the Cold War.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780807835470Publication Date: 2012-03-12
The Age of Youth in Argentina by
"This social and cultural history of Argentina's "long sixties" argues that the nation's younger generation was at the epicenter of a public struggle over democracy, authoritarianism, and revolution from the mid-twentieth century through the ruthless military dictatorship that seized power in 1976. Valeria Manzano demonstrates how, during this period, large numbers of youths built on their history of earlier activism and pushed forward closely linked agendas of sociocultural modernization and political radicalization. Focusing also on the views of adults who assessed, and sometimes profited from, youth culture, Manzano analyzes countercultural formations--including rock music, sexuality, student life, and communal living experiences--and situates them in an international context. She details how, while Argentines of all ages yearned for newness and change, it was young people who championed the transformation of deep-seated traditions of social, cultural, and political life. The significance of youth was not lost on the leaders of the rising junta: people aged sixteen to thirty accounted for 70 percent of the estimated 20,000 Argentines who were "disappeared" during the regime."--Publisher's description.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781469611617Publication Date: 2014-04-28
Memories of Conquest by
Indigenous allies helped the Spanish gain a foothold in the Americas. What did these Indian conquistadors expect from the partnership, and what were the implications of their involvement in Spain's New World empire? Laura Matthew's study of Ciudad Vieja, Guatemala--the study first to focus on a single allied colony over the entire colonial period--places the Nahua, Zapotec, and Mixtec conquistadors of Guatemala and their descendants within a deeply Mesoamerican historical context. Drawing on archives, ethnography, and colonial Mesoamerican maps, Matthew argues that the conquest cannot be fully.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780807835371Publication Date: 2012-04-30
The Logic of Compromise in Mexico by
In this political history of twentieth-century Mexico, Gladys McCormick argues that the key to understanding the immense power of the long-ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) is to be found in the countryside. Using newly available sources, including declassified secret police files and oral histories, McCormick looks at large-scale sugar cooperatives in Morelos and Puebla, two major agricultural regions that serve as microcosms of events across the nation. She argues that Mexico's rural peoples, despite shouldering much of the financial burden of modernization policies, formed the PRI regime's most fervent base of support. McCormick demonstrates how the PRI exploited this support, using key parts of the countryside to test and refine instruments of control--including the regulation of protest, manipulation of collective memories of rural communities, and selective application of violence against critics--that it later employed in other areas, both rural and urban. With three peasant leaders, brothers named Ruben, Porfirio, and Antonio Jaramillo, at the heart of her story, McCormick draws a capacious picture of peasant activism, disillusion, and compromise in state formation, revealing the basis for an enduring political culture dominated by the PRI. On a broader level, McCormick demonstrates the connections among modern state building in Latin America, the consolidation of new forms of authoritarian rule, and the deployment of violence on all sides.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781469627762Publication Date: 2016-01-01
The Work of Recognition by
This book tells the compelling story of postemancipation Colombia, from the liberation of the slaves in the 1850s through the country's first general labor strikes in the 1910s. As Jason McGraw demonstrates, ending slavery fostered a new sense of citizenship, one shaped both by a model of universal rights and by the particular freedom struggles of African-descended people. Colombia's Caribbean coast was at the center of these transformations, in which women and men of color, the region's majority population, increasingly asserted the freedom to control their working conditions, fight in civil wars, and express their religious beliefs. The history of Afro-Colombians as principal social actors after emancipation, McGraw argues, opens up a new view on the practice and meaning of citizenship. Crucial to this conception of citizenship was the right of recognition. Indeed, attempts to deny the role of people of color in the republic occurred at key turning points exactly because they demanded public recognition as citizens. In connecting Afro-Colombians to national development, The Work of Recognition also places the story within the broader contexts of Latin American popular politics, culture, and the African diaspora.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781469617862Publication Date: 2014-08-18
Smeltertown by
Company town. Blighted community. Beloved home. Nestled on the banks of the Rio Grande, at the heart of a railroad, mining, and smelting empire, Smeltertown--La Esmelda, as its residents called it--was home to generations of ethnic Mexicans who labored at the American Smelting and Refining Company in El Paso, Texas. Using newspapers, personal archives, photographs, employee records, parish newsletters, and interviews with former residents, including her own relatives, Monica Perales unearths the history of this forgotten community. Spanning almost a century, Smeltertown traces the birth, growth, and ultimate demise of a working class community in the largest U.S. city on the Mexican border and places ethnic Mexicans at the center of transnational capitalism and the making of the urban West. Perales shows that Smeltertown was composed of multiple real and imagined social worlds created by the company, the church, the schools, and the residents themselves. Within these dynamic social worlds, residents forged permanence and meaning in the shadow of the smelter's giant smokestacks. Smeltertown provides insight into how people and places invent and reinvent themselves and illuminates a vibrant community grappling with its own sense of itself and its place in history and collective memory.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780807899564Publication Date: 2010-09-13
Creating a Common Table in Twentieth-Century Argentina by
"Dona Petrona C. de Gandulfo (c. 1896-1992) reigned as Argentina's preeminent domestic and culinary expert from the 1930s through the 1980s. An enduring culinary icon thanks to her magazine columns, radio programs, and television shows, she was likely second only to Eva Peron in terms of the fame she enjoyed and the adulation she received. Her cookbook garnered tremendous popularity, becoming one of the three best-selling books in Argentina. Dona Petrona capitalized on and contributed to the growing appreciation for women's domestic roles as the Argentine economy expanded and fell into periodic crises. Drawing on a wide range of materials, including her own interviews with Dona Petrona's inner circle and with everyday women and men, Rebekah E. Pite provides a lively social history of twentieth-century Argentina, as exemplified through the fascinating story of Dona Petrona and the homemakers to whom she dedicated her career. Pite's narrative illuminates the important role of food--its consumption, preparation, and production--in daily life, class formation, and national identity. By connecting issues of gender, domestic work, and economic development, Pite brings into focus the critical importance of women's roles as consumers, cooks, and community builders"-- Provided by publisher
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781469606897Publication Date: 2013-04-01
Myths of Demilitarization in Postrevolutionary Mexico, 1920-1960 by
At the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1920, Mexico's large, rebellious army dominated national politics. By the 1940s, Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was led by a civilian president, and claimed to have depoliticised the army and achieved the bloodless pacification of the Mexican countryside through land reform, schooling, and indigenismo. However, this book argues, Mexico's celebrated demilitarisation was more protracted, conflict-ridden, and incomplete than most accounts assume.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780807839287Publication Date: 2013-04-22
From South Texas to the Nation by
In the early years of the twentieth century, newcomer farmers and migrant Mexicans forged a new world in South Texas. In just a decade, this vast region, previously considered too isolated and desolate for large-scale agriculture, became one of the United States' most lucrative farming regions and one of its worst places to work. By encouraging mass migration from Mexico, paying low wages, selectively enforcing immigration restrictions, toppling older political arrangements, and periodically immobilizing the workforce, growers created a system of labor controls unique in its levels of exploitation. Ethnic Mexican residents of South Texas fought back by organizing and by leaving, migrating to destinations around the United States where employers eagerly hired them--and continued to exploit them. In From South Texas to the Nation, John Weber reinterprets the United States' record on human and labor rights. This important book illuminates the way in which South Texas pioneered the low-wage, insecure, migration-dependent labor system on which so many industries continue to depend.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781469625232Publication Date: 2015-10-26
Early Latino Ballplayers in the United States by
From 1900 through the 1940s Latino baseball players suffered discrimination, poor accommodations, low pay and homesickness to play a game they loved. Those who were both talented and light-skinned enough to make it to the majors were mocked for being foreign. Those in the Negro Leagues were, like African American ballplayers, segregated and largely ignored by the public and major league scouts. Building on the work of researchers who focused on the seasons and careers of these pioneer athletes, Nick Wilson draws on primary documents and interviews to round out our knowledge of the players as people. Jose Mendez, Miguel Gonzalez, Luis Tiant, Sr., Martin Dihigo, Rodolfo Fernandez, Roberto Ortiz, Cristobal Torriente, Hiram Bithorn and Pedro "Preston" Gomez are only a few examples of the players included here. Appendices on "Americans Who Positively Influenced Latin Migration" and "Latinos and the Washington Senators Spring Training Camps, 1939-1942" are included, along with 26 photos, appendices, notes, bibliography, index.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781476603186Publication Date: 2013-01-24
Traders and Raiders by
The Colorado River region looms large in modern history, but has, in fact, played a pivotal role in the colonial designs of Euro-Americans since the first Spanish journey up the Colorado River in the sixteenth century. This book examines more than three centuries of indigenous life in the West, revealing how native peoples of present-day southern California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico maintained their autonomy amidst the unprecedented political, economic, and cultural changes occurring throughout the region.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781469615844Publication Date: 2014-08-25
Poetry
Poetry
The Woman I Kept to Myself by
The works of this award-winning poet and novelist are rich with the language and influences of two cultures: those of the Dominican Republic of her childhood and the America of her youth and adulthood. They have shaped her writing just as they have shaped her life. In these seventy-five autobiographical poems, Alvarez?s clear voice sings out in every line. Here, in the middle of her life, she looks back as a way of understanding and celebrating the woman she has become.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781616200749Publication Date: 2011-04-05
Porridge by
Richard Garcia's Porridge is a fractious mash-up of fairy tales, nursery rhymes, cartoons, games, dances, popular songs and the Bible-with an occasional nod to the greatest hits of English literature. Imagine Shakespeare, Walt Disney and the Brothers Grimm on a road trip, and you'll have an idea of the invention, wit, and virtuosity of this mesmerizing collection of prose poems. Garcia's quirky fables are by turns playful, humorous, and haunting, and Garcia guides us through his dream-like evocations with wonder, charity and aplomb. -Gary Young, author of Even So: New & Selected Poems.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781941209356Publication Date: 2016-04-01
Only the Road / Solo el Camino by
Featuring the work of more than fifty poets writing across the last eight decades, Only the Road / Solo el Camino is the most complete bilingual anthology of Cuban poetry available to an English readership. It is distinguished by its stylistic breadth and the diversity of its contributors, who come from throughout Cuba and its diaspora and include luminaries, lesser-known voices, and several Afro-Cuban and LGBTQ poets. Nearly half of the poets in the collection are women. Only the Road paints a full and dynamic picture of modern Cuban life and poetry, highlighting their unique features and idiosyncrasies, the changes across generations, and the ebbs and flows between repression and freedom following the Revolution. Poet Margaret Randall, who translated each poem, contributes extensive biographical notes for each poet and a historical introduction to twentieth-century Cuban poetry.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780822362081Publication Date: 2016-10-17
Social Studies
Social Studies
Sharing This Walk by
The Primeiro Comando do Capital (PCC) is a Sao Paulo prison gang that since the 1990s has expanded into the most powerful criminal network in Brazil. Karina Biondi's rich ethnography of the PCC is uniquely informed by her insider-outsider status. Prior to his acquittal, Biondi's husband was incarcerated in a PCC-dominated prison for several years. During the period of Biondi's intense and intimate visits with her husband and her extensive fieldwork in prisons and on the streets of Sao Paulo, the PCC effectively controlled more than 90 percent of Sao Paulo's 147 prison facilities. Available for the first time in English, Biondi's riveting portrait of the PCC illuminates how the organization operates inside and outside of prison, creatively elaborating on a decentered, non-hierarchical, and far-reaching command system. This system challenges both the police forces against which the PCC has declared war and the methods and analytic concepts traditionally employed by social scientists concerned with crime, incarceration, and policing. Biondi posits that the PCC embodies a "politics of transcendence," a group identity that is braided together with, but also autonomous from, its decentralized parts. Biondi also situates the PCC in relation to redemocratization and rampant socioeconomic inequality in Brazil, as well as to counter-state movements, crime, and punishment in the Americas.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781469630311Publication Date: 2016-10-12
From Coveralls to Zoot Suits by
"During World War II, unprecedented employment avenues opened up for women and minorities in U.S. defense industries at the same time that massive population shifts and the war challenged Americans to rethink notions of race. At this extraordinary historical moment, Mexican American women found new means to exercise control over their lives in the home, workplace, and nation. In From Coveralls to Zoot Suits, Elizabeth R. Escobedo explores how, as war workers and volunteers, dance hostesses and zoot suiters, respectable young ladies and rebellious daughters, these young women used wartime conditions to serve the United States in its time of need and to pursue their own desires. But even after the war, as Escobedo shows, Mexican American women had to continue challenging workplace inequities and confronting family and communal resistance to their broadening public presence. Highlighting seldom heard voices of the 'Greatest Generation,' Escobedo examines these contradictions within Mexican families and their communities, exploring the impact of youth culture, outside employment, and family relations on the lives of women whose home-front experiences and everyday life choices would fundamentally alter the history of a generation."-- Provided by publisher.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781469602059Publication Date: 2013-03-21
The Latino Generation by
"Latinos are already the largest minority group in the United States, and experts estimate that by 2050, one out of three Americans will identify as Latino. Though their population and influence are steadily rising, stereotypes and misconceptions about Latinos remain, from the assumption that they refuse to learn English to questions of just how 'American' they actually are. By presenting thirteen riveting oral histories of young, first-generation college students, Mario T. Garcia counters those long-held stereotypes and expands our understanding of what he terms 'the Latino Generation.' By allowing these young people to share their stories and struggles, Garcia reveals that these students and children of immigrants will be critical players in the next chapter of our nation's history. Collected over several years, the testimonios follow the history of the speakers in thought-provoking ways, reminding us that members of the Latino Generation are not merely a demographic group but rather real individuals, as American in their aspirations and loyalty as the members of any other ethnic group in the country"-- Provided by publisher.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781469614113Publication Date: 2014-05-12
The Latino Migration Experience in North Carolina, Revised and Expanded Second Edition by Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781469646428Publication Date: 2018-07-18
Native and National in Brazil by
How do the lives of indigenous peoples relate to the romanticized role of 'Indians' in Brazilian history, politics, and cultural production? Native and National in Brazil charts this enigmatic relationship from the sixteenth century to the present, focusing on the consolidation of the dominant national imaginary in the postindependence period and highlighting Native peoples' ongoing work to decolonize it. Engaging issues ranging from sovereignty, citizenship, and national security to the revolutionary potential of art, sustainable development, and the gendering of ethnic differences, Tracy Devine Guzman argues that the tensions between popular renderings of "Indianness" and lived indigenous experience are critical to the unfolding of Brazilian nationalism, on the one hand, and the growth of the Brazilian indigenous movement, on the other. Devine Guzmán suggests that the "indigenous question" now posed by Brazilian indigenous peoples themselves-how to be Native and national at the same time-can help us to rethink national belonging in accordance with the protection of human rights, the promotion of social justice, and the consolidation of democratic governance for indigenous and nonindigenous citizens alike
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781469602103Publication Date: 2013-05-27
Porous Borders by
"With the railroad's arrival in the late nineteenth century, immigrants of all colors rushed to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, transforming the region into a booming international hub of economic and human activity. Following the stream of Mexican, Chinese, and African American migration, Julian Lim presents a fresh study of the multiracial intersections of the borderlands, where diverse peoples crossed multiple boundaries in search of new economic opportunities and social relations. However, as these migrants came together in ways that blurred and confounded elite expectations of racial order, both the United States and Mexico resorted to increasingly exclusionary immigration policies in order to make the multiracial populations of the borderlands less visible within the body politic, and to remove them from the boundaries of national identity altogether"-- Provided by publisher
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781469635507Publication Date: 2017-10-10
Defiant Braceros by
"In this book, Mireya Loza sheds new light on the history of the Bracero Program (1942-1964), the binational agreement between the United States and Mexico that allowed hundreds of thousands of male Mexican workers to enter this country on temporary work permits. While this program and the issue of temporary workers has long been politicized on both sides of the border, Loza argues that the prevailing romanticized image of braceros as a family-oriented, productive, legal workforce has obscured the real, diverse experiences of the workers themselves. Focusing on underexplored aspects of workers' lives such as their transnational union organizing efforts, the sexual economies of both gay and straight workers, and the ethno-racial boundaries among Mexican indigenous braceros, Loza reveals how these men defied perceived political, sexual, and racial norms. Basing her work on an archive of more than 800 oral histories from the United States and Mexico, Loza is the first scholar to carefully differentiate between the experiences of Spanish-speaking guest workers and the many Mixtec, Zapotec, Purhepecha, and Mayan laborers. In doing so, she demonstrates how these transnational workers were able to forge new identities in the face of intense discrimination and exploitation"-- Provided by publisher.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781469629759Publication Date: 2016-09-06
Power to the Poor by
The Poor People's Campaign of 1968 has long been overshadowed by the assassination of its architect, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the political turmoil of that year. In a major reinterpretation of civil rights and Chicano movement history, Gordon K. Mantler demonstrates how King's unfinished crusade became the era's most high-profile attempt at multiracial collaboration and sheds light on the interdependent relationship between racial identity and political coalition among African Americans and Mexican Americans. Mantler argues that while the fight against poverty held great potential for black-brown cooperation, such efforts also exposed the complex dynamics between the nation's two largest minority groups.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781469608075Publication Date: 2014-06-24
Latin American Popular Culture by
This book details many aspects of Latin American culture as experienced by millions of people living in Central and South America. The author argues that despite early and considerable European influences on the region, indigenous Latin American traditions still characterize much of the social and artistic heritage of the Latin American countries. Several chapters provide detailed accounts of daily life, including descriptions of contemporary dress, mealtime traditions, transportation and traditional ways of conducting business. Other chapters focus on the cultural significance of the popular music, art and literature prevalent in each Latin American country. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here:
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780786451487Publication Date: 2008-05-23
The Tejano Diaspora by
Rodriguez examines how Chicano political and social movements developed at both ends of the migratory labor network that flowed between Crystal City, Texas, and Wisconsin during the 1960s and 1970s. By providing a view of the Chicano movement beyond the Southwest, Rodriguez reveals an emergent ethnic identity, discovers an overlooked youth movement, and interrogates the meanings of American citizenship.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780807877661Publication Date: 2011-04-18
Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement by
"In the first book-length history of Puerto Rican civil rights in New York City, Sonia Lee traces the rise and fall of an uneasy coalition between Puerto Rican and African American activists from the 1950s through the 1970s. Previous work has tended to see blacks and Latinos as either naturally unified as "people of color" or irreconcilably at odds as two competing minorities. Lee demonstrates instead that Puerto Rican and African Americans in New York City shaped the complex and shifting meanings of "Puerto Rican-ness" and "blackness" through political activism. African American and Puerto Rican New Yorkers came to see themselves as minorities joined in the civil rights struggle, the War on Poverty, and the Black Power movement - until white backlash and internal class divisions helped break the coalition, remaking "Hispanicity" as an ethnic identity that was mutually exclusive from "blackness."Drawing on extensive archival research and oral history interviews, Lee vividly portrays this crucial chapter in postwar New York, revealing the permeability of boundaries between African American and Puerto Rican communities." -- From the jacket.Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781469614144Publication Date: 2014-05-26
Latinos at the Golden Gate by
Born in an explosive boom and built through distinct economic networks, San Francisco has a cosmopolitan character that often masks the challenges migrants faced to create community in the city by the bay. Latin American migrants have been part of the city's story since its beginning. Charting the development of a hybrid Latino identity forged through struggle-- latinidad --from the Gold Rush through the civil rights era, Tomas F. Summers Sandoval Jr. chronicles the rise of San Francisco's diverse community of Latin American migrants. This latinidad, Summers Sandoval shows, was formed and mad.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781469612720Publication Date: 2014-06-24
Corazón de Dixie by
"When Latino migration to the U.S. South became increasingly visible in the 1990s, observers and advocates grasped for ways to analyze "new" racial dramas in the absence of historical reference points. However, as this book is the first to comprehensively document, Mexicans and Mexican Americans have a long history of migration to the U.S. South. Corazón de Dixie recounts the untold histories of Mexicanos' migrations to New Orleans, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina as far back as 1910. It follows Mexicanos into the heart of Dixie, where they navigated the Jim Crow system, cultivated community in the cotton fields, purposefully appealed for help to the Mexican government, shaped the southern conservative imagination in the wake of the civil rights movement, and embraced their own version of suburban living at the turn of the twenty-first century"-- Provided by publisher.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781469624976Publication Date: 2015-09-30
Religion
Religion
Migrating Faith by
Daniel Ramírez's history of 20th century Pentecostalism in the US-Mexico borderlands argues that, because of the distance separating the transnational migratory circuits from domineering arbiters of religious and aesthetic orthodoxy in both the US and Mexico, the region was fertile ground for the religious innovation by which working-class Pentecostals expanded and changed traditional options for practicing the faith.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781469624075Publication Date: 2015-09-14
