February 2013
5 posts
November 2012
1 post
A Natural History of Chicano Literature: Juan... →
Juan Felipe Herrera traveled as a child with his parents through many small farming towns and cities in California, until finally settling in San Diego. He has taught poetry from kindergarten to the university level and is the author of numerous poetry and children’s books, including Calling The Doves, which won the Ezra Jack Keats Award, and Crashboomlove, which was prized with the Americas...
August 2011
1 post
History is A Weapon →
History Is A Weapon is a left counter-hegemonic education project.
July 2011
4 posts
Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of... →
This book unravels the ethnic history of California since the late nineteenth-century Anglo-American conquest and the institutionalization of “white supremacy” in the state. Drawing from an array of primary and secondary sources, Tomás Almaguer weaves a detailed, disturbing portrait of ethnic, racial, and class relationships during this tumultuous time. A new preface looks at...
Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical... →
Chicana Feminist Thought brings together the voices of Chicana poets, writers, and activists who reflect upon the Chicana Feminist Movement that began in the late 1960s. With energy and passion, this anthology of writings documents the personal and collective political struggles of Chicana feminists.
Working the Boundaries: Race, Space and... →
Description
While Chicago has the second-largest Mexican population among U.S. cities, relatively little ethnographic attention has focused on its Mexican community. This much-needed ethnography of Mexicans living and working in Chicago examines processes of racialization, labor subordination, and class formation; the politics of nativism; and the structures of citizenship and immigration...
June 2011
6 posts
WatchLorena Oropeza, Author of Raza Si! Guerra No! and Associate Professor of History at UC Davis speaking with Charly Trujillo, Vietnam War Veteran awarded the Purple Heart and a native of Corcoran, a small agricultural community of the San Joaquin Valley of California. After his discharge he continued his education and received a BA from UC Berkeley and an MA from San José State University. He is...
Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease... →
Celebrated American Indian thinker Jack D. Forbes’s Columbus and Other Cannibalswas one of the founding texts of the anticivilization movement when it was first published in 1978. His history of terrorism, genocide, and ecocide told from a Native American point of view has inspired America’s most influential activists for decades. Frighteningly, his radical critique of the modern “civilized”...
Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in... →
“Conquest usually has a negative impact on the vanquished, but it can also provide the disenfranchised in conquered societies new tools for advancement within their families and
This is a very good book that shows the richness of employing gender, class, race, and ethnicity as analytic tools —Journal of the West Negotiating Conquest is a must-read for anyone interested in the process...
Barrios Nortenos: St. Paul and Midwestern Mexican... →
Mexican communities in the Midwestern United States have a history that extends back to the turn of the twentieth century, when a demand for workers in several mass industries brought Mexican agricultural laborers to jobs and homes in the cities. This book offers a comprehensive social, labor, and cultural history of these workers and their descendants, using the Mexican barrio of...
Memory, Community, and Activism: Mexican Migration... →
Memory, Community, and Activism is the first book-length study to critically examine the Mexican experience in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. Many books deal with Chicano history, but few ever attempt to interpret or analyze it beyond the confines of the American Southwest. Eleven essays by leading scholars on the Mexican experience in the Northwest shed new light on immigration/migration, the...
Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers... →
In her incisive analysis of the shaping of California’s agricultural work force, Devra Weber shows how the cultural background of Mexican and, later, Anglo-American workers, combined with the structure of capitalist cotton production and New Deal politics, forging a new form of labor relations. She pays particular attention to Mexican field workers and their organized struggles,...
May 2011
3 posts
U.S. Hispanic Country-of-Origin Counts for Nation,... →
The Pew Hispanic Center is a nonpartisan research organization that seeks to improve public understanding of the diverse Hispanic population in the United States and to chronicle Latinos’ growing impact on the nation. It does not take positions on policy issues. The Center is part of the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan “fact tank” based in Washington, D.C., and it is funded...
Decolonizing Methodologies by Linda Tuhiwai Smith →
About the Book
From the vantage point of the colonized, the term ‘research‘ is inextricably linked with European colonialism; the ways in which scientific research has been implicated in the worst excesses of imperialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world‘s colonized peoples. Here, an indigenous researcher issues a clarion call for the decolonization of research...
From Out of the Shadows: Mexican American Women in... →
From Out of the Shadows was the first full study of Mexican-American women in the twentieth century. Beginning with the first wave of Mexican women crossing the border early in the century, historian Vicki L. Ruiz reveals the struggles they have faced and the communities they have built. In a narrative enhanced by interviews and personal stories, she shows how from labor camps, boxcar...
April 2011
4 posts
Chicano Park takeover San Diego, CA April 22,... →
The History of Chicano Park web site supports MAS 350B: Mexican American Studies - Chicano History at San Diego State University. This class involves the study of the history of Chicanos since 1848, using Chicano Park as a point of departure for research and study. The main emphasis of the class will be to survey the major themes of Chicano history that are suggested by the murals of Chicano...
No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed The Rise of... →
Founded by Mexican American men in 1929, the League of United Latin-American Citizens (LULAC) has usually been judged according to Chicano nationalist standards of the late 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on extensive archival research, including the personal papers of Alonso S. Perales and Adela Sloss-Vento, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed presents the history of LULAC in a new light,...
Inter-University Program for Latino Research →
IUPLR is a national consortium of university-based centers dedicated to the advancement of the Latino intellectual presence in the United States. IUPLR works to expand the pool of Latino scholars and leaders and increase the availability of policy-relevant Latino-focused research. IUPLR headquarters, located at the University of Notre Dame, and the IUPLR Washington DC Office, located at...
The Tejano Diaspora: Mexican Americanism and... →
Each spring during the 1960s and 1970s, a quarter million farm workers left Texas to travel across the nation, from the Midwest to California, to harvest America’s agricultural products. During this migration of people, labor, and ideas, Tejanos established settlements in nearly all the places they traveled to for work, influencing concepts of Mexican Americanism in Texas,...
March 2011
32 posts
Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and... →
Twentieth-century Los Angeles has been the locus of one of the most profound and complex interactions between variant cultures in American history. Yet this study is among the first to examine the relationship between ethnicity and identity among the largest immigrant group to that city. By focusing on Mexican immigrants to Los Angeles from 1900 to 1945, George J. Sánchez explores the...
Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest... →
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...
Chicanismo: The Forging of a Militant Ethos among... →
During the 1960s and ’70s, Mexican Americans began to agitate for social and political change. From their diverse activities and agendas there emerged a new political consciousness. Emphasizing race and class within the context of an oppressive society, this militant ethos would become the unifying theme for groups involved in a myriad of causes. Chicanismo, as it came to be known,...
Benson Collection Mexican American\Latino... →
The Mexican American Library Program (MALP) at The University of Texas at Austin was formally established in 1974 by the General Libraries to support the educational needs of students of Mexican American and U.S. Latino culture and history. It is also designed to support the research activities of the faculty of the Center for Mexican American Studies.
Housed in the Nettie Lee Benson Latin...
The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into... →
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.
WatchYo Soy Joaquin by Rudolfo “Corky”
Gonzales Short Film (1969)
Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and... →
Although Mexico lost its northern territories to the United States in 1848, battles over property rights and ownership have remained intense. This turbulent, vividly narrated story of the Maxwell Land Grant, a single tract of 1.7 million acres in northeastern New Mexico, shows how contending groups reinterpret the meaning of property to uphold their conflicting claims to land. The...
Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational... →
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 temporary migrants provoked so much concern and anxiety in the United States and what the Mexican government expected to gain in participating in...
Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon Zoot Suits, Race, and... →
The notorious 1942 “Sleepy Lagoon” murder trial in Los Angeles concluded with the conviction of seventeen young Mexican American men for the alleged gang slaying of fellow youth Jose Diaz. Just five months later, the so-called Zoot Suit Riot erupted, as white soldiers in the city attacked minority youths and burned their distinctive zoot suits. Eduardo Obregón Pagán here...
Eyewitness: A Filmmaker's Memoir of the Chicano... →
“Noted filmmaker Jesús Salvador Treviño participated in and documented the most important events in the Mexican American civil rights movement of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s: the farm workers’ strikes and boycotts, the Los Angeles school walk-outs, the Chicano Youth Conference in Denver, the New Mexico land grant movement, the Chicano moratorium against the...
The Brick People by Alejandro Morales →
The Brick People is an historical novel that traces the growth of California from the nineteenth to the twentieth century by following the development of the Simons Brick Factory. The bricks that laid the foundation of modern California were manufactured by the people that ventured from Central Mexico to stoke the furnaces of industry. With an attention to historical reality blended with...
Roots of Resistance A History of Land Tenure in... →
In New Mexico—once a Spanish colony, then part of Mexico—Pueblo Indians and descendants of Spanish- and Mexican-era settlers still think of themselves as distinct peoples, each with a dynamic history. At the core of these persistent cultural identities is each group’s historical relationship to the others and to the land, a connection that changed dramatically when the United States wrested...
UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Library →
Established in 1969, the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Library and Archive was the first library of its kind and is now the only freestanding Chicano studies library in the United States. It provides information resources, reference services, and bibliographic instruction for those seeking information on Chicano history and culture. The library...
Mexican Chicago Race, Identity, and Nation,... →
Becoming Mexican in early twentieth-century Chicago
Mexican Chicago builds on previous studies of Mexicans in the United States while challenging static definitions of “American” and underlying assumptions of assimilation. Gabriela F. Arredondo contends that because of the revolutionary context from which they came, Mexicans in Chicago between 1916 and 1939 were not just...
Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great... →
This sweeping, vibrant narrative chronicles the history of the Mexican community in Los Angeles. Douglas Monroy unravels the dramatic, complex story of Mexican immigration to Los Angeles during the early decades of the twentieth century and shows how Mexican immigrants re-created their lives and their communities. Against the backdrop of this newly created cityscape, Rebirth explores...
"¡Mi Raza Primero!" (My People First!)... →
¡Mi Raza Primero! is the first book to examine the Chicano movement’s development in one locale—in this case Los Angeles, home of the largest population of people of Mexican descent outside of Mexico City. Ernesto Chávez focuses on four organizations that constituted the heart of the movement: The Brown Berets, the Chicano Moratorium Committee, La Raza Unida Party, and the Centro de...
Occupied America: A History of Chicanos by Rodolfo... →
Authored by one of the most influential and highly-regarded voices of Chicano history and ethnic studies, Occupied America is the most definitive introduction to Chicano history. This comprehensive overview of Chicano history is passionately written and extensively researched.With a concise and engaged narrative, and timelines that give students a context for pivotal events in Chicano ...
Mexican American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance, and... →
Stretching from the years during the Second World War when young couples jitterbugged across the dance floor at the Zenda Ballroom, through the early 1950s when honking tenor saxophones could be heard at the Angelus Hall, to the Spanish-language cosmopolitanism of the late 1950s and 1960s, Mexican American Mojo is a lively account of Mexican American urban culture in wartime and postwar Los...
Mexican New York Transnational Lives of New... →
Drawing on more than fifteen years of research, Mexican New York offers an intimate view of globalization as it is lived by Mexican immigrants and their children in New York and in Mexico. Robert Courtney Smith’s groundbreaking study sheds new light on transnationalism, vividly illustrating how immigrants move back and forth between New York and their home village in Puebla with...
Walls and Mirrors Mexican Americans, Mexican... →
Covering more than one hundred years of American history, Walls and Mirrors examines the ways that continuous immigration from Mexico transformed—and continues to shape—the political, social, and cultural life of the American Southwest. Taking a fresh approach to one of the most divisive political issues of our time, David Gutiérrez explores the ways that nearly a century of steady...
Proletarians of the North A History of Mexican... →
Between the end of World War I and the Great Depression, over 58,000 Mexicans journeyed to the Midwest in search of employment. Many found work in agriculture, but thousands more joined the growing ranks of the industrial proletariat. Throughout the northern Midwest, and especially in Detroit, Mexican workers entered steel mills, packing houses, and auto plants, becoming part of the modern...
Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol by... →
This is the untold history of the United States Border Patrol from its beginnings in 1924 as a small peripheral outfit to its emergence as a large professional police force. To tell this story, Kelly Lytle Hernández dug through a gold mine of lost and unseen records stored in garages, closets, an abandoned factory, and in U.S. and Mexican archives. Focusing on the daily challenges of...
¡Raza Sí! ¡Guerra No! Chicano Protest and... →
This incisive and elegantly written examination of Chicano antiwar mobilization demonstrates how the pivotal experience of activism during the Viet Nam War era played itself out among Mexican Americans. ¡Raza Sí! ¡Guerra No! presents an engaging portrait of Chicano protest and patriotism. On a deeper level, the book considers larger themes of American nationalism and citizenship and the...
¡Chicana Power!: Contested Histories of Feminism... →
” The first book-length study of women’s involvement in the Chicano Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, ¡Chicana Power! tells the powerful story of the emergence of Chicana feminism within student and community-based organizations throughout southern California and the Southwest. As Chicanos engaged in widespread protest in their struggle for social justice, civil rights,...
Pitti, S.J.: The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern... →
This sweeping history explores the growing Latino presence in the United States over the past two hundred years. It also debunks common myths about Silicon Valley, one of the world’s most influential but least-understood places. Far more than any label of the moment, the devil of racism has long been Silicon Valley’s defining force, and Stephen Pitti argues that ethnic ...
