New Books In Latino Studies

Throughout its quest for freedom from colonial rule, the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (PNPR) created strategy through a solidarity that moved far beyond the archipelago. It invested significant energy, members, and resources in attending regional conferences, distributing its literature throughout the hemisphere, creating solidarity committees, presenting its case to elected officials and the general public, and promoting the causes of oppressed peoples. The hemispheric connections between supporters of Puerto Rican independence have been obscured by larger, later liberation movements as well as the island's ultimate failure in its quest for independence, but they were nonetheless at the vanguard of the postcolonial revolutions that swept the world after the Cuban revolution.  Margaret M. Power's new history of the PNPR, Solidarity Across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-Imperialism (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) focuses on how it built a broad movement with active netwo

After Stories: Transnational Intimacies of Postwar El Salvador (Stanford UP, 2022) builds upon Irina Carlota [Lotti] Silber's nearly 25 years of ethnographic research centered in Chalatenango, El Salvador, to follow the trajectories—geographic, temporal, storied—of several extended Salvadoran families. Traveling back and forth in time and across borders, Silber narrates the everyday unfolding of diasporic lives rich with acts of labor, love, and renewed calls for memory, truth, and accountability in El Salvador's long postwar. Through a retrospective and intimate ethnographic method that examines archives of memories and troubles the categories that have come to stand for "El Salvador" such as alarming violent numbers, Silber considers the lives of young Salvadorans who were brought up in an everyday radical politics and then migrated to the United States after more than a decade of peace and democracy. She reflects on this generation of migrants—the 1.5 insurgent generation born to forgotten former rank-and-

Writing Latinos, from Public Books, features interviews with Latino (a/x/e) authors discussing their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad. In this episode, Geraldo Cadava and Tasha Sandoval talk with Raquel Gutiérrez about their critically acclaimed book, Brown Neon: Essays, published by Coffee House Press in 2022. Brown Neon won the 2023 Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction, and was a finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Memoir/Biography and the 2023 Firecracker Award for Creative Nonfiction. It has received praise from the New Yorker, Vogue, Oprah Daily, SPIN, Ms. Magazine, and so many other publications. Gutiérrez, Cadava, and Sandoval discuss the legendary activist Jeanne Córdova, Leslie Marmon Silko, gentrification, belonging, performance, border walls, the Sonoran Desert, the drive on I-10 through Arizona and California, and Tucson. Really, it was a lot about Tucson, and you can thank Sandoval f

Writing Latinos, from Public Books, features interviews with Latino (a/x/e) authors. We discuss their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad. We recently caught up with Héctor Tobar to discuss his new book, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino" (MCD, 2023). Our conversation included mention of the pathbreaking historian Vicki L. Ruiz, to whom Tobar dedicated Our Migrant Souls, as well as discussions on the literary influence of James Baldwin, the need for a revolution in how we talk about immigrants and immigration, Latino racial identity, and Tobar’s own life and travels. Tobar is a writer based in Los Angeles and is a professor of literary journalism and Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the winner of a Pulitzer Prize, a frequent contributor to the New York Times, and the author of many other books, including The Last Great Road Bum, Deep Down Dark, and The Tattooed

Writing Latinos, from Public Books, features interviews with Latino (a/x/e) authors discussing their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad. In this episode, you’ll hear our interview with Alejandro Varela about his books The Town of Babylon and The People Who Report More Stress, both published by Astra House. The Town of Babylon was a finalist for the National Book Award, and The People Who Report More Stress is sure to earn similar accolades. We discussed stress as a silent killer in Latinx communities; the challenges of interethnic and interracial relationships; whether it’s possible to partner with someone who doesn’t share your politics; suburbs and cities; the meanings of Latinx literature as a genre; and so much more. Varela is a writer based in New York City. He has a background in public health, which is evident in his writing. His writing has appeared in the Point Magazine, Georgia Review, Boston Review, Harper’s, The Offing, and oth

Why are students encouraged to move far from home and family, to attend “the best school”? Why aren’t the emotional and physical costs of this disclosed to students and their families? Dr. Jorge Juan Rodríguez joins us to talk about his article, “Lessons From My Working Class Parents,” and the graduate school sacrifices he wouldn’t make. This episode explores: The personal costs first gen students make when they leave family behind. How lived experience can influence your field of study. Why stories from his parents led to his dissertation topic. What led him to prioritize his family and his home life in graduate school. Lessons from his parents. Our guest is: Dr. Jorge Juan Rodriguez, who is the son of two Puerto Rican migrants. He grew up in an affordable housing community outside of Hartford, Connecticut. His lived experiences in that community influenced his academic work, leading him to degrees in biblical studies, liberation theologies, and a Ph.D. in history where he specialized in the intersect

In Caribbean American Narratives of Belonging (Ohio State University Press, 2023), Vivian Nun Halloran analyzes memoirs, picture books, comic books, young adult novels, musicals, and television shows through which Caribbean Americans recount and celebrate their contributions to contemporary politics, culture, and activism in the United States. The writers, civil servants, illustrators, performers, and entertainers whose work is discussed here show what it is like to fit in and be included within the body politic. From civic memoirs by Sonia Sotomayor and others, to West Side Story, Hamilton, and Into the Spider-Verse, these texts share a forward-looking perspective, distinct from the more nostalgic rhetoric of traditional diasporic texts that privilege connections to the islands of origin. There is no one way of being Caribbean. Diasporic communities exhibit a broad spectrum of ethnic, racial, religious, linguistic, and political qualities. Claiming a Caribbean American identity asks wider society to recogniz

Pressing Onward: The Imperative Resilience of Latina Migrant Mothers (U California Press, 2023) centers the stories of mothers who migrated from Latin America, settled in New Haven, Connecticut, and overcame trauma and ongoing adversity to build futures for their children. These migrant mothers enact imperative resilience, engaging cognitive and social strategies to resist racial, economic, and gender-based oppression to seguir adelante, or press onward. Both a contemporary view of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on racially minoritized populations and a timeless account of the ways immigration enforcement and healthcare inequality affect migrant mothers, Pressing Onward uses ethnography to tell a greater story of persistence amid long-standing structural violence. Jessica P. Cerdeña is an anthropologist, family physician-in-training, and mother of two who lives in New Haven, Connecticut, where she advocates for racial justice and health equity (Twitter: @jes_cerdena) Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows

In the early twentieth century, Miami cultivated an image of itself as a destination for leisure and sunshine free from labor strife. In Working in the Magic City: Moral Economy in Early Twentieth-Century Miami (U Illinois Press, 2022), Thomas A. Castillo unpacks this idea of class harmony and the language that articulated its presence by delving into the conflicts, repression, and progressive grassroots politics of the time. Castillo pays particular attention to how class and race relations reflected and reinforced the nature of power in Miami. Class harmony argued against the existence of labor conflict, but in reality obscured how workers struggled within the city's service-oriented seasonal economy. Castillo shows how and why such an ideal thrived in Miami's atmosphere of growth and boosterism and amidst the political economy of tourism. His analysis also presents class harmony as a theoretical framework that broadens our definitions of class conflict and class consciousness. This episode was produced for

In this episode, our host Lucila Rozas discusses the book Latino TV: A History (2022) by Mary Beltrán. You’ll hear about: A brief trajectory of the book and the conversations on global studies of media and communication with which this book engages; The concept of cultural citizenship and its relevance to study Latino TV; How the author puts together the traces of the history of Latino TV, especially in the cases when it was difficult to find information about the series that were not preserved/archived; What has changed in the 2000s-2010s that led to the inclusion of more Latinx people in TV roles in front and behind the camera; How the diversification of latinidad identities in the TV shows is related to race, class, and gender through specific characters or forms of storytelling; The importance of Latino(a)(x) representation in the US TV industry and the potential limits of representation and visibility; The role of Latinx activism in the 1960s and 70s and the legacy of public television on today’s

Mexican American writers make their mark in Science Fiction literature! In this first of a kind anthology, written solely by Mexican Americans, we are taken into space and near future barrios, to the other side of the universe, and onto post-apocalyptic worlds ala raza style. We have seen collections of futures of every kind, but not yet where Chicanada dominate the scene. Enter the world of El Porvenir, ¡Ya! - Citlalzazanilli Mexicatl -Chicano Science Fiction Anthology by Somos en escrito Literary Foundation Press, an independent raza publisher. Authors: Ernest Hogan, Mario Acevedo, Frank Lechuga, Martin Hill Ortiz, Pedro Iniguez, Nicholas Belardes, Armando Rendón, Lizz Huerta, Emmanuel Valtierra, Rios de La Luz, Beatrice Pita, Rosaura Sánchez, R. Ch. Garcia, Ricardo Tavarez, Rosa Martha Villarreal, Carmen Baca, Scott Russell Duncan, Gloria Delgado, and Kathleen Alcalá. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.suppor

Lloyd Daniel Barba's book Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California (Oxford UP, 2022) traces the development of Pentecostalism among Mexican-American migrant laborers in California's agricultural industry from the 1910s to the 1960s. At the time, Pentecostalism was often seen as a distasteful new sect rife with cultish and fanatical tendencies; U.S. growers thought of Mexicans as no more than a mere workforce not fit for citizenship; and industrial agriculture was celebrated for feeding American families while its exploitation of workers went largely ignored. Farmworkers were made out to be culturally vacuous and lacking creative genius, simple laborers caught in a vertiginous cycle of migrant work. This book argues that farmworkers from La Asamblea Apostólica de la Fe en Cristo Jesús carved out a robust socio-religious existence despite these conditions, and in doing so produced a vast record of cultural vibrancy. Examining racialized portrayals of Mexican workers and their religious l

The story of how Black and Brown parents, students and members of low-income communities of color organized to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline in their local schools and built a movement that spread across the country.  In Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline (Oxford UP, 2021), Mark R. Warren documents how Black and Brown parents, students, and low-income communities of color organized to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline in their local schools and built an intersectional movement that spread across the country. Examining organizing processes in Mississippi, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other localities, he shows how relatively small groups of community members built the power to win policy changes to reduce suspensions and expulsions by combining deep local organizing with resources from the national movement. As a result, over the course of twenty years, the movement to combat the school-to-prison pipeline resulted in falling suspension rates across the countr

Water is often tasked with upholding division through the imposition of geopolitical borders. We see this in the construction of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo on the US-Mexico border, as well as in how the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean are used to delineate the limits of US territory. In stark contrast to this divisive view, Afro-diasporic religions conceive of water as a place of connection; it is where spiritual entities and ancestors reside, and where knowledge awaits. Departing from the premise that water encourages confluence through the sustainment of contradiction, Channeling Knowledges: Water and Afro-Diasporic Spirits in Latinx and Caribbean Worlds (U Texas Press, 2023) fathoms water’s depth and breadth in the work of Latinx and Caribbean creators such as Mayra Santos-Febres, Rita Indiana, Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, and the Border of Lights collective. Combining methodologies from literary studies, anthropology, history, and religious studies, Rebeca L. Hey-Colón’s interdisciplinary study traces ho

Contracting Freedom: Race, Empire, and U.S. Guestworker Programs (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) explores the origins of twentieth-century U.S. guestworker programs from Mexico and the Caribbean. It investigates these government-sponsored programs as the unexplored consequence of the history of enslaved labor, Japanese American incarceration, the New Deal, the long civil rights movement, and Caribbean decolonization. Quintana shifts the focus on guestworker programs to the arena of political conflict, revealing how fierce debates over the bracero program and Caribbean contract labor programs extended and legitimated U.S. racial and imperial domination into the present era. Her work also unearths contract workers' emerging visions of social justice that challenged this reproduction of race and empire, giving freedom new meanings that must be contemplated Dr. Quintana earned her Ph.D. at the University of Washington and taught at San Francisco State’s College of Ethnic Studies before joining the Department of Hist

Recent racist anti-immigration policies, from the border wall to the Muslim ban, have left many Americans wondering: How did we get here? In White Borders: The History of Race and Immigration in the United States from Chinese Exclusion to the Border Wall (Beacon Press, 2021), Dr. Reece Jones reveals the painful answer: although the US is often mythologized as a nation of immigrants, it has a long history of immigration restrictions that are rooted in the racist fear of the “great replacement” of whites with non-white newcomers. After the arrival of the first slave ship in 1619, the colonies that became the United States were based on the dual foundation of open immigration for whites from Northern Europe and the racial exclusion of slaves from Africa, Native Americans, and, eventually, immigrants from other parts of the world. Jones' scholarship shines through his extensive research of the United States’ racist and xenophobic underbelly. He connects past and present to uncover the link between the Chinese Exc

Writing Latinos, from Public Books, is a new podcast featuring interviews with Latino (a/x/e) authors discussing their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad. For this episode, we caught up with Edgar Gomez on his memoir High-Risk Homosexual (Soft Skull, 2022). The conversation with Gomez was one of our most wide-ranging, flowing, and honest yet. We talk about machismo, cockfighting, reconciling with parents, the Pulse nightclub shooting, bilingualism in contemporary literature, and the “messiness” of latinidad. The New York Times called High-Risk Homosexual “a breath of fresh air.” The book is a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography; an Honor Book for the 2023 Stonewall Book Award-Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award; and was named a Best Book of the Year by BuzzFeed, Electric Literature, and Publishers Weekly. Born in Florida but with roots in Nicaragua and Puerto Rico, Gomez received an MFA from the University of Calif

First performed in the Milagro Theater of Portland, Oregon in 2014, Olga Sanchez Saltveit’s ¡O Romeo! imagines William Shakespeare, late in his life, writing a play set in Mexico about a conquistador and his beloved, a woman from Tenochtitlán. Shakespeare tells Rifke, his Spanish housekeeper that his conquistador protagonist will “integrate” his beloved’s “life and faith with” his own. Rifke who has received letters from her missionary brother living in the Americas responds, “Los conquistadores no integran, imponen. ¿No has oído lo que escribe mi hermano?” (“The conquistadors do not integrate, they impose. Have you not heard what my brother writes?”) Saltveit’s play has been published in the first volume of a new anthology titled The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera (ACMRS, 2023), with its editors, Katherine “Kate” Gillen, Adrianna M. Santos, and Kathryn “Katie” Vomero Santos. Katherine Gillen is Professor of English at Texas A&M-San Antonio and is the author

In To Tell a Black Story of Miami (UP of Florida, 2022), Tatiana McInnis examines literary and cultural representations of Miami alongside the city's material realities to challenge the image of South Florida as a diverse cosmopolitan paradise. McInnis discusses how this favorable "melting pot" narrative depends on the obfuscation of racialized violence against people of African descent. Analyzing novels, short stories, and memoirs by Edwidge Danticat, M.J. Fievre, Carlos Moore, Carlos Eire, Patricia Stephens Due, and Tananarive Due, as well as films such as Dawg Fight and Moonlight, McInnis demonstrates how these creations push back against erasure by representing the experiences of Black Americans and immigrants from Caribbean nations. McInnis considers portrayals of state-sanctioned oppression, residential segregation, violent detention of emigres, and increasing wealth gaps and concludes that celebrations of Miami's diversity disguise the pervasive, adaptive nature of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. T

Writing Latinos, from Public Books, is a new podcast featuring interviews with Latino (a/x/e) authors discussing their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad. In this episode, Lorgia García Peña discusses her new book, Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective (Duke University Press, 2022). For a long time, Afro-Latino scholars and community organizers have argued both for their greater belonging within Black and Latinx communities in the United States and recognition of their difference from them. Conversations about Blackness within latinidad became more urgent when members of the Los Angeles City Council were caught saying ugly things on tape and because of a proposal to combine race and ethnicity questions on the US Census that could lump all Latinos together as members of the same racial group, despite the fact that Latinos come from many racial backgrounds. As Afro-Latinas including García Peña have argued in oppo