New Books In Latino Studies

There was a time when “history” was the history of powerful people. Shakespeare captures this notion of history in the prologue to Henry V: O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention, A kingdom for a stage, princes to act And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! Then and for centuries afterward, princes were deemed the proper focus of the historical investigations. The history of history from about 1950 to the present has largely been one of “democratizing” that view of the past. Princes are still given their due, but now a host of previously invisible people are as well. In the hands of social historians, butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, male and female, European and non-European have all been given a written history. Our guest today, Vicki Ruiz, is one of the pioneers in this effort. Her path-breaking From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford UP, 1998; Tenth Anniversary Edition, 2008) shed light on the lives of o