New Books In Latino Studies

Today we are joined by Jorge Iber, Professor of History and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Science at Texas Tech, and Mario Longoria, a long-time author and educator who received his PhD in English in 2014. The two are the authors of Latinos in American Football: Pathbreakers on the Gridiron, 1927 to the Present (McFarland and Co Publishers, 2020). In our conversation we discussed the origins of Latino American football, the role of World War II and the Civil Rights movement in expanding opportunities for Latino sportsmen, and the ongoing obstacles to Latino participation in the game that many love. In Latinos in American Football, Iber and Longoria recover the history of Latino participation in American football at the high school, college, and professional level. Although each chapter includes a series of case studies of Latino players, often undergirded by interviews conducted by the two scholars over thirty years, their work does more than recount histories on the field. They instead contextual