This is the first book solely dedicated to the history, development, and present-day flowering of Chicana and Chicano visual arts. It offers readers an opportunity to understand and appreciate Chicana/o art from its beginnings in the 1960s, its relationship to the Chicana/o Movement and its leading artists, themes, current directions, and ...

Although Juicy Fruit® gum was introduced to North Americans in 1893, Native Americans in Mesoamerica were chewing gum thousands of years earlier. And although in the last decade "biographies" have been devoted to salt, spices, chocolate, coffee, and other staples of modern life, until now there has never been a full history of chewing gum.

Faith Run offers the most recent work by the well-known poet Ray Gonzalez. The poetry here is--at once--perhaps his most personal and most universal. At the heart of these lyrical, sometimes ethereal, poems is a deep sense of the mystery and even the divinity of our human lives. Although Gonzalez invokes the names of many poets who have ...

In her debut poetry collection, Carmen Giménez Smith illuminates Latina identity in the prismatic light of postcolonial history, feminism, myth, and the fragmentation of modernity. From these disparate elements she fashions a female persona--"clairvoyant with great shoes"--who is both bracingly modern and movingly vulnerable. Through her ...

Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes is a comparative study of the literary and cinematic representation of Mexican American masculine identity from early twentieth-century adventure stories and movie Westerns through contemporary self-representations by Chicano/a writers and filmmakers. In this deeply compelling book, Juan J. Alonzo proposes ...

When the Zoot Suit Riots ignited in Los Angeles in 1943, they quickly became headline news across the country. At their center was a series of attacks by U.S. Marines and sailors on young Mexican American men who dressed in distinctive suits and called themselves pachucos. The media of the day portrayed these youths as miscreants and ...

In December 2005, following a series of convulsive upheavals that saw the overthrow of two presidents in three years, Bolivian peasant leader Evo Morales became the first Indian president in South American history. Consequently, according to S. Sándor John, Bolivia symbolizes new shifts in Latin America, pushed by radical social movements ...

In her analysis of some of the most interesting and important children's literature from Central America and the Caribbean, Ann González uses postcolonial narrative theory to expose and decode what marginalized peoples say when they tell stories to their children--and how the interpretations children give these stories today differ from ...

Duality" is at the center of this striking collection of poems both intimate and grand. The poet offers a multifaceted reflection on what it means to straddle two cultures: her father's Spanish-speaking and her mother's speaking in a Southern drawl. Unexpectedly, the sonnet form helps her give voice to her "in-between-ness.

The remarkable and wholly delightful poems collected here bounce the reader through a world where words are not bricks but trampolines--springy, un-static-y things. Feisty, spirited, serious and comic, these poems address a wild range of subjects with an equally wild range of tones. María Meléndez emerges as a fearless poet.