Central Americans are the third largest and fastest growing Latino population in the United States. And yet, despite their demographic presence, there has been little scholarship focused on this group. Constituting Central American-Americans is an exploration of the historical and disciplinary conditions that have structured U.S. Central American identity.  

Post-Borderlandia examines why gender variance is such a core theme in contemporary Chicana and Chicanx narratives. Cuevas explores how a new generation of Chicanx writers, performers, and filmmakers are drawing on a rich tradition of challenging heteropatriarchal norms to offer new directions for Chicana feminist theory.   

LatinAsian Cartographies examines how Latina/o and Asian American writers provide important counter-narratives to the stories of racial encroachment that have come to characterize twenty-first century dominant discourses on race.  

In Search of the Mexican Beverly Hills examines the multilayered process by which Mexican Americans moved out of the barrios and emerged as a majority population in the San Gabriel Valley, and the impact that movement had on collective racial and class identity. 

From the Edge reveals the tangled textual histories behind some of the most cherished works in the Chicana/o literary canon, tracing the contentious negotiations between authors, editors, and publishers that determined how these books appeared in print. In this groundbreaking examination of the politics of print culture, Allison Fagan demonstrates how the texts surrounding the authors’ words—from editorial prefaces to Spanish-language glossaries, from reviewers’ blurbs to readers’ marginalia—have crucially shaped the reception of Chicana/o literature.

Southwest Asia investigates why key Chicana/o writers, from the 1950s to the present day, have persistently referenced Asian people and places in the course of articulating their political ideas. Raising concerns about how these texts invariably marginalize their Asian characters and suggesting that darker legacies of imperialism and exclusion might lurk beneath their utopian visions of a Chicana/o nation, Jayson Gonzales Sae-Saue takes our conception of Chicana/o literature as a transnational movement in a new direction.

Of Forests and Fields tells the story of the Mexican guest laborers, Tejano migrants, and undocumented immigrants who worked to transform the Pacific Northwest into the agricultural powerhouse it is today. Employing an innovative approach that traces the intersections between Chicana/o labor and environmental history, Mario Sifuentez reveals both the struggles and the many accomplishments of these workers, offering valuable historical precedents for understanding the activism of immigrant and migrant laborers in our own era.  

Mexico on Main Street takes us inside a forgotten world: the film culture that thrived within Los Angeles’s Mexican immigrant community in the early decades of the twentieth-century. Drawing from rare archives, Colin Gunckel demonstrates how these immigrants not only consumed Hollywood and Mexican films, but also produced fan publications, fiction, criticism, music, and live theatrical events. This book demonstrates how a site-specific study of cultural and ethnic issues challenges our existing conceptions of U.S. film history, Mexican cinema, and the history of Los Angeles. 

 

Drawing upon the idea of the “impossible activism” of undocumented immigrants, Amalia Pallares argues that those without legal status defy this “impossible” context by relying on the politicization of the family to challenge justice within contemporary immigration law. The culmination of a seven-year-long ethnography of undocumented immigrants and their families in Chicago, as well as national immigrant politics, Family Activism examines the ways in which the family has become politically significant.

Drawing upon the idea of the “impossible activism” of undocumented immigrants, Amalia Pallares argues that those without legal status defy this “impossible” context by relying on the politicization of the family to challenge justice within contemporary immigration law. The culmination of a seven-year-long ethnography of undocumented immigrants and their families in Chicago, as well as national immigrant politics, Family Activism examines the ways in which the family has become politically significant.

 In The Virgin of Guadalupe and the Conversos, Marie-Theresa Hernández unmasks the secret lives of conversos and judaizantes and their likely influence onthe Catholic Churchin the New World. On a Da Vinci Code – style quest, Hernández persisted in hunting against resistance for a trove of forgotten manuscripts at the New York Public Library. These documents, once unearthed, describe the Jewish/Christian religious beliefs of an early nineteenth century Catholic priest in Mexico City, focusing on the relationship between the Virgin of Guadalupe and Judaism.

 In this groundbreaking new book, Mexican Hometown Associations in Chicagoacán, Xóchitl Bada reveals how Mexican hometown associations, groups consisting of immigrants from the same small towns, have become a surprisingly powerful force for mobilizing social change in both the United States and Mexico. By giving voice to the members of a group of Chicago-based hometown associations from the state of Michoacán, Xóchitl Bada draws much larger conclusions about the emergence and global impact of new transnational forms of community activism. 

 Accessible and beautifully written, Rivas examines how El Salvador’s post-war identity has been transformed by communication technologies, journalistic narratives of migratory experiences, and the complex relationships between private and public spaces of consumption and belonging. This book shows how seemingly disparate sites of experience and representation—call centers, newspapers, shopping malls, and literature—can reveal the complicated process of a nation reinventing itself.

 Accessible and beautifully written, Rivas examines how El Salvador’s post-war identity has been transformed by communication technologies, journalistic narratives of migratory experiences, and the complex relationships between private and public spaces of consumption and belonging. This book shows how seemingly disparate sites of experience and representation—call centers, newspapers, shopping malls, and literature—can reveal the complicated process of a nation reinventing itself.

In this provocative new book, Maria Acosta Cruz investigates why the rhetoric of independence is so pivotal to Puerto Rican culture, despite the fact that the island’s voters have consistently rejected calls for national sovereignty. Weaving together texts from literature, history, and popular culture, Dream Nation shows how this seemingly revolutionary and populist iconography of independence has become an established orthodoxy.