Named the 2009 AAUP Best of the Best - Outstanding Book Distinction The history of Mexican Americans spans more than five centuries and varies from region to region across the United States. Yet most of our history books devote at most a chapter to Chicano history, with even less attention to the story of Chicanas. 500 Years of Chicana Women’s History offers a powerful antidote to this omission with a vivid, pictorial account of struggle and survival, resilience and achievement, discrimination and identity. The bilingual text, along with hundreds of photos and other images, ranges from female-centered stories of pre-Columbian Mexico to profiles of contemporary social justice activists, labor leaders, youth organizers, artists, and environmentalists, among others. With a distinguished, seventeen-member advisory board, the book presents a remarkable combination of scholarship and youthful appeal.

?A courageous memoir.... One witnesses the blessings, contradictions, and restraints of Puerto Rican culture.

A journalist describes her efforts to come to terms with her dual heritage as a Hispanic American and offers a portrait of her family members, including her talented American mother and her brilliant Peruvian father.

Discusses U.S. and Mexican cultural relations

Chronicles the life of a child growing up in a family of Mexican-American migrant farm workers who traveled between Texas and Minnesota.

The award-winning historian and author of Hotel documents the role of Latino immigrants in revitalizing American cities, tracing the examples of Chicago

This unique anthology highlights the diversity of Latino cultural expressions and points out the distinctive features of the three major Latino populations: Mexican, Puerto Rican and Cuban. It is organized around six central cultural issues: family, religion, community, the arts, (im)migration and exile, and cultural identity. Each chapter focuses on a particular theme by presenting readings from a variety of genres, including short stories, poems, essays, excerpts from novels, a play, photographs, even a few songs and recipes.

Twentieth-century Los Angeles has been the locus of one of the most profound and complex interactions between variant cultures in American history. Yet this study is among the first to examine the relationship between ethnicity and identity among the largest immigrant group to that city. By focusing on Mexican immigrants to Los Angeles from 1900 to 1945, George J. Sanchez explores the process by which temporary sojourners altered their orientation to that of permanent residents, thereby laying the foundation for a new Mexican-American culture. Analyzing not only formal programs aimed at these newcomers by the United States and Mexico, but also the world created by these immigrants through family networks, religious practice, musical entertainment, and work and consumption patterns, Sanchez uncovers the creative ways Mexicans adapted their culture to life in the United States. When a formal repatriation campaign pushed thousands to return to Mexico, those remaining in Los Angeles launched new campaigns to gain civil rights as ethnic Americans through labor unions and New Deal politics. The immigrant generation, therefore, laid the groundwork for the emerging Mexican-American identity of their children.

From scattered sources, Mendieta (philosophy, State U. of New York-Stony Brook) has assembled 13 essays and articles by Latin American philosopher and church historian Dussel that deal with theological, economic, and historical themes, They form part of an Ethics of Liberation. Annotation (c) Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

In a green town in the middle of America, a bright 18-year-old Hispanic student named Isaias Ramos sets out on the journey to college. Isaias, who passed a prestigious national calculus test as a junior and leads the quiz bowl team, is the hope of Kingsbury High in Memphis, a school where many students have difficulty reading. But Kingsbury’s dysfunction, expensive college fees, and forms printed in a language that’s foreign to his parents are all obstacles in the way of getting him to a university. Isaias also doubts the value of college and says he might go to work in his family’s painting business after high school, despite his academic potential. Is Isaias making a rational choice? Or does he simply hope to avoid pain by deferring dreams that may not come to fruition? This is what journalist Daniel Connolly attempts to uncover in The Book of Isaias as he follows Isaias, peers into a tumultuous final year of high school, and, eventually, shows how adults intervene in the hopes of changing Isaias’ life. Mexican immigration has brought the proportion of Hispanics in the nation’s youth population to roughly one in four. Every day, children of immigrants make decisions about their lives that will shape our society and economy for generations. In the tradition of Friday Night Lights and A Hope in the Unseen, this engaging, poignant book captures an American microcosm and illustrates broader challenges for our collective future.