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

A former L.A. gang member describes his experiences in that world, recounting the sense of security and power found in a gang and the grim reality of violence and poverty. Reprint. 60,000 first printing. Tour. NYT.

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.

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

Black behind the Ears is an innovative historical and ethnographic examination of Dominican identity formation in the Dominican Republic and the United States. For much of the Dominican Republic’s history, the national body has been defined as “not black,” even as black ancestry has been grudgingly acknowledged. Rejecting simplistic explanations, Ginetta E. B. Candelario suggests that it is not a desire for whiteness that guides Dominican identity discourses and displays. Instead, it is an ideal norm of what it means to be both indigenous to the Republic (indios) and “Hispanic.” Both indigeneity and Hispanicity have operated as vehicles for asserting Dominican sovereignty in the context of the historically triangulated dynamics of Spanish colonialism, Haitian unification efforts, and U.S. imperialism. Candelario shows how the legacy of that history is manifest in contemporary Dominican identity discourses and displays, whether in the national historiography, the national museum’s exhibits, or ideas about women’s beauty. Dominican beauty culture is crucial to efforts to identify as “indios” because, as an easily altered bodily feature, hair texture trumps skin color, facial features, and ancestry in defining Dominicans as indios. Candelario draws on her participant observation in a Dominican beauty shop in Washington Heights, a New York City neighborhood with the oldest and largest Dominican community outside the Republic, and on interviews with Dominicans in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Santo Domingo. She also analyzes museum archives and displays in the Museo del Hombre Dominicano and the Smithsonian Institution as well as nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European and American travel narratives.

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.

An exploration of Spanish culture in Spain and the Americas traces the social, political, and economic forces that created that culture

The author of Thirteen Senses describes his struggles with cultural discrimination and an untreated learning disability, recounting his victimization as a non-English-speaking Latino in an American school system and his eventual rise to an award-winning writer. Reprint. 30,000 first printing.

“[An] exceptionally interesting and intimate oral history . . . Against a background of motels and all-night cafés and strikes, the high relief in which the characters stand out is truly fascinating. Jacques Levy’s biography of Chavez has unforgettable descriptive passages and fine photographs.” —The Nation Mexican-American civil rights and labor activist Cesar Chavez (1927–1993), comes to life in this vivid portrait of the charismatic and influential fighter who boycotted supermarkets and took on corporations, the government, and the powerful Teamsters Union. Jacques E. Levy gained unprecedented access to Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union in writing this account of one of the most successful labor movements in history which can also serve as a guidebook for social and political change. “[The] definitive work. The book’s major contribution lies in its portrait of the man himself—deeply religious in an almost mystical fashion; a dedicated battler, but not a dedicated hater; a leader who not only will not ask, but will not allow his followers to make the sacrifices he has made.” —Publishers Weekly “One of the heroic figures of our time.” —Senator Robert F. Kennedy Jacques E. Levy (1927–2004), a prize-winning journalist, spent six years with Cesar Chavez researching and writing this book. Fred Ross Jr. is a spokesperson for the Service Employees’ International Union and the son of Fred Ross, Chavez’s mentor. Jacqueline Levy is the daughter of Jacques E. Levy and a high school science teacher in Sonoma County, California.

In more than 225 entries, this comprehensive overview of the folktales, traditions, rituals, and religious practices of Mexican Americans explores the meaning and origins of each cultural term and discusses the influence of Chicano music, religious practice, food, ritual, and historical and mythical figures on American culture in general. Reprint.