Technofuturos offers a critical and innovative exploration of the forms of representation found in Latina/o studies. The editors, Nancy Raquel Mirabal and Agustin La-Montes, challenge conventional notions of Latina/o identities, histories, and cultures by historicizing and differentiating the multiple discourses of Latinidad. The essays examine the temporality and spatiality of socio-historical processes, the multiple and varied constellations of power, and the complicated geographies of d...

Change looms in Havana, Cuba's capital, a city electric with uncertainty yet cloaked in cliché90 miles from U.S. shores and off-limits to most Americans. Journalist Julia Cooke, who lived there at intervals over a period of five years, discovered a dynamic scene: baby-faced anarchists with Mohawks gelled with laundry soap, whiskey-drinking children of the elite, SanterÃtrainees, pregnant prostitutes, university graduates planning to leave for the first country that will give them a visa.

Surrealism, magic realism and expressionism are the hallmarks of Jose Rivera’s influential body of work. This new volume collects the author’s plays written in the past five years, including References to Salvador Dalí Make Me Hot ("effortlessly melds otherworldly fantasy with gritty realism to make sparks fly onstage."—The Journal News), Sueño (a reworking for Pedro Calderón’s Life is a Dream) and Sonnets for an Old Century, the author’s most r...

"Jason M. Colby has researched and analyzed his topic―the business of empire―well. He exposes the intertwining of imperialism, expansion, racism, and corporate power. The Business of Empire is an insightful story about the interaction of U.S. overseas business and the U.S. and Central American governments. It will prove useful to scholars of U.S. imperialism, international business history, and U.S.–Central American relations for generations."

Children working the cocoa plantations for Americas chocolate. Would you ever dream of such abuse happening to five-year-old boys and girls, children being worked worse than animals on the cocoa plantations to get the cocoa bean, the main ingredient in chocolate, to America. The cocoa beans are covered with the blood, sweat, and tears of five-year-old children sold for slave labor to work on the cocoa plantations. Everyone has limited freedoms, even in America. We protect our children. The...

Thanks in large part to an exploitation film producer and distributor named K. Gordon Murray, a unique collection of horror films from Mexico began to appear on American late-night television and drive-in screens in the 1960s. Ranging from monster movies clearly owing to the heyday of Universal Studios to the lucha libre horror films featuring El Santo and the "Wrestling Women," these low-budget "Mexploitation" films offer plenty of campy fun and still inspire cult devotion, yet they also ...

A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness features essays and poems by Cherríe L. Moraga, one of the most influential figures in Chicana/o, feminist, queer, and indigenous activism and scholarship. Combining moving personal stories with trenchant political and cultural critique, the writer, activist, teacher, dramatist, mother, daughter, comadre, and lesbian lover looks back on the first ten years of the twenty-first century. She considers decade-defining public events suc...

Here is the first extensive, full-length biography and career record on the life and work of Mexican whirlwind Lupe Velez (1908-1944). Over the years many crude myths have surfaced about Velez, the most notorious that she "died with her head in the toilet." This biography not only studies Lupe's personal life and career--including her tempestuous marriage to Johnny Weissmuller--but also examines her death in detail. It has been almost seven decades since her untimely end; at long last, the...

Undertakes a wide-ranging examination of the US-Mexico border as it functions in the rhetorical production of civic unity in the United StatesA “border” is a powerful and versatile concept, variously invoked as the delineation of geographical territories, as a judicial marker of citizenship, and as an ideological trope for defining inclusion and exclusion. It has implications for both the empowerment and subjugation of any given populace. Both real and imagined, th...

Too frequently, the media and politicians cast Mexican immigrants as a threat to American society. Given America's increasing ethnic diversity and the large size of the Mexican-origin population, an investigation of how Mexican immigrants and their descendants achieve upward mobility and enter the middle class is long overdue. Barrios to Burbs offers a new understanding of the Mexican American experience.Vallejo explores the challenges that accompany rapid social mobility ...

The year is 2009, and José Antonio Rodríguez, a doctoral student at Binghamton University in upstate New York, is packing his suitcase, getting ready to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with his parents in South Texas. He soon learns from his father that a drug cartel has overtaken the Mexican border village where he was born. Now, because of the violence there, he won’t be able to visit his early-childhood home. Instead, his memories will have to take him back.Thus, Rodríguez begins...

Many questions remain unanswered about the observable differences in voting behavior, partisanship, and cultural attitudes among men and women. Latino political participation in the United States is generally lower than the rest of the population, mainly due to their high proportion of youth and foreign born populations that are ineligible to vote. This dynamic is slowing changing, partly as a result of the rapidly growing Latino population in the United States.This book delves dee...