The history of the United States in the twentieth century is inextricably entwined with that of people of Mexican origin. The twenty million Mexicans and Mexican Americans living in the U.S. today are predominantly a product of post-1900 growth, and their numbers give them an increasingly meaningful voice in the political process.

Oscar Martínez here recounts the struggle of a people who have scraped and grappled to make a place for themselves in the American mainstream. Focusing on social, economic, and political change during the twentieth century— particularly in the American West— Martínez provides a survey of long-term trends among Mexican Americans and shows that many of the difficult conditions they have experienced have changed decidedly for the better.

Organized thematically, the book addresses population dynamics, immigration, interaction with the mainstream, assimilation into the labor force, and growth of the Mexican American middle class. Martínez then examines the various forms by which people of Mexican descent have expressed themselves politically: becoming involved in community organizations, participating as voters, and standing for elective office. Finally he summarizes salient historical points and offers reflections on issues of future significance. Where appropriate, he considers the unique circumstances that distinguish the experiences of Mexican Americans from those of other ethnic groups.


Chicano Popular Culture
Que hable el pueblo
Charles M. Tatum.

Tunnel Kids
Lawrence Taylor and Maeve Hickey.

Chicano Renaissance
Contemporary Cultural Trends
Edited by David R. Maciel, Isidro D. Ortiz, and María Herrera-Sobek, eds.

The re-emerging field of ethnoecology offers a promising way to document and analyze human-environment interactions. This collection brings the discipline into sharp focus, conveying local understandings of environments and proposing a way of looking at the relationship between humans and the natural world that emphasizes the importance of cognition in shaping behavior.

Case studies by international experts explore the varied views of scholars on the human dimension of conversation and the different views of local peoples regarding their own environments. Filled with peoples' voices from North and South America, Africa, and Asia, these cases cover a range of issues: natural resource conservation and sustainable development, the relationship between local knowledge and biodiversity, the role of the commons in development, and the importance of diversity and equity in environmental management.

As the only volume to address the status of this increasingly multidisciplinary field—especially as it relates to the differential power of multiple stakeholders—Ethnoecology: Situated Knowledge/Located Lives is intended for a wide range of specialists not only in social and natural sciences but also in agricultural studies. It conveys the overriding importance of this powerful methodological approach in providing insiders' perspectives on their environment and how they manage it.

Visiting an exhibition by Leonardo Nierman is penetrating a space that invites us to dream in infinities, to discover exteriors and interiors of cosmic worlds. The exhibition Génesis de un Sueño (Genesis of a Dream) mounted at the Contemporary University Museum of Art in Mexico City conveyed such sensations to visitors. Running from May through August of 1996, it featured three hundred of Nierman's works spanning forty years and was reinstalled by popular demand through January 1997. Its beauty and mystery are now captured in this elegant volume.

Nierman: Génesis de un Sueño a celebration of the painting, sculpture, and tapestry of this prolific and visionary artist. Dazzling four-color plates capture both the rich detail and the striking colors of individual works, while other photographs, often in gatefold, reflect the juxtaposition of painting and sculpture at the exhibition. To turn the pages of this book is to be transported into a dreamworld that recreates the dawning of the universe.

Mexico is more than a country; it is a concept that is the product of a complex network of discourses as disparate as the rhetoric of Chicano nationalism, English-language literature about Mexico, and Mexican tourist propaganda. The idea of "Mexicanness," says Daniel Cooper Alarcón, "has arisen through a process of erasure and superimposition as these discourses have produced contentious and sometimes contradictory descriptions of their subject."

By considering Mexicanness as a palimpsest of these competing yet interwoven narratives, Cooper offers a paradigm through which the construction and representation of cultural identity can be studied. He shows how the Chicano myth of Aztlan was constructed upon earlier Mesoamerican myths, discusses representations of Mexico in texts by nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, and analyzes the content of tourist literature, thereby revealing the economic, social, and political interests that drive the production of Mexicanness today.

Until recently, mainstream American environmentalism has been a predominantly white, middle-class movement, essentially ignoring the class, race, and gender dimensions of environmental politics. In this provocative collection of original essays, the environmental dimensions of the Chicana/o experience are explicitly expressed and debated. Employing a variety of genres ranging from poetry to autobiography to theoretical and empirical essays, the voices in this collection speak to the most significant issues of environmentalism and social justice, recognizing throughout the need for a pluralism of Chicana/o philosophies.

The contributors provide an excellent basis for understanding how multiple Chicana/o views on the environment play out in the context of dominant social, political and economic views. Chicano Culture, Ecology, Politics examines a number of Chicana/o ecological perspectives. How can the ethics of reciprocity present in Chicana/o agropastoral life be protected and applied on a broader scale? How can the dominant society, whose economic structure is invested in "placeless mobility," take note of the harm caused to land-based cultures, take responsibility for it, and take heed before it is too late? Will the larger society be "ecologically housebroken" before it destroys its home?

For as long as Mexicans have emigrated to the United States they have responded creatively to the challenges of making a new home. But although historical, sociological, and other aspects of Mexican immigration have been widely studied, its cultural and artistic manifestations have been largely overlooked by scholars—even though Mexico has produced the greatest number of cultural works inspired by the immigration process. And recently Chicana/o artists have addressed immigration as a central theme in their cultural productions and motifs.

Culture across Borders is the first and only book-length study to analyze a wide range of cultural manifestations of the immigration experience, including art, literature, cinema, corridos, and humor. It shows how Mexican immigrants have been depicted in popular culture both in Mexico and the United States—and how Mexican and Chicano/Chicana artists, intellectuals, and others have used artistic means to protest the unjust treatment of immigrants by U.S. authorities.

Established and upcoming scholars from both sides of the border contribute their expertise in art history, literary criticism, history, cultural studies, and other fields, capturing the many facets of the immigrant experience in popular culture. Topics include the difference between Chicano/a and Mexican representation of immigration; how films dealing with immigrants are treated differently by Mexican, Chicano, and Hollywood producers; the rich literary and artistic production on immigration themes; and the significance of immigration in Chicano jokes.

Chicanismo
The Forging of a Militant Ethos among Mexican Americans
Ignacio M. García.

In Chicanismo, the first intellectual history of the Chicano Movement and the militant ethos that emerged from it, Ignacio Garcia traces the development of the philosophical strains that guided the movement. First, Mexican Americans came to believe that the liberal agenda that had promised education and equality had failed them, leading them toward separatism. Second, they saw a need to reinterpret the past as it related to their own history, leading them to discovered their legacy of struggle. Third, Mexican American activists, intellectuals, and artists affirmed a renewed pride in their ethnicity and class status. Finally, this new philosophy-Chicanismo-was politicized through the struggles of the Chicano organizations that promoted it as they faced resistance or external attacks.

Healing with Plants in the American and Mexican West
Margarita Artschwager Kay.
315 pp. / 30 illus. / 6 x 9 / 1996 (2nd ptg.)
Paper (0-8165-1646-4) $19.95
Cloth (0-8165-1645-6) $52.00s

The Embodiment of the National in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexican Painting
Stacie G. Widdifield.
Published with the assistance of the College Art Association's Millard Meiss Publication Fund
215 pp. / 30 photos, 8 color plates / 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 / 1996
Cloth (0-8165-1561-1) $31.95s

"An outstanding contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century Mexico. . . there are no competitors and this is a much-needed, important addition to the field of Latin American art history and history." --Jeanette F. Peterson, University of California at Santa Barbara

"It opens up a new theoretical perspective for the study of art, it places the production of academic art in a historical context both national and international, and it discusses the specific works using all the tools available to the art historian at the end of the century." --Esther Acevedo, Direccion de Estudios Historicos del Instituto, Nacional de Antropologia e Historia

As a nation fights to reclaim its independence, what is the artist’s role in the drama? In this unparalleled study, an art historian spotlights contemporary paintings of Mexico from the years 1867-1881, a critical period for Mexican culture and politics.

Leonardo Nierman 1987-1994
Painting/Sculpture/Tapestry
Leonardo Nierman.
Schwabe & Co., AG
216 pp. / 108 illus. / 8 3/4 x 10 1/4 / 1996
Cloth (9709135600) $75.00

Chicanas/Chicanos at the Crossroads
Social, Economic, and Political Change
David R. Maciel and Isidro D. Ortiz, eds.

"It is an inspired, carefully documented, and theoretically novel critique of mainstream environmentalism which points in new directions for understanding the intersections of race, class, and culture dynamics in environmental politics."--Devon G. Pena, Colorado College

Ecological causes are championed not only by lobbyists or hikers. While mainstream environmentalism is usually characterized by well-financed, highly structured organizations operating on a national scale, campaigns for environmental justice are often fought by poor or minority communities.

Environmentalism and Economic Justice is one of the first books devoted to Chicano environmental issues and is a study of U.S. environmentalism in transition as seen through the contributions of people of color. It elucidates the various forces driving and shaping two important examples of environmental organizing: the 1965-71 pesticide campaign of the United Farm Workers and a grazing conflict between a Hispano cooperative and mainstream environmentalists in northern New Mexico.

Ambivalent Journey
U.S. Migration and Economic Mobility in North-Central Mexico
Richard C. Jones.

Mexican Cinema/Mexican Woman, 1940-1950
Joanne Hershfield.
159 pp. / 19 photos / 6 x 9 / 1996
Paper (0-8165-1637-5) $17.95s

Our Lady of Guadalupe
The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797
Stafford Poole.

Too often in the history of Mexico, women have been portrayed as marginal figures rather than legitimate participants in social processes. As the twentieth century draws to a close, Mexican women of the countryside can be seen as true historical actors: mothers and heads of households, factory and field workers, community activists, artisans, and merchants. In this new book, thirteen contributions by historians, anthropologists, and sociologists--from Mexico as well as the United States--elucidate the roles of women and changing gender relations in Mexico as rural families negotiated the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society.

Drawing on Mexican community studies, gender studies, and rural studies, these essays overturn the stereotypes of Mexican peasant women by exploring the complexity of their lives and roles and examining how these have changed over time. The book emphasizes the active roles of women in the periods of civil war, 1854-76, and the commercialization of agriculture, 1880-1910. It highlights their vigorous responses to the violence of revolution, their increased mobility, and their interaction with state reforms in the period from 1910 to 1940. The final essays focus on changing gender relations in the countryside under the impact of rapid urbanization and industrialization since 1940.

"Using contemporary literary theory, these Chicano scholars challenge commonly held perceptions of both American literature and contemporary Chicano literature in order to demonstrate a certain continuity with each tradition, both despite and because of cultural ruptures surrounding the production of these texts." —Western American Literature

"It represents a significant deviation from the typical negative views of Chicano literary writers on traditional literary theory. . . . An objective search for these roots [of modern Chiano literature] leads to the discovery of several outstanding contributions by Spanish writers of the colonial period."—Choice

Early literary works written in Spanish in what is today the American Southwest have been largely excluded from the corpus of American literature, yet these documents are the literary antecedents of contemporary Chicano and Chicana writing.

This collection of essays establishes the importance of this literary heritage through a critical examination of key texts produced in the Southwest from 1542 to 1848. Drawing on research in the archives of Southwestern libraries and applying contemporary literary theoretical constructs to these centuries-old manuscripts, the authors—all noted scholars in Chicano literature—demonstrate that these works should be recognized as an integral part of American literature.

"There is simply no better anthology for readers wondering how to enter those borderlands Chicana writers have been occupying for the past decades. . . . A superb selection of poems, stories, essays and plays by fifty authors." --Women's Review of Books

"The hefty collection will satisfy more than one taste, whether literary, historical, or even sociological. There are many hours of enjoyment here, and many important lessons to be learned." --Booklist

Given the explosive creativity shown by Chicana writers over the past two decades, this first major anthology devoted to their work is a major contribution to American letters. It highlights the key issues, motifs, and concerns of Mexican American women from 1848 to the present, and particularly reflects the modern Chicana's struggle for identity.

Among the recurring themes in the collection is a re-visioning of foremothers such as the historical Malinche, the mythical Llorona, and pioneering women who settled the American Southwest from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. Also included are historical documents on the lives, culture, and writings of Mexican American women in the nineteenth century, as well as oral histories recorded by the Federal Writers Project in the 1930s.

Through poetry, fiction, drama, essay, and other forms, this landmark volume showcases the talents of more than fifty authors, including Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Denise Chávez, Sandra Cisneros, Pat Mora, Cherríe Moraga, and María Helena Viramontes.

Winner of the American Society for Ethnohistory's Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Prize

"Gillespie has put the myth back into Mexica history and shown that the often tedious accounts of royal marriages and accessions are really mirrors of the Nahua mentality, which continued to shape the past in its own terms even after an invasion that challenged all definitions of past, present, and future."--Ethnohistory

"A readable book for the general reader and for the expert"--Choice

"Gillespie has presented a brilliant new synthesis of the many confusing and contradictory Aztec documents. . . . The Aztec Kings is a study of the nature of rulership, and as such it is a major contribution to the cross-cultural literature of symbolic-structuralist analysis of historical traditions." --Prudence M. Rice, American Anthropologist

Scholars have long viewed histories of the Aztecs either as flawed chronologies plagued by internal inconsistencies and intersource discrepancies or as legends that indiscriminately mingle reality with the supernatural. But this new work draws fresh conclusions from these documents, proposing that Aztec dynastic history was recast by its sixteenth-century recorders not merely to glorify ancestors but to make sense out of the trauma of conquest and colonialism.