Chicano/a/x Studies

Honorable Mention for the National Women's Studies Association's 2021 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize 2021 Finalist Best LGBTQ+ Themed Book, International Latino Book Awards 2022 John Leo & Dana Heller Award for Best Single Work, Anthology, Multi-Authored, or Edited Book in LGBTQ Studies, Popular Culture Association The Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize, GL/Q Caucus, Modern Language Association (MLA) 2022 AAHHE Book of the Year Award, American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education Within queer, transgender, and Latinx and Chicanx cultural politics, brown transgender narratives are frequently silenced and erased. Brown trans subjects are treated as deceptive, unnatural, nonexistent, or impossible, their bodies, lives, and material circumstances represented through tropes and used as metaphors. Restoring personhood and agency to these subjects, Francisco J. Galarte advances "brown trans figuration" as a theoretical framework to describe how transness and brownness coexist within the larger queer, trans, and Latinx historical experiences. Brown Trans Figurations presents a collection of representations that reveal the repression of brown trans narratives and make that repression visible and palpable. Galarte examines the violent deaths of two transgender Latinas and the corresponding narratives that emerged about their lives, analyzes the invisibility of brown transmasculinity in Chicana feminist works, and explores how issues such as transgender politics can be imagined as part of Chicanx and Latinx political movements. This book considers the contexts in which brown trans narratives appear, how they circulate, and how they are reproduced in politics, sexual cultures, and racialized economies.

Chicana Feminist Thought brings together the voices of Chicana poets, writers, and activists who reflect upon the Chicana Feminist Movement that began in the late 1960s. With energy and passion, this anthology of writings documents the personal and collective political struggles of Chicana feminists.

Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities presents scholarly chapters that 'address the complex issues of racialized masculinities in the Latinx communities'. Building on Chicana feminist theories and decolonial gender studies, the manuscript explores such issues as machismo, patriarchy, and compulsory heteronormativities; how these issues are reinforced; and how 'Latinx men are criminalized by the dominant discourse'. Arturo Aldama and Frederick Aldama take a hemispheric approach to their content in order to place Latinx masculinities within the broader context of the Américas. According to reviewer Richard T. Rodríguez: 'By examining recent films, historical and contemporary novels, political phenomena, theater and performance, short stories, and various popular cultural forms, the 18 essays assembled here and written by established and emergent scholars make a significant contribution to the literature on manhood, queer sexualities, and gender roles

Mexican Americans are unique in the panoply of American ethno-racial groups in that they are the descendants of the largest and longest lasting immigration stream in US history. Today, there are approximately 24 million Americans of Mexican descent living in the United States, many of whose families have been in the US for several generations. In Durable Ethnicity, Edward E. Telles and Christina A. Sue examine the meanings behind being both American and ethnically Mexican for contemporary Mexican Americans. Rooted in a large-scale longitudinal and representative survey of Mexican Americans living in San Antonio and Los Angeles across 35 years, Telles and Sue draw on 70 in-depth interviews and over 1,500 surveys to examine how Mexicans Americans construct their identities and attitudes related to ethnicity, nationality, language, and immigration. In doing so, they highlight the primacy of their American identities and variation in their ethnic identities, showing that their experiences range on a continuum from symbolic to consequential ethnicity, even into the fourth generation. Durable Ethnicity offers a comprehensive exploration into how, when, and why ethnicity matters for multiple generations of Mexican Americans, arguing that their experiences are influenced by an ethnic core, a set of structural and institutional forces that promote and sustain ethnicity.

The goal of this book is to examine the ethnic experience of the Mexican American community in the United States, from colonialism to twenty-first century globalization. The authors unearth evidence that reveals how historically white ideology, combined with science, law, and the American imagination, has been strategically used as a mechanism to intimidate, manipulate, oppress, control, dominate, and silence Mexican Americans, ethnic racial minorities, and poor whites. A theoretical and philosophical overview is presented, focusing on the repressive practice against Mexicans that resulted in violence, brutality, vigilantism, executions, and mass expulsions. The Mexican experience under hooded America is explored, including religion, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Local, state, and federal laws are documented, often in conflict with one another, including the Homeland Security program that continues to result in detentions and deportations. The authors examine the continuing argument of citizenship that has been used to legally exclude Mexican children from the educational system and thereby being characterized as not fit for the classroom nor entitled to an equitable education. Segregation and integration in the classroom is discussed, featuring examples of court cases. As documented throughout the book, American law is a constant reminder of the pervasive ideology of the historical racial supremacy, socially defined and enforced ethnic inferiority, and the rejection of positive social change, equality, and justice that continues to persist in the United States. The book is extensively referenced and is intended for professionals in the fields of sociology, history, ethnic studies, Mexican American (Chicano) studies, law and political science and also those concerned with sociolegal issues.

This book is an original collection of more than thirty interviews led by Frederick Luis Aldama with Latino/a authors working in the genre.

Contributions by Carolina Alonso, Elena Avil's, Trevor Boffone, Christi Cook, Ella Diaz, Amanda Ellis, Cristina Herrera, Guadalupe García McCall, Domino Renee Pérez, Adrianna M. Santos, Roxanne Schroeder-Arce, Lettycia Terrones, and Tim Wadham In Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature, the outsider intersects with discussions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. The essays in this volume address questions of outsider identities and how these identities are shaped by mainstream myths around Chicanx and Latinx young people, particularly with the common stereotype of the struggling, underachieving inner-city teens. Contributors also grapple with how young adults reclaim what it means to be an outsider, weirdo, nerd, or goth, and how the reclamation of these marginalized identities expand conversations around authenticity and narrow understandings of what constitutes cultural identity. Included are analysis of such texts as I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, Shadowshaper, Swimming While Drowning, and others. Addressed in the essays are themes of outsiders in Chicanx/Latinx children's and young adult literature, and the contributors insist that to understand Latinx youth identities it is necessary to shed light on outsiders within an already marginalized ethnic group: nerds, goths, geeks, freaks, and others who might not fit within such Latinx popular cultural paradigms as the chola and cholo, identities that are ever-present in films, television, and the internet.

As immigration from Mexico to the United States grew through the 1970s and 1980s, the Border Patrol, police, and other state agents exerted increasing violence against ethnic Mexicans in San Diego's volatile border region. In response, many San Diego activists rallied around the leadership of the small-scale print shop owner Herman Baca in the Chicano movement to empower Mexican Americans through Chicano self-determination. The combination of increasing repression and Chicano activism gradually produced a new conception of ethnic and racial community that included both established Mexican Americans and new Mexican immigrants. Here, Jimmy Patino narrates the rise of this Chicano/Mexicano consciousness and the dawning awareness that Mexican Americans and Mexicans would have to work together to fight border enforcement policies that subjected Latinos of all statuses to legal violence. By placing the Chicano and Latino civil rights struggle on explicitly transnational terrain, Patino fundamentally reorients the understanding of the Chicano movement. Ultimately, Patino tells the story of how Chicano/Mexicano politics articulated an "abolitionist" position on immigration--going beyond the agreed upon assumptions shared by liberals and conservatives alike that deportations are inherent to any solutions to the still burgeoning immigration debate.