Happy National Hispanic Heritage Month! We’ve prepared a selection of recently published titles that showcase the histories, cultures, contributions, and unique experiences of Hispanic and Latino Americans. Happy #HispanicHeritageMonth, and happy reading!
Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Americas
by Macarena Gomez-Barris
How can we create a model of politics that reaches beyond the nation-state, and beyond settler-colonialism, authoritarianism, and neoliberalism? In Beyond the Pink Tide, Macarena Gómez-Barris explores the alternatives of recent sonic, artistic, activist, visual, and embodied cultural production. By focusing on radical spaces of potential, including queer, youth, trans-feminist, Indigenous, and anticapitalist movements and artistic praxis, Gómez-Barris offers a timely call for a decolonial, transnational American Studies. She reveals the broad possibilities that emerge by refusing national borders in the Americas and by seeing and thinking beyond the frame of state-centered politics.
“A timely call for transnational Americas studies beyond the violence of bordered nation-states. Dynamically rich and interdisciplinary.”—Jodi A. Byrd, author of The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism
The Tide Was Always High: The Music of Latin America in Los Angeles
edited by Josh Kun
The Tide Was Always High gathers together essays, interviews, and analysis from leading academics, artists, journalists, and iconic Latin American musicians to explore the vibrant connections between Los Angeles and Latin America. Published in conjunction with the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, the book shows how Latin American musicians and music have helped shape the city’s culture—from Hollywood film sets to recording studios, from vaudeville theaters to Sunset Strip nightclubs, and from Carmen Miranda to Pérez Prado and Juan García Esquivel.
Check out the accompanying Spotify playlists curated by editor Josh Kun.
“The Tide Was Always High will redefine the way people think and write about the music and history of Los Angeles. Positioning LA as a Latin American city, this collection reveals new geographic, visual, and sonic understandings of the link between Los Angeles and the world Latin@s have made.”—Gaye Theresa Johnson, author of Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity
An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States
by Rosina Lozano
An American Language is a tour de force that revolutionizes our understanding of U.S. history. It reveals the origins of Spanish as a language binding residents of the Southwest to the politics and culture of an expanding nation in the 1840s. As the West increasingly integrated into the United States over the following century, struggles over power, identity, and citizenship transformed the place of the Spanish language in the nation. An American Language is a history that reimagines what it means to be an American—with profound implications for our own time.
“This is the most comprehensive book I’ve ever read about the use of Spanish in the U.S. Incredible research. Read it to understand our country. Spanish is, indeed, an American language.”—Jorge Ramos, Emmy-award winning journalist
Confessions of a Radical Chicano Doo-Wop Singer
by Rubén Funkahuatl Guevara
A pioneer of Chicano rock, Rubén Funkahuatl Guevara performed with Frank Zappa, Johnny Otis, Bo Diddley, Tina Turner, and Celia Cruz, though he is best known as the front man of the 1970s experimental rock band Ruben And The Jets. Here he recounts how his youthful experiences in the barrio La Veinte of Santa Monica in the 1940s prepared him for early success in music and how his triumphs and seductive brushes with stardom were met with tragedy and crushing disappointments. Brutally honest and open, Confessions of a Radical Chicano Doo-Wop Singer offers a look inside the struggle of becoming an artist and a man.
Check out the accompanying Spotify playlist by author Rubén Funkahuatl Guevara
“Hilarious and heartbreaking. I cannot recommend this work highly enough. I urge my colleagues to share it with their students.”—Jacqueline M. Hidalgo, author of Revelation in Aztlán
Inland Shift: Race, Space, and Capital in Southern California
by Juan De Lara
Economic crisis, finance capital, and global commodity chains transformed Southern California just as Latinxs and immigrants were turning California into a majority-nonwhite state. In Inland Shift, Juan D. De Lara uses the growth of Southern California’s logistics economy, which controls the movement of goods, to examine how modern capitalism was shaped by and helped to transform the region’s geographies of race and class. While logistics provided a roadmap for capital and the state to transform Southern California, it also created pockets of resistance among labor, community, and environmental groups.
“A stunning exploration of the logistics mega-complex in Southern California’s Inland Empire that is the single most important material expression of the globalization of the U.S. economy.”—Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz
Strategies of Segregation: Race, Residence, and the Struggle for Educational Equality
by David G. García
In this meticulously researched narrative spanning 1903 to 1974, David G. García excavates an extensive array of archival sources to expose a separate and unequal school system and its purposeful links with racially restrictive housing covenants. He recovers powerful oral accounts of Mexican Americans and African Americans who endured disparate treatment and protested discrimination. His analysis is skillfully woven into a compelling narrative that culminates in an examination of one of the nation’s first desegregation cases filed jointly by Mexican American and Black plaintiffs.
“This outstanding book speaks to national issues of segregation, racial inequality, and resistance and will command the attention of the larger academy.”—James D. Anderson, author of The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935
