Latin American
Showing all 13 results
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If We Want to Win
A Latine Vision for a New American Democracy$26.99An urgent, provocative collection of essays from Latinx thought leaders heralding a more inclusive vision of America’s future
Latinx people make up the second-largest ethnic and racial group in America, with a population of over sixty million. They have been integral to shaping the country’s economy, culture, and politics, and their influence and power continue to grow at all levels of civic life. Yet their diversity remains misunderstood, their contributions ignored, their concerns overlooked.
If We Want to Win brings together twenty leading figures involved in issues that affect the Latinx community, to lay out a vision for the future of American democracy, drawing on their experience and expertise in areas ranging from the arts, juvenile justice, women’s rights, and education, to environmental justice, racism, human rights, immigration, technology, and philanthropy.
Each contributor tells his or her own story alongside stories of the resilience and hope they have encountered over the course of their careers, debunking the stereotyping and scapegoating that continue to plague the Latinx community and seeking a more accurate portrayal of themselves and their communities. While questioning what it means to be Latinx and what it means to be American in the twenty-first century, this inspiring, visionary collection offers a blueprint for moving the United States toward a more inclusive and just democracy.
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Inventing Latinos
A New Story of American Racism$17.99 – $40.00Named one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR
An NPR Best Book of the Year, exploring the impact of Latinos’ new collective racial identity on the way Americans understand race, with a new afterword by the authorWho are Latinos and where do they fit in America’s racial order? In this “timely and important examination of Latinx identity” (Ms.), Laura E. Gómez, a leading critical race scholar, argues that it is only recently that Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, Central Americans, and others are seeing themselves (and being seen by others) under the banner of a cohesive racial identity. And the catalyst for this emergent identity, she argues, has been the ferocity of anti-Latino racism.
In what Booklist calls “an incisive study of history, complex interrogation of racial construction, and sophisticated legal argument,” Gómez “packs a knockout punch” (Publishers Weekly), illuminating for readers the fascinating race-making, unmaking, and re-making processes that Latinos have undergone over time, indelibly changing the way race functions in this country.
Building on the “insightful and well-researched” (Kirkus Reviews) material of the original, the paperback features a new afterword in which the author analyzes results of the 2020 Census, providing brilliant, timely insight about how Latinos have come to self-identify.
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Killing the Story
Journalists Risking Their Lives to Uncover the Truth in Mexico$25.99A harrowing and unforgettable look at reporting in Mexico, one of the world’s most dangerous countries to be a journalist
In 2017, Mexico edged out Iraq and Syria as the deadliest country in the world in which to be a reporter, with at least fourteen journalists killed over the course of the year. The following year another ten journalists were murdered, joining the almost 150 reporters who have been killed since the mid-2000s in a wave of violence that has accompanied Mexico’s war on drugs.
In Killing the Story, award-winning journalist and filmmaker Témoris Grecko reveals how journalists are risking their lives to expose crime and corruption. From the streets of Veracruz to the national television studios of Mexico City, Grecko writes about the heroic work of reporters at all levels—from the local self-trained journalist, Moises Sanchez, whose body was found dismembered by the side of a road after he reported on corruption by the state’s governor, to high-profile journalists such as Javier Valdez Cárdenas, gunned down in the streets of Sinaloa, and Carmen Aristegui, battling the forces attempting to censor her.
In the vein of Charles Bowden’s Murder City and Anna Politskaya’s A Russian Diary, Killing the Story is a powerful memorial to the work of Grecko’s lost colleagues, which shows a country riven by brutality, hypocrisy, and corruption, and sheds a light on how those in power are bent on silencing those determined to reveal the truth and bring an end to corruption.
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Latino Stats
American Hispanics by the Numbers$14.95At a time when politics is seemingly ruled by ideology and emotion and when immigration is one of the most contentious topics, it is more important than ever to cut through the rhetoric and highlight, in numbers, the reality of the broad spectrum of Latino life in the United States. Latinos are both the largest and fastest-growing racial/ethnic group in the country, even while many continue to fight for their status as Americans.
Respected movement builder and former leader of the Tides Foundation Idelisse Malavé and her daughter, Celeste Giordani—a communications strategist for the Social Transformation Project—distills the profusion of data, identifying the most telling and engaging facts to assemble a portrait of contemporary Latino life with glimpses of the past and future. From politics and the economy to popular culture, the arts, and ideas about race, gender, and family, Latino Stats both catalogs the inequities that plague Latino communities and documents Latinos’ growing power and influence on American life.
An essential tool for advocates, educators, and policy makers, Latino Stats will be a go-to guidebook for anyone wanting to raise their awareness and increase their understanding of the complex state of our nation.
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The World of Mexican Migrants
The Rock and the Hard Place$19.99 – $25.95Widely praised as a splendid addition to the literature on the great wave of post-1970 immigration from Mexico—as a result of which an estimated 6 million undocumented Mexican migrants now live in the United States—The World of Mexican Migrants, by acclaimed author Judith Adler Hellman, takes us into the lives of those who, no longer able to eke out even a modest living in their homeland, have traveled north to find jobs.
Hellman takes us deep into the sending communities in Mexico, where we witness the conditions that lead Mexicans to risk their lives crossing the border and meet those who live on Mexico’s largest source of foreign income, remittances from family members al Norte. We hear astonishing border crossing tales—including one man’s journey riding suspended from the undercarriage of a train. In New York and Los Angeles, construction workers, restaurant staff, street vendors, and deliverymen share their survival strategies—the ways in which they work, send money home, find housing, learn English, send their children to school, and avoid detection.
Drawing upon five years of in-depth interviews, Hellman offers a humanizing perspective and “essential window” (Booklist) into the lives and struggles of Mexican migrants living in the United States.
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Latin America After Neoliberalism
Turning the Tide in the 21st Century?$24.95 – $60.00Beginning in the 1980s, Latin America became a laboratory for the ideas and policies of neoliberalism. Now the region is an epicenter of dissent from neoliberal ideas and resistance to U.S. economic and political dominance; Latin America’s political map is being redrawn. Already half a dozen progressive governments have swept into power—in Chile, Bolivia, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela—and more may follow. Latin America After Neoliberalism is a fascinating look at what is perhaps the most politically dynamic region in the world—and an authoritative guide to the political movements and leaders that are part of this historic change.
Published in conjunction with the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) and written by leading progressive analysts of the region, this book takes on the full spectrum of contemporary issues in Latin America, from political transformation to the role of women, indigenous people, and labor coalitions. Latin America After Neoliberalism attempts to make sense of the ongoing upheavals throughout the continent as it moves into the vanguard of an international rejection of neoliberalism for a new and viable progressive alternative.
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The Condor Years
How Pinochet And His Allies Brought Terrorism To Three Continents$18.99 – $25.95A “compelling and shocking account” of a brutal campaign of repression in Latin America, based on interviews and previously secret documents (The Miami Herald).
Throughout the 1970s, six Latin American governments, led by Chile, formed a military alliance called Operation Condor to carry out kidnappings, torture, and political assassinations across three continents. It was an early “war on terror” initially encouraged by the CIA—which later backfired on the United States.
Hailed by Foreign Affairs as “remarkable” and “a major contribution to the historical record,” The Condor Years uncovers the unsettling facts about the secret US relationship with the dictators who created this terrorist organization. Written by award-winning journalist John Dinges and updated to include later developments in the prosecution of Pinochet, the book is a chilling yet dispassionately told history of one of Latin America’s darkest eras. Dinges, himself interrogated in a Chilean torture camp, interviewed participants on both sides and examined thousands of previously secret documents to take the reader inside this underground world of military operatives and diplomats, right-wing spies and left-wing revolutionaries.
“Scrupulous, well-documented.” —The Washington Post
“Nobody knows what went wrong inside Chile like John Dinges.” —Seymour Hersh -
Law in a Lawless Land
Diary of a Limpieza in a Colombia$24.95The town needs to get 300 coffins ready. Heads Up! The priest better be ready to work overtime. —flier from Colombian paramilitaries announcing their arrival
In January 2003, U.S. troops were sent to Colombia to train army units engaged in a bloody civil war, deepening a multibillion-dollar American commitment that makes that country the third-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid.
Despite the potential for disaster embodied in the U.S.’s looming entanglement with another jungle war, America’s role in Colombia has received little critical media attention. The interlacing of terror, drugs and oil with endemic political instability makes the country a likely international flashpoint in the near future.
In this stunning account of Colombian violence and disorder, acclaimed anthropologist Michael Taussig recounts two weeks in a village under siege by paramilitaries. Routinely visited by autodefensas brandishing weapons and a laptop containing a list of names, victims are rounded up, tortured, and killed, their bodies left on display as a warning to others. In his diary of the limpieza (the “cleaning”), Taussig offers unusual insight into the nature of Colombia’s present peril and a nuanced account of the human consequences of a disintegrating state.
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Perpetuating Power
How Mexican Presidents Were Chosen$16.95 – $26.00Jorge Castañeda, who served as Mexico’s foreign minister from 2000 to 2003, has been both an insider and an outsider in Mexico’s political system. In Perpetuating Power, he lays bare the often mystifying workings of power in Mexico, offering readers what the New York Times Book Review called “an unusually revealing explication of the inner workings of three decades of presidential succession.”
To outside observers, Mexico stood out for its odd mixture of democratic pretension with autocratic inevitability: there were always elections, but everyone knew the next president would be the candidate of the aptly named Party of the Institutional Revolution, which governed Mexico throughout most of the last century.
In six penetrating essays combined with interviews by Castañeda with each of the living Mexican ex-presidents, Perpetuating Power provides a remarkably candid account of the political machinery behind Mexican presidential politics and a view, startling to political outsiders, of how power really operates.
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The Mexican Shock
Its Meaning for the United States$13.00 – $23.00One of the most trenchant critics of the Latin American scene and American foreign policy, Jorge G. Castañeda has been hailed as the “leading Mexican voice in the U.S. media” (In These Times). In The Mexican Shock Castañeda examines the major issues in Mexico in recent years and their effects on the United States: emigration, the relationship between politics and economics, the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Colosio, and the rapid devaluation of the peso. He also explores the United States’s changing perceptions of Mexico and the historical and cultural outlooks that still divide the two countries. Finally, he examines the campaign behind Proposition 187 in California, discussing the dangerous mix of ignorance and bias that has formed so much of America’s reaction to Mexico.
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Recipe of Memory
$14.00 – $22.00A multi-award winner, RECIPE OF MEMORY is a unique blend of cookbook, family memoir, and social history. In an antique chest left to L.A. journalist Victor Valle by his great aunt, recipes dating back to 1888 give tips for preparing more than 50 dishessuch as Squab on a Bed of Saffron Rice. And five generations worth of family journals and old photographs offer insights into the development of Mexican American culture and cuisine. Illustrated.
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Mexican Lives
$16.95On the eve of the most significant trade agreement in recent Mexico-U.S. history, Judith Adler Hellman, a leading authority on Mexican politics, went into the homes and workplaces of a variety of Mexicans, from rich industrialists to poor street vendors. In bringing us their stories, Hellman puts a human face on the political and economic transformation currently under way in this rapidly changing country, and puts in context the rage and frustration that is feeding the current rebellion in the Mexican state of Chiapas.
The Mexicans interviewed in this remarkable book share their views on an array of subjects, including pollution, the political elite, corruption, economics, and the migrant experience in the United States. Some seek collective solutions to the challenges they face; others, for a variety of interesting reasons, have no involvement with any group beyond their immediate or extended family, and rely for their well-being only on themselves and their kin.
Here we meet a small subsistence farmer, eager to break into the more profitable gourmet fruit and vegetable export market; a very wealthy family pondering how best to position its company to profit from NAFTA; and a former housewife turned union organizer, who must figure out what to do with her life savings: underwrite her son’s migration to the United States, put down a payment on a new house with running water, or buy an industrial sewing machine with which to start her own business.
These personal portraits, combined with Hellman’s concise and engaging presentation of recent Mexican economic and political history, make this essential reading for those concerned about Mexico and the growing global economy.
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A Piece of My Heart/Pedacito De Mi Corazon
The Art of Carmen Lomas Garza$14.95The thirty-seven works of art, twenty-four in full color, presented in A Piece of My Heart/Pedacito de mi Corazón take us into the heart of one of the most distinguished painters of Chicano life. In a career that spans twenty years, Carmen Lomas Garza has depicted the cherished traditions and harsh struggles of Chicano culture. From Grandparents Cutting Cactus to Felino’s Breakdancers, Lomas Garza’s bright, colorful images capture the beauty and texture of daily life among families, friends, and neighbors in southern Texas.
Carmen Lomas Garza is the first Chicana to be the subject of a major traveling retrospective;The artist came of age during the Chicano civil rights movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s and El Movimiento helped shape her identity and goals. Lomas Garza’s evocative portraits of faith healings and tamale-making parties, of girls fixing their hair, and children gazing at the moon add a distinctly female perspective to her male compatriots’ earnest depictions of the oppressive living conditions of Chicanos.
A Piece of My Heart/Pedacito de mi Corazón presents the artist’s finest works, including paintings, etchings, cut-paper hangings, and altarlike installations. Together with a biographical chronology and rich interpretive essay by Amalia Mesa-Bains, this book is a long-overdue introduction to an important artist.
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