HIS 127 - Desert Vista - History and Culture of the Mexican-Americans in the Southwest: Find Books

Latinos in the U.S. and Latin Americans are a combination of diverse populations that differ on a range of factors including length of time in the country, migration background, ethnicity, geographical location, socio-economic status, and so on. The reader will find perspectives of those of us who live in the borderlands--that is, those of us whom Gloria Anzaldua identified as Mestizas, who inhabit the intersticios, the spaces in between souls, minds, identities, and geographies. This book assists new generations of Latino/as and of those involved in Latino Culture and Latin America in understanding how the colonization of the Americas is still tied to current issues of migration from the South to the North and how mental health practices have been created and maintained from the wound of coloniality. It offers a rich and alternative foundation for approaching trauma, identity, and resilience through the integration of a decolonization paradigm, borderlands theory, and social justice approaches in couple and family therapy.

Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano has described U.S. and Latin American culture as continually hobbled by amnesia--unable, or unwilling, to remember the influence of mestizos and indigenous populations. In Mestizos Come Home! author Robert Con Davis-Undiano documents the great awakening of Mexican American and Latino culture since the 1960s that has challenged this omission in collective memory. He maps a new awareness of the United States as intrinsically connected to the broader context of the Americas. At once native and new to the American Southwest, Mexican Americans have "come home" in a profound sense: they have reasserted their right to claim that land and U.S. culture as their own. Mestizos Come Home! explores key areas of change that Mexican Americans have brought to the United States. These areas include the recognition of mestizo identity, especially its historical development across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the re-emergence of indigenous relationships to land; and the promotion of Mesoamerican conceptions of the human body. Clarifying and bridging critical gaps in cultural history, Davis-Undiano considers important artifacts from the past and present, connecting the casta (caste) paintings of eighteenth-century Mexico to modern-day artists including John Valadez, Alma L#65533;pez, and Luis A. Jim#65533;nez Jr. He also examines such community celebrations as Day of the Dead, Cinco de Mayo, and lowrider car culture as examples of mestizo influence on mainstream American culture. Woven throughout is the search for meaning and understanding of mestizo identity. A large-scale landmark account of Mexican American culture, Mestizos Come Home! shows that mestizos are essential to U.S. national culture. As an argument for social justice and a renewal of America's democratic ideals, this book marks a historic cultural homecoming.

The stories in this dynamic bilingual prose-art collection touch on the universals of romance, family, migration and expulsion, and everyday life in all its zany configurations. Each glimpse into lives at every stage - from newborns and children to teens, young adults, and the elderly - further submerges readers in psychological ups and downs. In a world filled with racism, police brutality, poverty, and tensions between haves and have-nots, these flashes of fictional insight bring gleaming clarity to lives lived where all sorts of borders meet and shift. These unflinching and often brutal fictions crisscross spiritual, emotional, and physical borders as they give voice to all those whom society chooses not to see.

The act of eating defines and redefines borders. What constitutes "American" in our cuisine has always depended on a liberal crossing of borders, from "the line in the sand" that separates Mexico and the United States, to the grassland boundary with Canada, to the imagined divide in our collective minds between "our" food and "their" food. Immigrant workers have introduced new cuisines and ways of cooking that force the nation to question the boundaries between "us" and "them."   The stories told in Food Across Borders highlight the contiguity between the intimate decisions we make as individuals concerning what we eat and the social and geopolitical processes we enact to secure nourishment, territory, and belonging.    Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University..