"An unprecedented tour de force . . . [A] sweeping historical overview and interpretation of the racial formation and racial history of Mexican Americans." -Antonia I. Castañeda, Associate Professor of History, St. Mary's University Winner, A Choice Outstanding Academic Book The history of Mexican Americans is a history of the intermingling of races-Indian, White, and Black. This racial history underlies a legacy of racial discrimination against...

"In the borderlands between the white US cultural mainstream and Mexican American cultural productions, this book concerns itself not with the liberation but with the legibility of Mexican American fathers in literature and film. Few works focus exclusively on Brown fathers in the borderlands. This study focuses on the slow interplay of form, genre, and subject that determines the roles these fathers are allowed to occupy in the cultural imaginary....

Juan Rulfo is one of the most important writers of twentieth-century Mexico, though he wrote only two booksthe novel Pedro Páramo (1955) and the short story collection El llano en llamas (1953). First translated into English in 1967 as The Burning Plain, these starkly realistic stories create a psychologically acute portrait of poverty and dignity in the countryside at a time when Mexico was undergoing rapid industrialization following the upheavals...

"This collection takes a similar format to that of Auyero's earlier book, Invisible in Austin. It was conceived of at the start of the COVID era in UT's Urban Ethnography Lab, where Auyero and some of his colleagues and grad students discussed the ways that the pandemic had renewed conversations on a whole host of issues. But with this book, he wanted to diversify the contributions from authors at all career levels, from graduate students to senior...

"Since the Mid-1980S, whimsical, brightly colored wood carvings from the Mexican state of Oaxaca have found their way into gift shops and private homes across the United States and Europe, as Western consumers seek to connect with the authenticity and tradition represented by indigenous folk arts. Ironically, however, the Oaxacan wood carvings are not a traditional folk art. Invented in the mid-twentieth century by non-Indian Mexican artisans for...

"The capital of the Aztec empire, Tenochtitlan, was, in its era, one of the largest cities in the world. Built on an island in the middle of a shallow lake, its population numbered perhaps 150,000, with another 350,000 people in the urban network clustered around the lake shores. In 1521, at the height of Tenochtitlan's power, which extended over much of Central Mexico, Hernando Cortes and his followers conquered the city. Cortes boasted to King Charles...

"The Virgin of Guadalupe is famously migratory, traversing continents and crossing and recrossing oceans. Guadalupe's earliest cult originated in medieval Iberia, where Our Lady of Guadalupe from Extremadura, Spain, played a significant role in the reconquista and garnered royal backing. The Spanish Guadalupe accompanied the conquistadors as part of the spiritual arsenal used to Christianize the Americas, where new images of the Virgin acted as catalysts...

"From prehistory to the present, the Indigenous peoples of the Andes have used a visual symbol system--that is, art--to express their sense of the sacred and its immanence in the natural world. Many visual motifs that originated prior to the Incas still appear in Andean art today, despite the onslaught of cultural disruption that native Andeans have endured over several centuries. Indeed, art has always been a unifying power through which Andeans...