Discover & Discuss: National Hispanic Heritage Month

A Handbook of Latinx Art
Aranda-Alvarado, Rocío; Cullen-Morales, Deborah (2024)

"A Handbook of Latinx Art" is the first anthology to explore the rich, deep, and often overlooked contributions that Latinx artists have made to art in the United States. Drawn from wide-ranging sources, this volume includes texts by artists, critics, and scholars from the 1960s to the present that reflect the diversity of the Latinx experience across the nation, from the West Coast and the Mexican border to New York, Miami, and the Midwest.

The anthology features essential writings by Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, Dominican American, and Central American artists to highlight how visionaries of diverse immigrant groups negotiate issues of participation and belonging, material, style, and community in their own voices. These intersectional essays cut across region, gender, race, and class to lay out a complex emerging field that reckons with different histories, geographies, and political engagements and, ultimately, underscores the importance of Latinx artists to the history of American art. - Publisher's Description

Request this Title

Playful Protest: The Political Work of Joy in Latinx Media
Soares, Kristie (2023)

Joy is a politicized form of pleasure that goes beyond gratification to challenge norms of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Kristie Soares focuses on the diasporic media of Puerto Rico and Cuba to examine how music, public activist demonstrations, social media, sitcoms, and other areas of culture resist the dominant stories told about Latinx joy. As she shows, Latinx creators compose versions of joy central to social and political struggle and at odds with colonialist and imperialist narratives that equate joy with political docility and a lack of intelligence. 

Soares builds her analysis around chapters that delve into gozando in salsa music, precise joy among the New Young Lords Party, choteo in the comedy ¿Qué Pasa U.S.A.?, azúcar in the life and death of Celia Cruz, dale as Pitbull’s signature affect, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s use of silliness to take seriously political violence. 

Daring and original, "Playful Protest" examines how Latinx creators resist the idea that joy only exists outside politics and activist struggle. - Publisher's Description

Request this Title

Rhythms of Race: Cuban Musicians and the Making of Latino New York City and Miami
Abreu, Christina (2015)

Among the nearly 90,000 Cubans who settled in New York City and Miami in the 1940s and 1950s were numerous musicians and entertainers, black and white, who did more than fill dance halls with the rhythms of the rumba, mambo, and cha cha cha. 

In her history of music and race in midcentury America, Christina D. Abreu argues that these musicians, through their work in music festivals, nightclubs, social clubs, and television and film productions, played central roles in the development of Cuban, Afro-Cuban, Latino, and Afro-Latino identities and communities. 

Abreu draws from previously untapped oral histories, cultural materials, and Spanish-language media to uncover the lives and broader social and cultural significance of these vibrant performers. - Publisher's Description

Request this Title

MeXicana Fashions: Politics, Self-adornment, and Identity Construction
Hurtado, Aída; Cantú, Norma (2020)

Collecting the perspectives of scholars who reflect on their own relationships to particular garments, analyze the politics of dress, and examine the role of consumerism and entrepreneurialism in the production of creating and selling a style, "meXicana Fashions" examines and searches for meaning in these visible, performative aspects of identity. 

Focusing primarily on Chicanas but also considering trends connected to other Latin American communities, the authors highlight specific constituencies that are defined by region (“Tejana style,” “L.A. style”), age group (“homie,” “chola”), and social class (marked by haute couture labels such as Carolina Herrera and Oscar de la Renta). The essays acknowledge the complex layers of these styles, which are not mutually exclusive but instead reflect a range of intersections in occupation, origin, personality, sexuality, and fads. Other elements include urban indigenous fashion shows, the shifting quinceañera market, “walking altars” on the Days of the Dead, plus-size clothing, huipiles in the workplace, and dressing in drag. Together, these chapters illuminate the full array of messages woven into a vibrant social fabric. - Publisher's Description

Request this Title

Latin American and Latinx Fashion Design Today - ¡Moda Hoy!
Melendez-Escalante, Tanya; Marra-Alvarez, Melissa (2024)

Accompanying a major exhibition at The Museum at FIT, "Latin American and Latinx Fashion Design Today: ¡Moda Hoy!" examines Latin American and Latinx fashion design from the past 20 years, asking “What is Latin American fashion design in the 21st century”? 

The book seeks to explore the sociohistorical influences and cultural dynamics that have propelled the development of the unique sartorial bricolage that is Latin American and Latinx fashion. Through a series of themes and topics favored by contemporary designers – including Indigenous heritage, art, sustainable design, politics, gender, elegance, and popular culture – it highlights established designers with a strong international presence, such as Isabel Toledo, Carolina Herrera, Rick Owens, Oscar de la Renta, Carla Fernández, and Gabriela Hearst. Accompanied by regional brands and emerging talents, and case studies that take an in-depth look into specific designers, and beautifully illustrated in full color throughout, "Latin American and Latinx Fashion Design Today" is essential reading for fashion enthusiasts who have an overlapping interest in Latin American studies, and all who appreciate the history and visual culture of fashion and Latin America. - Publisher's Description

Request this Title

Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production
Alvarado, Leticia (2018)

In "Abject Performances," Leticia Alvarado draws out the irreverent, disruptive aesthetic strategies used by Latino artists and cultural producers who shun standards of respectability that are typically used to conjure concrete minority identities. 

In place of works imbued with pride, redemption, or celebration, artists such as Ana Mendieta, Nao Bustamante, and the Chicano art collective known as Asco employ negative affects—shame, disgust, and unbelonging—to capture experiences that lie at the edge of the mainstream, inspirational Latino-centered social justice struggles. Drawing from a diverse expressive archive that ranges from performance art to performative testimonies of personal faith-based subjection, Alvarado illuminates modes of community formation and social critique defined by a refusal of identitarian coherence that nonetheless coalesce into Latino affiliation and possibility. - Publisher's Description

Request this Title

Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, and Politics
Davila, Arlene (2020)

In "Latinx Art," Arlene Dávila draws on numerous interviews with artists, dealers, and curators to explore the problem of visualizing Latinx art and artists. Providing an inside and critical look of the global contemporary art market, Dávila's book is at once an introduction to contemporary Latinx art and a call to decolonize the art worlds and practices that erase and whitewash Latinx artists. 

Dávila shows the importance of race, class, and nationalism in shaping contemporary art markets while providing a path for scrutinizing art and culture institutions and for diversifying the art world. - Publisher's Description

Request this Title

Day of the Dead in the USA: The Migration and Transformation of a Cultural Phenomenon
Marchi, Regina (2022)

Honoring relatives by tending graves, building altars, and cooking festive meals has been a major tradition among Latin Americans for centuries. The tribute, "El Día de los Muertos," has enjoyed renewed popularity since the 1970s when Latinx activists and artists in the United States began expanding "Day of the Dead" north of the border with celebrations of performance art, Aztec danza, art exhibits, and other public expressions. 

Focusing on the power of public ritual to serve as a communication medium, this revised and updated edition combines a mix of ethnography, historical research, oral history, and critical cultural analysis to explore the manifold and unexpected transformations that occur when the tradition is embraced by the mainstream. A testament to the complex role of media and commercial forces in constructions of ethnic identity, "Day of the Dead in the USA" provides insight into the power of art and ritual to create community, transmit oppositional messages, and advance educational, political, and economic goals. - Publisher's Description

Request this Title

The Mariachi Voice
Newland-Ulloa, Juanita (2024)

"The Mariachi Voice" is a practical resource for all educational program directors, voice professors, historians, singers, and students of Mariachi who want to learn and encourage the tradition of Mariachi music in the United States. It explores and dissects the similarities and differences between classical and Mariachi fields regarding voice, while also providing useful classroom-tested lesson plans, voice history, and pedagogy for teaching the Mariachi singer. With this book, program instructors can more easily assist students in connecting safely and more deeply to their voices, share new songs, and introduce Mexican Spanish Lyric Diction --including the application of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)-- to Mariachi with exercises to facilitate diction, song learning, and overall technique while learning the style. 

An expert in Mariachi scholarship and performance, author Juanita Ulloa further includes interviews with vocal artists of Mariachi music, notably singer Linda Ronstadt and the grandchildren of well-known Mexican singer Jorge Negrete. Her career touring as a professional singer/pianist, voice professor, ethnomusicologist, and educator led her to the creation of the "Operachi" style, a crossover style between classical and Mariachi training. - Publisher's Description

Request this Title

The Taco Truck: How Mexican Street Food Is Transforming the American City
Lemon, Robert (2019)

Icons of Mexican cultural identity and America's melting pot ideal, taco trucks have transformed cityscapes from coast to coast. The taco truck radiates Mexican culture within non-Mexican spaces with a presence—sometimes desired, sometimes resented—that turns a public street corner into a bustling business. 

Drawing on interviews with taco truck workers and his own skills as a geographer, Robert Lemon illuminates new truths about foodways, community, and the unexpected places where ethnicity, class, and culture meet. Lemon focuses on the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento, and Columbus, Ohio, to show how the arrival of taco trucks challenge preconceived ideas of urban planning even as cities use them to reinvent whole neighborhoods. As Lemon charts the relationships between food practices and city spaces, he uncovers the many ways residents and politicians alike contest, celebrate, and influence not only where your favorite truck parks, but what's on the menu. - Publisher's Description

Request this Title

Selected Poems: Poesia Selecta
Pales Matos, Luis; Marzan, Julio (2000)

Although today Luis Palés Matos is virtually unknown to most American readers, the eminent U.S. poet and writer William Carlos Williams once praised his younger contemporary as “one of the most important poets out of Latin America.” 

Palés Matos was a native, and lifelong resident, of Puerto Rico. Though he was not black, he became one of the Caribbean’s leading advocates of poesía negra (black poetry). His landmark 1937 collection Tuntún de Pasa y Grifería: Poesía Afro-Antillana (Tom-Tom of Kinky Hair and Black Things: Afro-Caribbean Poetry) joyously celebrated the African aspects and sources of Puerto Rico’s culture and influenced later generations of writers throughout the Western hemisphere. 

Translator Julio Marzán has selected the best of Palés Matos’s poems from throughout his career, among them “Prelude in Boricua,” “Danza Negra,” “Buccaneer Winds,” and “Elegy on the Duke of Marmalade.” He also provides a helpful glossary of obscure terms and an introduction that locates Palés Matos in the broader cultural context of his contemporaries and poetic influences—including such North American poets as Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and Vachel Lindsay. - Publisher's Description

Request this Title

Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa
Gonzalez, Rigoberto (2006)

Heartbreaking, poetic, and intensely personal, "Butterfly Boy" is a unique coming out and coming-of-age story of a first-generation Chicano who trades one life for another, only to discover that history and memory are not exchangeable or forgettable. 

Growing up among poor migrant Mexican farmworkers, Rigoberto González also faces the pressure of coming-of-age as a gay man in a culture that prizes machismo. Losing his mother when he is twelve, González must then confront his father’s abandonment and an abiding sense of cultural estrangement, both from his adopted home in the United States and from a Mexican birthright. His only sense of connection gets forged in a violent relationship with an older man. By finding his calling as a writer, and by revisiting the relationship with his father during a trip to Mexico, González finally claims his identity at the intersection of race, class, and sexuality. The result is a leap of faith that every reader who ever felt like an outsider will immediately recognize. - Publisher's Description

Request this Title

Speaking of Spain: The Evolution of Race and Nation in the Hispanic World
Feros, Antonio (2017)

Momentous changes swept Spain in the fifteenth century. A royal marriage united Castile and Aragon, its two largest kingdoms. The last Muslim emirate on the Iberian Peninsula fell to Spanish Catholic armies. And conquests in the Americas were turning Spain into a great empire. Yet few in this period of flourishing Spanish power could define “Spain” concretely, or say with any confidence who were Spaniards and who were not. Speaking of Spain offers an analysis of the cultural and political forces that transformed Spain’s diverse peoples and polities into a unified nation. 

Antonio Feros traces evolving ideas of Spanish nationhood and Spanishness in the discourses of educated elites, who debated whether the union of Spain’s kingdoms created a single fatherland (patria) or whether Spain remained a dynastic monarchy comprised of separate nations. If a unified Spain was emerging, was it a pluralistic nation, or did “Spain” represent the imposition of the dominant Castilian culture over the rest? The presence of large communities of individuals with Muslim and Jewish ancestors and the colonization of the New World brought issues of race to the fore as well. A nascent civic concept of Spanish identity clashed with a racialist understanding that Spaniards were necessarily of pure blood and “white,” unlike converted Jews and Muslims, Amerindians, and Africans. 

Gradually Spaniards settled the most intractable of these disputes. By the time the liberal Constitution of Cádiz (1812) was ratified, consensus held that almost all people born in Spain’s territories, whatever their ethnicity, were Spanish. - Publisher's Description

Request this Title

Elena, Princesa of the Periphery: Disney's Flexible Latina Girl
Leon-Boys, Diana (2023)

In the summer of 2016, Disney introduced its first Latina princess, Elena of Avalor. 

"Princesa of the Periphery" explores this Disney property using multiple case studies to understand its approach to girlhood and Latinidad. Following the circuit of culture model, author Diana Leon-Boys teases out moments of complex negotiations by Disney, producers, and audiences as they navigate Elena’s circulation. Case studies highlight how a flexible Latinidad is deployed through corporate materials, social media pages, theme park experiences, and the television series to create a princess who is both marginal to Disney’s normative vision of princesshood and central to Disney’s claims of diversification. This multi-layered analysis of Disney’s mediated Latina girlhood interrogates the complex relationship between the U.S.’s largest ethnic minority and a global conglomerate that stands in for the U.S. on the global stage. - Publisher's Description

Request this Title

Latino TV: A History
Beltrán, Mary (2022)

Whose stories are told on television? Who are the heroes and heroines, held up as intriguing, lovable, and compelling? Which characters are fully realized, rather than being cardboard villains and sidekicks? And who are our storytellers?

The first-ever account of Latino/a participation and representation in US English-language television, "Latino TV: A History" offers a sweeping study of key moments of Chicano/a and Latino/a representation and authorship since the 1950s. Drawing on archival research, interviews with dozens of media professionals who worked on or performed in these series, textual analysis of episodes and promotional materials, and analysis of news media coverage, Mary Beltrán examines Latina/o representation in everything from children’s television Westerns of the 1950s, Chicana/o and Puerto Rican activist-led public affairs series of the 1970s, and sitcoms that spanned half a century, to Latina and Latino-led series in the 2000s and 2010s on broadcast, cable, and streaming outlets, including "George Lopez," "Ugly Betty," "One Day at a Time," and "Vida." 

Through the exploration of the histories of Latina/o television narratives and the authors of those narratives, Mary Beltrán sheds important light on how Latina/os have been included―and, more often, not―in the television industry and in the stories of the country writ large. - Publisher's Description

Request this Title

Who is Ana Mendieta?
Redfern, Christine; Caron, Caro (2011)

This fiery account of Ana Mendieta is also a snapshot of the turbulent times in which she lived. In exile from revolutionary Cuba, Ana Mendieta found in the 1960s US another kind of social upheaval: Frida Kahlo was finally being appreciated as an artist, not just a muse; Valerie Solanas wrote her manifesto, then shot Andy Warhol; Carolee Schneemann performed nude and pulled a feminist scroll out of her vagina. And Ana Mendieta began creating what she called "earth-body art," revolutionary work that explored issues of gender and cultural activity. In 1985, at the height of her success, she plunged to her death from the window of the New York City apartment she shared with her husband, artist Carl Andre. He was tried and acquitted of her murder. 

These vibrantly drawn pages chronicle how the women's art movement changed the way we look at the female body in art and in the world. Redfern and Caron bring luminaries and the conflicts that inspired them to blazing life, telling us not only who is Ana Mendieta, but why we need to know. - Publisher's Description

Request this Title

Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of La Causa
Levy, Jacques; Chavez, Cesar (2007)

In the writing of this biography, Jacques E. Levy was given almost unlimited access to Chavez for nearly six years. Levy traveled and worked with Chavez, interviewed him, and spent time with his family, friends, and other contemporary civil rights activists. 

The documents and recordings accumulated by Levy during the writing of this biography are now housed in the Jacques E. Levy Research Collection on Cesar Chavez at Yale’s Beinecke Library. - Publisher's Description

Request this Title

In the Heights: Finding Home
Miranda, Lin-Manuel; Hudes, Quiara Alegría; McCarter, Jeremy (2021)

In 2008, "In the Heights," a new musical from up-and-coming young artists, electrified Broadway. The show’s vibrant mix of Latin music and hip-hop captured life in Washington Heights, the Latino neighborhood in upper Manhattan. It won four Tony Awards and became an international hit, delighting audiences around the world. For the film version, director Jon M. Chu ("Crazy Rich Asians") brought the story home, filming its spectacular dance numbers on location in Washington Heights. That’s where Usnavi, Nina, and their neighbors chase their dreams and ask a universal question: Where do I belong? 

"In the Heights: Finding Home" reunites Miranda with Jeremy McCarter, co-author of "Hamilton: The Revolution," and Quiara Alegría Hudes, the Pulitzer Prize–winning librettist of the Broadway musical and screenwriter of the film. They do more than trace the making of an unlikely Broadway smash and a major motion picture: They give readers an intimate look at the decades-long creative life of In the Heights.

Like "Hamilton: The Revolution," the book offers untold stories, perceptive essays, and the lyrics to Miranda’s songs—complete with his funny, heartfelt annotations. It also features newly commissioned portraits and never-before-seen photos from backstage, the movie set, and productions around the world.

This is the story of characters who search for a home—and the artists who created one. - Publisher's Description

Request this Title

Critical Insights: The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros
Herrera-Sobek, Maria (2011)

This volume in the "Critical Insights" series offers a comprehensive introduction to Sandra Cisneros's acclaimed novel. 

"The House on Mango Street" is easily one of the most critically and commercially successful novels by a Mexican American writer. Since its publication in 1984, more than one million copies have been sold, and it regularly appears on high school and college reading lists. In deceptively simple prose, it tells the stories of a young Mexican American girl's family and friends and of her coming-of-age within an impoverished Chicago neighborhood. Both universal in theme and culturally specific, it stands as a landmark in Chicano/a and American literature. 

Edited and with an introduction by María Herrera-Sobek, Professor of Chicano Studies and the Luis Leal Endowed Chair at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Herrera-Sobek reasons that a large part of the novel's success can be attributed to its simple prose and reliance on suggestive metaphors and similes, and Chloë Schama, writing on behalf of The Paris Review, reflects on the urgency Cisneros felt as she wrote her novel. - Publisher's Description

Request this Title

Puerto Rico's Henry Klumb: A Modern Architect's Sense of Place
Cruz, César (2020)

This book follows Henry Klumb’s life in architecture from Cologne, Germany to Puerto Rico. Arriving on the island, Klumb was a one-time German immigrant, a moderately successful designer, and previously a senior draftsman with Frank Lloyd Wright. 

Over the next forty years Klumb would emerge as Puerto Rico’s most prolific, locally well-known, and celebrated modern architect. In addition to becoming a leading figure in Latin American modern architecture, Klumb also became one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most accomplished protégés, and an architect with a highly attuned social and environmental consciousness. Cruz explores his life, works, and legacy through the lens of a sense of place, defined as the beliefs that people adopt, actions undertaken, and feelings developed towards specific locations and spaces. He argues that the architect’s sense of place was a defining quality of his life and work, most evident in the houses he designed and built in Puerto Rico. 

"Puerto Rico’s Henry Klumb" offers a historical narrative, culminating in a series of architectural analyses focusing on four key design strategies employed in Klumb’s work: vernacular architecture, the grid and the landscape, dense urban spaces, and open air rooms. This book is aimed at researchers, academics, and postgraduate students interested in Latin American architecture, modernism, and architectural history. - Publisher's Description

Request this Title