From the white boy who transforms himself into a full-fledged Chicano, to the self-assured woman who effortlessly terrorizes her Anglo boss, to the junior-high friend who berated her "sloppy Spanish" and accused her of being a "Chicana Falsa," the people and places that Michele Serros brings to vivid life in this collection of poems and stories introduce a unique new viewpoint to the American literary landscape. Witty, tender, irreverent, and emotionally honest, her words speak to the painful and hilarious identity crises particular to the coming of age of an adolescent caught between two cultures.
Ride the wave of the Latin explosion with the much anticipated new book from the award-winning author of "Chicana Falsa. How to be a Chicana Role Model" is the fiercely funny tale of a Chicana writer who's trying to find a way to embrace two very different cultures without losing touch with who she is.
Evie Gomez is one chill chica. She and best friend Raquel hang with the Flojos, a kick-back crew named for their designer flip-flops. And their habit of doing absolutely nothing. But the return of long-lost amiga mejor Dee Dee wrecks Evie and Raquel's Flojo flow. A few years in Mexico City have transformed their shy, skinny, brunette Dee Dee into a Sangro nightmare. Dee Dee has reinvented herself as "Dela," complete with tight designer threads, freaky blue contacts, and that signature blonde hair. When Raquel wants precisely nada to do with the new Dela, Evie finds herself caught between two very different friends. At heart, is Evie a Cali-casual Flojo chick or a sexy Sangro diva? How's a chica to choose?
“I wish I could find the words to tell you the story of our village after you were killed.” So begins Senegal Taxi, the new work by one of contemporary poetry’s most vibrant voices, Juan Felipe Herrera. Known for his activism and writings that bring attention to oppression and injustice, Herrera turns to stories of genocide and hope in Sudan. Senegal Taxi offers the voices of three children escaping the horrors of war in Africa. Unflinching in its honesty, brutality, and beauty, the collection fiercely addresses conflict and childhood, inviting readers to engage in complex and often challenging issues. Senegal Taxi weaves together verse, dialogue, and visual art created by Herrera specifically for the book. Stylistically genre-leaping, these many layers are part of the collection’s innovation. Phantom-like televisions, mud drawings, witness testimonies, insects, and weaponry are all storytellers that join the siblings for a theatrical crescendo. Each poem is told from a different point of view, which Herrera calls “mud drawings,” referring to the evocative symbols of hope the children create as they hide in a cave on their way to Senegal, where they plan to catch a boat to the United States. This collection signals a poignant shift for Herrera as he continues to use his craft to focus attention on global concerns. In so doing, he offers an acknowledgment that the suffering of some is the suffering of all.
Like the complex systems of man-made power lines that transmit electricity and connect people and places, feminist alliances are elaborate networks that have the potential to provide access to institutional power and to transform relations. In Power Lines, Aimee Carrillo Rowe explores the formation and transformative possibilities of transracial feminist alliances. She draws on her conversations with twenty-eight self-defined academic feminists, who reflect on their academic careers, alliances, feminist struggles, and identifications. Based on those conversations and her own experiences as an Anglo-Chicana queer feminist researcher, Carrillo Rowe investigates when and under what conditions transracial feminist alliances in academia work or fail, and how close attention to their formation provides the theoretical and political groundwork for a collective vision of subjectivity. Combining theory, criticism, and narrative nonfiction, Carrillo Rowe develops a politics of relation that encourages the formation of feminist alliances across racial and other boundaries within academia. Such a politics of relation is founded on her belief that our subjectivities emerge in community; our affective investments inform and even create our political investments. Thus experience, consciousness, and agency must be understood as coalitional rather than individual endeavors. Carrillo Rowe’s conversations with academic feminists reveal that women who restrict their primary allies to women of their same race tend to have limited notions of feminism, whereas women who build transracial alliances cultivate more nuanced, intersectional, and politically transformative feminisms. For Carrillo Rowe, the institutionalization of feminism is not so much an achievement as an ongoing relational process. In Power Lines, she offers a set of critical, practical, and theoretical tools for building and maintaining transracial feminist alliances.
Desperate to escape South Texas, Stephanie Elizondo Griest dreamed of becoming a foreign correspondent. So she headed to Russia looking for some excitement—commencing what would become a four-year, twelve-nation Communist bloc tour that shattered her preconceived notions of the “Evil Empire.” In Around the Bloc, Griest relates her experiences as a volunteer at a children’s shelter in Moscow, a propaganda polisher at the office of the Chinese Communist Party’s English-language mouthpiece in Beijing, and a belly dancer among the rumba queens of Havana. She falls in love with an ex-soldier who narrowly avoided radiation cleanup duties at Chernobyl, hangs out with Cuban hip-hop artists, and comes to difficult realizations about the meaning of democracy. is the absorbing story of a young journalist driven by a desire to witness the effects of Communism. Along the way, she learns the Russian mathematical equation for buying dinner-party vodka (one bottle per guest, plus an extra), stumbles upon Beijing’s underground gay scene, marches with 100,000 mothers demanding Elián González’s return to Cuba, and gains a new appreciation for the Mexican culture she left behind.
Evie Gomez finally has it all: a sweet boyfriend, two mejor amigas, and an upcoming sixteeñera that's the talk of the school. Qué cool, no? Too bad reality has a way of ruining things. When her grades start to slip, Evie's parents threaten to cancel her party. The good news? All she has to do is volunteer in the community to raise her grades. The bad news? Since it's the middle of the semester, the best remaining option is working at the Southern California Horse Reserve. Then again...ranchero life? Charros? Maybe things will work out after all. Or maybe not. Things with boyfriend Alex start to fizzle, party-girl pal Raquel slides down a spiral of boys and booze, Dee Dee -- who only recently re-entered Evie's life -- considers moving back to Mexico City, and to top it all off, Evie's flirting with someone she never expected to like -- ranch hand Arturo (even with his que fugly cowboy boots). Things can't get más complicated...can they?
By approaching Chicana/o issues from the frames of feminism, social activism, and cultural studies, and by considering both lived experience and the latest research, Torres offers a more comprehensive understanding of current Chicana life. Through compelling prose, Torres masterfully weaves her own story as a first-generation Mexican American with interviews with activists and other Mexican-American women to document the present fight for social justice and the struggles of living between two worlds.
