Dividing the Isthmus

Dividing the Isthmus

Author: Ana Patricia Rodríguez

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2009-08-17

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 0292774583

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In 1899, the United Fruit Company (UFCO) was officially incorporated in Boston, Massachusetts, beginning an era of economic, diplomatic, and military interventions in Central America. This event marked the inception of the struggle for economic, political, and cultural autonomy in Central America as well as an era of homegrown inequities, injustices, and impunities to which Central Americans have responded in creative and critical ways. This juncture also set the conditions for the creation of the Transisthmus—a material, cultural, and symbolic site of vast intersections of people, products, and narratives. Taking 1899 as her point of departure, Ana Patricia Rodríguez offers a comprehensive, comparative, and meticulously researched book covering more than one hundred years, between 1899 and 2007, of modern cultural and literary production and modern empire-building in Central America. She examines the grand narratives of (anti)imperialism, revolution, subalternity, globalization, impunity, transnational migration, and diaspora, as well as other discursive, historical, and material configurations of the region beyond its geophysical and political confines. Focusing in particular on how the material productions and symbolic tropes of cacao, coffee, indigo, bananas, canals, waste, and transmigrant labor have shaped the transisthmian cultural and literary imaginaries, Rodríguez develops new methodological approaches for studying cultural production in Central America and its diasporas. Monumental in scope and relentlessly impassioned, this work offers new critical readings of Central American narratives and contributes to the growing field of Central American studies.


Volcan

Volcan

Author: Alejandro Murguía

Publisher: City Lights Books

Published: 1983-12

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 9780872861534

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A contact bomb, a volcano ready to erupt" describes not only Central America in the 1980s but-in the conception of its editors-this anthology of contraband poetry. The poems themselves were often copied by hand and smuggled onto Mexico, from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. In all those countries, except Nicaragua, this poetry is banned. The thirty-nine poets represented here give potent voice to the struggles of their peoples under the crushing oppression of life "under the volcano" in these war-stunned lands. Many of these women and men have been jailed, exiled, killed, or otherwise made to disappear. Still they survive in these faithful and sensitive translations by a new literary underground in North America.


Beyond El Barrio

Beyond El Barrio

Author: Gina M. Pérez

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2010-10-24

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 0814768008

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Freighted with meaning, “el barrio” is both place and metaphor for Latino populations in the United States. Though it has symbolized both marginalization and robust and empowered communities, the construct of el barrio has often reproduced static understandings of Latino life; they fail to account for recent demographic shifts in urban centers such as New York, Chicago, Miami, and Los Angeles, and in areas outside of these historic communities. Beyond El Barrio features new scholarship that critically interrogates how Latinos are portrayed in media, public policy and popular culture, as well as the material conditions in which different Latina/o groups build meaningful communities both within and across national affiliations. Drawing from history, media studies, cultural studies, and anthropology, the contributors illustrate how despite the hypervisibility of Latinos and Latin American immigrants in recent political debates and popular culture, the daily lives of America’s new “majority minority” remain largely invisible and mischaracterized. Taken together, these essays provide analyses that not only defy stubborn stereotypes, but also present novel narratives of Latina/o communities that do not fit within recognizable categories. In this way, this book helps us to move “beyond el barrio”: beyond stereotype and stigmatizing tropes, as well as nostalgic and uncritical portraits of complex and heterogeneous range of Latina/o lives.


Heart Songs

Heart Songs

Author: Nina Serrano

Publisher: Estuary Press

Published: 2011-12-20

Total Pages: 113

ISBN-13: 0961872519

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Heart Songs: The Collected Poems of Nina Serrano, 1969-1980, was first published by Editorial Pocho Che, a Latino literary collective, as part of a three-book 10th anniversary series. The other two books were Raul Salinas’ now classic Un Trip through the Mind Jail y Otras Excursions and Roberto Vargas’s legendary Nicaragua Yo To Canto Besos Balas y Suenos de Libertad. Estuary Press republished it as an ebook. In those times, I was raising a family, supporting a revolution in Nicaragua and seeing its triumph, supporting the anti-Vietnam war movement, defending minority rights, as the minorities were swelling in California to today’s majority, fighting for women’s rights and our place in the sun, going through a martial break-up, and being a single woman again.


The Heart of the Mission

The Heart of the Mission

Author: Cary Cordova

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2017-05-04

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0812294149

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An illustrated, in-depth examintion of the avant-garde and politically radical Latino art of San Francisco's Mission District In The Heart of the Mission, Cary Cordova combines urban, political, and art history to examine how the Mission District, a longtime bohemian enclave in San Francisco, has served as an important place for an influential and largely ignored Latino arts movement from the 1960s to the present. Well before the anointment of the "Mission School" by art-world arbiters at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Latino artists, writers, poets, playwrights, performers, and filmmakers made the Mission their home and their muse. The Mission, home to Chileans, Cubans, Guatemalans, Mexican Americans, Nicaraguans, Puerto Ricans, and Salvadorans never represented a single Latino identity. In tracing the experiences of a diverse group of Latino artists from the 1940s to the turn of the century, Cordova connects wide-ranging aesthetics to a variety of social movements and activist interventions. The book begins with the history of the Latin Quarter in the 1940s and the subsequent cultivation of the Beat counterculture in the 1950s, demonstrating how these decades laid the groundwork for the artistic and political renaissance that followed. Using oral histories, visual culture, and archival research, she analyzes the Latin jazz scene of the 1940s, Latino involvement in the avant-garde of the 1950s, the Chicano movement and Third World movements of the 1960s, the community mural movement of the 1970s, the transnational liberation movements in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and the AIDS activism of the 1980s. Through these different historical frames, Cordova links the creation of Latino art with a flowering of Latino politics.


Violentologies

Violentologies

Author: B. V. Olguín

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2021-01-05

Total Pages: 407

ISBN-13: 0198863098

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Violentologies explores how different forms of violence shape identity and political vision in both familiar and unexpected ways using Latina/o writers and performers as case-studies.


Stray Poems

Stray Poems

Author: Alejandro Murgu’a

Publisher: City Lights Publishers

Published: 2014-04-15

Total Pages: 122

ISBN-13: 1931404135

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

COMING SOON! San Francisco's first Latino poet laureate offers new poems written in the native tongue of contemporary America: English-and-Spanish.ALERT ME WHEN THE BOOK BECOMES AVAILABLE


Ten Years That Shook the City

Ten Years That Shook the City

Author: Chris Carlsson

Publisher: City Lights Books

Published: 2011-06

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 1931404127

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The alliances, programs, and goals of a historic decade that continues to shape SF and the world.