Latinx Heritage Month Resource Guide: Latinx Heritage-Related Print & E-Book Selections

The divide over race is usually framed as one over Black and White. Sociologist Eileen O'Brien is interested in that middle terrain, what sits in the ever-increasing gray area she dubbed the racial middle. The Racial Middle, tells the story of the other racial and ethnic groups in America, mainly Latinos and Asian Americans, two of the largest and fastest-growing minorities in the United States. Using dozens of in-depth interviews with people of various ethnic and generational backgrounds, Eileen O'Brien challenges the notion that, to fit into American culture, the only options available to Latinos and Asian Americans are either to become white or to become brown. Instead, she offers a wholly unique analysis of Latinos and Asian Americans own distinctive experiences--those that aren't typically White nor Black. Though living alongside Whites and Blacks certainly frames some of their own identities and interpretations of race, O'Brien keenly observes that these groups struggles with discrimination, their perceived isolation from members of other races, and even how they define racial justice, are all significant realities that inform their daily lives and, importantly, influence their opportunities for advancement in society. A refreshing and lively approach to understanding race and ethnicity in the twenty-first century, The Racial Middle gives voice to Latinos and Asian-Americans place in this country's increasingly complex racial mosaic.

Is Latino art an integral part of modern American art? Presenting over one hundred major artworks from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Our America seeks to "recalibrate" enduring concepts about American national culture by exploring how one group of artists--those of Latin American descent and heritage--express their relationship to American art, history, and culture. E. Carmen Ramos addresses the whole issue of the definition of "Latino art" and how this emerged within the context of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s as American artists of Latino descent (Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, and, more recently, Dominican) began to give a tangible face to their culture and history. Highlights include an installation altar by Amalia Mesa-Bains, the "recycled" films of Raphael Montañez Ortiz, and a 1960 geometric painting by Carmen Herrera. Other notable artists include Olga Albizu, Melesio "Mel" Casas, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Margarita Cabrera, Enrique Chagoya, Teresita Fernández, Ken Gonzales-Day, Luis Jiménez, Ana Mendieta, Pepón Osorio, Sophie Rivera, Freddy Rodríguez, and John M. Valadez, among many others. Winner of first prize in the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) award for excellence, 2014 Author and curator E. Carmen Ramos is the Smithsonian American Art Museum's curator of Latino art. She has organized numerous shows, including the fifth biennial at El Museo del Barrio in New York City in 2007. Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, PhD, the "grandfather" of this subject, and formerly associate director for creativity and culture at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, has written and published extensively on US/Latino cultural issues. Accompanies an exhibition with the following venues: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, October 25, 2013-March 2, 2014 The Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University in Miami, FL,March 28, 2014-June 22, 2014 Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, CA, September 21, 2014-January 11, 2015 Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City, UT, February 6, 2015-May 17, 2015 Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock, AR, October 16, 2015-January 17, 2016 Delaware Museum of Art in Wilmington, DE, March 5, 2016-May 29, 2016

In this new study, Ylce Irizarry moves beyond literature that prioritizes assimilation to examine how contemporary fiction depicts being Cuban, Dominican, Mexican, or Puerto Rican within Chicana/o and Latina/o America. Irizarry establishes four dominant categories of narrative--loss, reclamation, fracture, and new memory--that address immigration, gender and sexuality, cultural nationalisms, and neocolonialism. As she shows, narrative concerns have moved away from the weathered notions of arrival and assimilation. Contemporary Chicana/o and Latina/o literatures instead tell stories that have little, if anything, to do with integration into the Anglo-American world. The result is the creation of new memory. This reformulation of cultural membership unmasks the neocolonial story and charts the conscious engagement of cultural memory. It outlines the ways contemporary Chicana/o and Latina/o communities create belonging and memory of their ethnic origins.

As the U.S. Latino population grows rapidly, and as the LGBTQ Latino community becomes more visible and a more crucial part of our literary and artistic heritage, there is an increasing demand for literature that successfully highlights these diverse lives. Edited by Lázaro Lima and Felice Picano, Ambientes is a revolutionary collection of fiction featuring stories by established authors as well as emerging voices that present a collective portrait of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender experience in America today. With a preface by Picano and an introduction by Lima that sets the stage for understanding Latino literary and cultural history, this is the first anthology to cross cultural and regional borders by offering a wide variety of urban, rural, East Coast, West Coast, and midwestern perspectives on Latina and Latino queers from different walks of life. Stories range from sensual pieces to comical romances and from inner-city dramas fueled by street language to portraits of gay domesticity, making this a much-needed collection for many different kinds of readers. The stories in this collection reflect a vibrant and creative community and redefine received notions of "gay" and "lesbian." Finalist, Over the Rainbow selection, American Library Association Finalist, LGBT Anthology, Lambda Literary Awards Best Special Interest Books, selected by the American Association of School Librarians Best Special Interest Books, selected by the Public Library Reviewers

Grit and Hope tells the story of five inner-city Hispanic students who start their college applications in the midst of the country's worst recession and of Reality Changers, the program that aims to help them become the first in their families to go college. This year they must keep up their grades in AP courses, write compelling essays for their applications, and find scholarships to fund their dreams. One lives in a garage and struggles to get enough to eat. Two are academic standouts, but are undocumented, ineligible for state and federal financial assistance. One tries to keep his balance as his mother gets a life-threatening diagnosis; another bonds with her sister when their parents are sidelined by substance abuse. The book also follows Christopher Yanov, the program's youthful, charismatic founder in a year that's as critical for Reality Changers' future as it is for the seniors. Yanov wants to grow Reality Changers into national visibility. He's doubled the program's size, and hired new employees, but he hasn't anticipated that growing means he'll have to surrender some control, and trust his new staff. It's the story of a highly successful, yet flawed organization that must change in order to grow. Told with deep affection and without sentimentality, the students stories show that although poverty and cultural deprivation seriously complicate youths' efforts to launch into young adulthood, the support of a strong program makes a critical difference.

This book chronicles a 10-year journey to develop and sustain Adelante, a university-school-community partnership designed specifically to address public education's failure to meet the needs of students of color, particularly Chicana/o students. The authors examine the persistent barriers, mistakes, challenges, and successes that emerged in their community-based partnership with elementary school students, college students, teachers, parents, and educational leaders. Intertwining critical race theories with Chicana feminist theories, they propose a "critical race feminista praxis" and provide real-world examples of what this praxis can look like in the context of a racialized, gendered, and colonial landscape. The book offers practical advice and theoretical insight to those interested in disrupting pervasive inequities that shape the (mis)education of marginalized students.

Since late 2001 more than fifty percent of the babies born in California have been Latino. When these babies reach adulthood, they will, by sheer force of numbers, influence the course of the Golden State. This essential study, based on decades of data, paints a vivid and energetic portrait of Latino society in California by providing a wealth of details about work ethic, family strengths, business establishments, and the surprisingly robust health profile that yields an average life expectancy for Latinos five years longer than that of the general population. Spanning one hundred years, this complex, fascinating analysis suggests that the future of Latinos in California will be neither complete assimilation nor unyielding separatism. Instead, the development of a distinctive regional identity will be based on Latino definitions of what it means to be American.   This updated edition now provides trend lines through the 2010 Census as well as information on the 1849 California Constitutional Convention and the ethnogenesis of how Latinos created the society of "Latinos de Estados Unidos" (Latinos in the US). In addition, two new chapters focus on Latino Post-Millennials--the first focusing on what it's like to grow up in a digital world; and the second describing the contestation of Latinos at a national level and the dynamics that transnational relationships have on Latino Post-Millennials in Mexico and Central America.  

Advancing work to effectively study, understand, and serve the fastest growing U.S. ethnic minority population, this volume explicitly emphasizes the racial and ethnic diversity within this heterogeneous cultural group. The focus is on the complex historical roots of contemporary Latino/as, their diversity in skin-color and physiognomy, racial identity, ethnic identity, gender differences, immigration patterns, and acculturation. The work highlights how the complexities inherent in the diverse Latino/a experience, as specified throughout the topics covered in this volume, become critical elements of culturally responsive and racially conscious mental health treatment approaches. By addressing the complexities, within-group differences, and racially heterogeneity characteristic of U.S. Latino/as, this volume makes a significant contribution to the literature related to mental health treatments and interventions.