I continue with more new literature headed our way. These titles are intriguing, even exciting, and cover the literary landscape from the RCAF of the Chicano Movement, to Papi and the Boston Red Sox, to a much-anticipated memoir from an author who unfailingly satisfies critics, educators and, most importantly, readers: Sherman Alexie. Hope you find something you want to add to your library.
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Ella Maria Diaz
University of Texas Press - April
[from the publisher]
The Royal Chicano Air Force produced major works of visual art, poetry, prose, music, and performance during the second half of the twentieth century and first decades of the twenty-first. Materializing in Sacramento, California, in 1969 and established between 1970 and 1972, the RCAF helped redefine the meaning of artistic production and artwork to include community engagement projects such as breakfast programs, community art classes, and political and labor activism. The collective's work has contributed significantly both to Chicano/a civil rights activism and to Chicano/a art history, literature, and culture.
Blending RCAF members' biographies and accounts of their artistic production with art historical, cultural, and literary scholarship, Flying under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force is the first in-depth study of this vanguard Chicano/a arts collective and activist group. Ella Maria Diaz investigates how the RCAF questioned and countered conventions of Western art, from the canon taught in US institutions to Mexican national art history, while advancing a Chicano/a historical consciousness in the cultural borderlands. In particular, she demonstrates how women significantly contributed to the collective's output, navigating and challenging the overarching patriarchal cultural norms of the Chicano Movement and their manifestations in the RCAF. Diaz also shows how the RCAF's verbal and visual architecture—a literal and figurative construction of Chicano/a signs, symbols, and texts—established the groundwork for numerous theoretical interventions made by key scholars in the 1990s and the twenty-first century.
Ella Maria Diaz is an assistant professor of English and Latino/a Studies at Cornell University. She has published in Aztlán: The Journal of Chicano Studies, Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social, and U.C. Santa Barbara’s Imaginarte e-publications.
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The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States
Edited by Leticia Hernández Linares, Rubén Martínez, and Héctor Tobar
[from the publisher]
The Royal Chicano Air Force produced major works of visual art, poetry, prose, music, and performance during the second half of the twentieth century and first decades of the twenty-first. Materializing in Sacramento, California, in 1969 and established between 1970 and 1972, the RCAF helped redefine the meaning of artistic production and artwork to include community engagement projects such as breakfast programs, community art classes, and political and labor activism. The collective's work has contributed significantly both to Chicano/a civil rights activism and to Chicano/a art history, literature, and culture.
Blending RCAF members' biographies and accounts of their artistic production with art historical, cultural, and literary scholarship, Flying under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force is the first in-depth study of this vanguard Chicano/a arts collective and activist group. Ella Maria Diaz investigates how the RCAF questioned and countered conventions of Western art, from the canon taught in US institutions to Mexican national art history, while advancing a Chicano/a historical consciousness in the cultural borderlands. In particular, she demonstrates how women significantly contributed to the collective's output, navigating and challenging the overarching patriarchal cultural norms of the Chicano Movement and their manifestations in the RCAF. Diaz also shows how the RCAF's verbal and visual architecture—a literal and figurative construction of Chicano/a signs, symbols, and texts—established the groundwork for numerous theoretical interventions made by key scholars in the 1990s and the twenty-first century.
Ella Maria Diaz is an assistant professor of English and Latino/a Studies at Cornell University. She has published in Aztlán: The Journal of Chicano Studies, Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social, and U.C. Santa Barbara’s Imaginarte e-publications.
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Edited by Leticia Hernández Linares, Rubén Martínez, and Héctor Tobar
Foreword by Juan José Dalton
Northwestern University Press/Tia Chucha Press - April
[from the publisher]
Tia Chucha Press is proud to present an anthology of Central American writers living in the United States. It features work that captures the complexity of a rapidly growing community that shares certain experiences with other Latino groups, but also offers its own unique narrative. This is the first-ever comprehensive literary survey of the Central American diaspora by a U.S. publisher, perfect for high school, college, or university courses in U.S. literature, Latino literature, multicultural studies, and migration studies.
Tia Chucha Press is proud to present an anthology of Central American writers living in the United States. It features work that captures the complexity of a rapidly growing community that shares certain experiences with other Latino groups, but also offers its own unique narrative. This is the first-ever comprehensive literary survey of the Central American diaspora by a U.S. publisher, perfect for high school, college, or university courses in U.S. literature, Latino literature, multicultural studies, and migration studies.
A multi-genre collection—including poems, short stories, essays, memoir or novel excerpts, and creative nonfiction—the book showcases writers who render a multiplicity of experiences, as refugees from the wars of the 1980s to those who barely remember the homeland or who were born in el norte. There are writers from both coasts and from the middle. Their aesthetics range from hip-hop inflected to high literary to acrobatics in Spanglish. Yet it is a community that shares a history of violence—both here and back home—and the hope and healing that ensures its survival. They include migrants or children of migrants from countries in the so-called Northern Triangle—El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—considered one of the most violent places on earth, as well as from Belize, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panamá.
Leticia Hernández Linares is the author of Mucha Muchacha, Too Much Girland a three-time San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grantee.
Rubén Martínez, the son and grandson of immigrants from El Salvador and Mexico, is a writer, performer, and professor of literature and writing at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
Héctor Tobar is a novelist and journalist, the author of four books, and the Los Angeles–born son of Guatemalan immigrants.
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Coronado National Memorial: A History of Montezuma Canyon and the Southern Huachucas
Joseph P. Sánchez
Joseph P. Sánchez
University of Nevada Press - April
[from the publisher]
Coronado National Memorial explores forgotten pathways through Montezuma Canyon in southeastern Arizona and provides an essential history of the southern Huachuca Mountains. This is a magical place that shaped the region and two countries, the United States and Mexico. Its history dates back to the expedition led by Conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado in 1540, a mere 48 years after Columbus’ first voyage. Before that time Native Americans occupied the land, later to be
joined by Spanish and Mexican period miners and ranchers, prospecting entrepreneurs, missionaries and homesteaders.
Joseph Sánchez is the foremost historian of the area, and he shifts through and decodes a number of key Spanish and English language documents from different archives that tell the story of an historical drama of epic proportions. He combines the regional and the global, starting with the prehistory of the area. He covers Spanish colonial contact, settlement missions, the Mexican Territorial period, land grants, and the ultimate formation of the international border that set the stage for the creation of the Coronado National Memorial in 1952.
Much has been written about southwestern Arizona and northeastern Sonora, and in many ways this book complements those efforts and delivers fresh and illuminating details about the region’s colorful past.
Joseph P. Sánchez worked for the National Park Service for 35 years. He is the founder of the Spanish Colonial Research Center at University of New Mexico, and founding editor of Colonial Latin American Historical Review. He is the author of several books, including most recently, Early Hispanic Colorado, 1678-1900. He lives in Albuquerque, NM.
[from the publisher]
Coronado National Memorial explores forgotten pathways through Montezuma Canyon in southeastern Arizona and provides an essential history of the southern Huachuca Mountains. This is a magical place that shaped the region and two countries, the United States and Mexico. Its history dates back to the expedition led by Conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado in 1540, a mere 48 years after Columbus’ first voyage. Before that time Native Americans occupied the land, later to be
joined by Spanish and Mexican period miners and ranchers, prospecting entrepreneurs, missionaries and homesteaders.
Joseph Sánchez is the foremost historian of the area, and he shifts through and decodes a number of key Spanish and English language documents from different archives that tell the story of an historical drama of epic proportions. He combines the regional and the global, starting with the prehistory of the area. He covers Spanish colonial contact, settlement missions, the Mexican Territorial period, land grants, and the ultimate formation of the international border that set the stage for the creation of the Coronado National Memorial in 1952.
Much has been written about southwestern Arizona and northeastern Sonora, and in many ways this book complements those efforts and delivers fresh and illuminating details about the region’s colorful past.
Joseph P. Sánchez worked for the National Park Service for 35 years. He is the founder of the Spanish Colonial Research Center at University of New Mexico, and founding editor of Colonial Latin American Historical Review. He is the author of several books, including most recently, Early Hispanic Colorado, 1678-1900. He lives in Albuquerque, NM.
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David Ortiz, Michael Holley
[from the publisher]
David “Big Papi” Ortiz is a baseball icon and one of the most popular figures ever to play the game. As a key part of the Boston Red Sox for 14 years, David has helped the team win 3 World Series, bringing back a storied franchise from “never wins” to “always wins.” He helped them upend the doubts, the naysayers, the nonbelievers and captured the imagination of millions of fans along the way, as he launched balls into the stands again, and again, and again. He made Boston and the Red Sox his home, his place of work, and his legacy. As he put it: This is our f*&#ing city.
Now, looking back at the end of his legendary career, Ortiz opens up fully for the first time about his last two decades in the game. Unhindered by political correctness, Ortiz talks colorfully about his journey, from his poor upbringing in the Dominican Republic to when the expansion Florida Marlins passed up a chance to sign him due to what was essentially tennis elbow. He recalls his days in Peoria, Arizona, his first time in the United States; tense exchanges with Twins manager Tom Kelly in Minnesota; and his arrival in Boston. Readers go behind the scenes for the many milestones of his Red Sox career— from the huge disappointment of the Red Sox losing to the Yankees in 2003, ending the curse in 2004 with the infamous “band of idiots," including his extraordinary clutch hitting to overcome a 3-0 series deficit against the Yankees, to earning a second title in 2007 and a third in 2013. Along the way, he was tainted by the infamous banned substances list in 2009; he used his passion and place to fortify a city devastated by the Boston Marathon bombings; and he dominated pitchers right up through his retirement season at age 40. Papi, as he became so affectionately called, gave his fans big hits when they needed them most. He was an even bigger presence: He was a champion who rallied a team, a city, and a sport in a way that no one will ever forget.
In Papi, his ultimate memoir, Ortiz opens up as never before about his life in baseball and about the problems he sees in Major League Baseball, about former teammates, opponents, coaches, and executives, and about the weight of expectation whenever he stepped up to the plate. The result is a revelatory, fly-on-the wall story of a career by a player with a lot to say at the end of his time in the game, a game to which he gave so much and which gave so much to him.
[from the publisher]
Pablo Neruda was a master of the ode, which he conceived as an homage to just about everything that surrounded him, from an artichoke to the clouds in the sky, from the moon to his own friendship with Federico García Lorca and his favorite places in Chile. He was in his late forties when he committed himself to writing an ode a week, and in the end he produced a total of 225, which are dispersed throughout his varied oeuvre. This bilingual volume, edited by Ilan Stavans, a distinguished translator and scholar of Latin American literature, gathers all Neruda’s odes for the first time in any language.
Sherman Alexie
When she passed away, the incongruities that defined his mother shook Sherman and his remembrance of her. Grappling with the haunting ghosts of the past in the wake of loss, he responded the only way he knew how: he wrote. The result is a stunning memoir filled with raw, angry, funny, profane, tender memories of a childhood few can imagine, much less survive. An unflinching and unforgettable remembrance, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me is a powerful, deeply felt account of a complicated relationship.
Manuel Ramosis the author of several novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction books and articles. His collection of short stories, The Skull of Pancho Villa and Other Stories, was a finalist for the 2016 Colorado Book Award.My Bad: A Mile High Noirwas published by Arte Público Press in 2016.