This creative combination of poetry, fiction and non-fiction focusing on grocery storesin a mix of English and Spanishcreates an epic story of immigration.

"In his poem, "Toward a Portrait of the Undocumented," Javier O. Huerta writes, "The economy is a puppeteer / manipulating my feet. / (Who's in control when you dance?) / Pregnant with illegals, the Camaro / labors up the road; soon I will be born." Sharing similar experiences with the more than eleven million undocumented people who live in the United States, Huerta struggles with his own sense of loss, caught between his life here and his past in Mexico. "Soy nadiense," he writes in another poem - I am from nowhere." "In this, Huerta's first full-length collection of poetry, he explores themes of dislocation, loss, love, and art. Whether mourning the tragic suffocating deaths of immigrants in a tractor trailer, lamenting the loss of a lover, or writing about childhood fears, Huerta sketches haunting pieces about a bilingual, bicultural experience. In "Coyote" Huerta evokes a child's unvoiced fear about his father, who his cousins tell him is a coyote, an immigrant smuggler. "I was only six so I pictured Father on all fours with tongue out, panting, on the prowl."" --Book Jacket.

U.S. Latinx Literature in Spanish remains an understudied field despite its large and vibrant corpus. This is partly due to the erroneous impression that this literature is only written in English, and partly due to traditional educational programs focusing on English texts to include non-Spanish speakers and non-Latinx students. This has created a vacuum in research about Latinx literary production in Spanish, leaving the contemporary field wide open for exploration. This volume fills this space by bringing contemporary U.S. Latinx literature in Spanish to the forefront of the field. The essays focus on literary production post-1960 and examine texts by authors from different backgrounds writing from the U.S., providing readers with an opportunity to explore new texts in Spanish within U.S. Latinx literature, and a departure point for starting a meaningful critical discourse about what it means to write and publish in Spanish in the U.S. Through exploring literary production in a language that is both emotionally and politically charged for authors, the academia, and the U.S., this book challenges and enhances our understanding of the term ‘Americas’.

A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.

The University of Nevada Press is pleased to publish its first dual-language (Spanish-English) book of poetry, To the North/Al norte: Poems, by the Nicaraguan poet León Salvatierra. The work is rooted in the Central American diaspora that emerged from the civil wars in the 1980s. The poems are tied together through the experiences, memories, visions, and dreams of a 15-yearold boy who embarked on a journey to the United States with a group of forty other migrants from Central America. After being undocumented for eleven years, Salvatierra established himself in the United States, first becoming a naturalized citizen and then obtaining a university education. Salvatierra mixes lyrical and prose poems to explore the experience of exile in a new country. His powerful metaphors and fresh images inhabit spaces fraught with the violence, anxiety, and vulnerability that undocumented Central American migrants commonly face in their transnational journeys. His vivid memories of Nicaragua tie the personal experiences of his poetic subjects to the geopolitical history between the Central American region and the United States.

Chicana/o literature frequently depicts characters who exist in a vulnerable liminal space, living on the border between Mexican and American identities, and sometimes pushed to the edge by authorities who seek to restrict their freedom. As this groundbreaking new study reveals, the books themselves have occupied similarly precarious positions, as Chicana/o literature has struggled for economic viability and visibility on the margins of the American publishing industry, while Chicana/o writers have grappled with editorial practices that compromise their creative autonomy. From the Edge reveals the tangled textual histories behind some of the most cherished works in the Chicana/o literary canon, tracing the negotiations between authors, editors, and publishers that determined how these books appeared in print. Allison Fagan demonstrates how the texts surrounding the authors’ words—from editorial prefaces to Spanish-language glossaries, from cover illustrations to reviewers’ blurbs—have crucially shaped the reception of Chicana/o literature. To gain an even richer perspective on the politics of print, she ultimately explores one more border space, studying the marks and remarks that readers have left in the margins of these books. From the Edge vividly demonstrates that to comprehend fully the roles that ethnicity, language, class, and gender play within Chicana/o literature, we must understand the material conditions that governed the production, publication, and reception of these works. By teaching us how to read the borders of the text, it demonstrates how we might perceive and preserve the faint traces of those on the margins.

Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien is a poetry memoir that takes up the intersections of Indigeneity, Blackness, queerness and migration as it relates to U.S. federal immigration law. The book pushes the boundaries of an "undocumented immigrant narrative"via the poet's refusal to belong to United Statian society and the refusal of a structured poetics.In fact, the chaotic geographies of the manuscript (collages + photographs + emails + negative space) formulate theories of fugitivity that position the transAtlantic slave trade and Indigenous dispossession as root causes of undocumented immigration. In this refusal of national belonging and form, the book asks for a critical kinship that the law can never account for, and thus, Pelaez Lopez negotiates legal status for new imaginaries of care. As a whole, the manuscript asks: "what does it mean that a descendant of enslaved Africans becomes an illegal alien in the same continent that subjugated their ancestors to chattel slavery?" Furthermore, "can an Indigenous subject of this continent be considered 'illegal' in the continent of their ancestors?"

Two decades into the twenty-first century, contemporary Latinx writers have established themselves within an evolving literary tradition. Imaginative Possibilities collects interviews with some of these authors to explores the writers’ processes, aesthetics, creative trajectories, and places within the larger body of Latinx literature. The interviews address artistic, professional, and cultural issues including the building of intellectual communities, the writing and publication process, and the practical economics of making a living. US Latinx writers discuss how they navigate the overwhelmingly white publishing industry, the academic book market, higher education, and MFA culture while exploring questions of representation, hybridity, and mestizaje. Through these conversations, a truth emerges: Latinx literature speaks not with one voice, but many.

"We defy translation," Sandra María Esteves writes. "Nameless/we are a whole culture/once removed." She is half Dominican, half Puerto Rican, with indigenous and African blood, born in the Bronx. Like so many of the contributors, she is a blend of cultures, histories and languages. Containing the work of more than 40 poets--equally divided between men and women--who self-identify as Afro-Latino, ¡Manteca! is the first poetry anthology to highlight writings by Latinos of African descent. The themes covered are as diverse as the authors themselves. Many pieces rail against a system that institutionalizes poverty and racism. Others remember parents and grandparents who immigrated to the United States in search of a better life, only to learn that the American Dream is a nightmare for someone with dark skin and nappy hair. But in spite of the darkness, faith remains. Anthony Morales' grandmother, like so many others, was "hardwired to hold on to hope." There are love poems to family and lovers. And music--salsa, merengue, jazz--permeates this collection.Editor and scholar Melissa Castillo-Garsow writes in her introduction that "the experiences and poetic expression of Afro-Latinidad were so diverse" that she could not begin to categorize it. Some write in English, others in Spanish. They are Puerto Rican, Dominican and almost every combination conceivable, including Afro-Mexican. Containing the work of well-known writers such as Pedro Pietri, Miguel Piñero and E. Ethelbert Miller, less well-known ones are ready to be discovered in these pages.

Join a young boy and his father on a daring journey from Mexico to Texas to find a new life. They’ll need all the resilience and courage they can muster to safely cross the border − la frontera − and to make a home for themselves in a new land.