Limon has taken great care to document his re-construction of the narrative and to provide ample socio-cultural background and bibliography in this clear example of literary archeology.

Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia records the contribution of women of Latin American birth or heritage to the economic and cultural development of the United States. The encyclopedia, edited by Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez-Korrol, is the first comprehensive gathering of scholarship on Latinas. This encyclopedia will serve as an essential reference for decades to come. In more than 580 entries, the historical and cultural narratives of Latinas come to life. From mestizo settlement, pioneer life, and diasporic communities, the encyclopedia details the contributions of women as settlers, comadres, and landowners, as organizers and nuns. More than 200 scholars explore the experiences of Latinas during and after EuroAmerican colonization and conquest; the early-19th-century migration of Puerto Ricans and Cubans; 20th-century issues of migration, cultural tradition, labor, gender roles, community organization, and politics; and much more. Individual biographical entries profile women who have left their mark on the historical and cultural landscape. With more than 300 photographs, Latinas in the United States offers a mosaic of historical experiences, detailing how Latinas have shaped their own lives, cultures, and communities through mutual assistance and collective action, while confronting the pressures of colonialism, racism, discrimination, sexism, and poverty. "Meant for scholars and general readers, this is a great resource on Latinas and historical topics connected with them." -- curledup.com

Gloria Anzaldua Book Prize, National Women's Studies Association, 2009 In the early twentieth century, three women of color helped shape a new world of ethnographic discovery. Ella Cara Deloria, a Sioux woman from South Dakota, Zora Neale Hurston, an African American woman from Florida, and Jovita González, a Mexican American woman from the Texas borderlands, achieved renown in the fields of folklore studies, anthropology, and ethnolinguistics during the 1920s and 1930s. While all three collaborated with leading male intellectuals in these disciplines to produce innovative ethnographic accounts of their own communities, they also turned away from ethnographic meaning making at key points in their careers and explored the realm of storytelling through vivid mixed-genre novels centered on the lives of women. In this book, Cotera offers an intellectual history situated in the "borderlands" between conventional accounts of anthropology, women's history, and African American, Mexican American and Native American intellectual genealogies. At its core is also a meditation on what it means to draw three women—from disparate though nevertheless interconnected histories of marginalization—into conversation with one another. Can such a conversation reveal a shared history that has been erased due to institutional racism, sexism, and simple neglect? Is there a mode of comparative reading that can explore their points of connection even as it remains attentive to their differences? These are the questions at the core of this book, which offers not only a corrective history centered on the lives of women of color intellectuals, but also a methodology for comparative analysis shaped by their visions of the world.

The writer Jovita González was a long memeber- and ultimately seved as president- of Texas Folklore Society, which strve to preserve the oral traditions and customs of her native state. Many of the folklore-based stories in this volume were published by González in periodicals such as Southwest Review from the 1920s through the 1940s but have been gathered here for the first time. Sergio Reyna has brought together more than thirty narratives by González and arranged them into Animal Tales (such as "The Mescal-Drinking Horse"); Tales of Humans ("The Bullet-Swallower"); Tales of Popular Customs ("Shelling Corn by Moonlight); Religious Tales ("The Guadalupana Vine); Tales of Mexican Ancestrors ("Ambriosio the Indian); and Tales of Ghosts, Demons, and Buried Treasure ("The Woman Who Lost Her Soul"). Reyna also provides a helpful introduction that succinctly surveys the authors life and work, analyzing her writings within their historical and cultural contexts.

In The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone, Greg Keyes has crafted a brilliant saga of magic, adventure, and love set against a backdrop of clashing empires and an ancient, reawakened evil. Now, with The Born Queen, Keyes brings his epic to a masterly close, gathering the strands of plot and character into a stunning climax that both completes and transcends all that has gone before. The Briar King is dead, and the world itself follows him to ruin. Aspar White, wounded and tired, must embark on one last quest to save the forest and the people he loves, but he has little hope of success. Anne Dare at last sits on the throne of Crotheny, but for how long? The Church, now led by the corrupt and powerful Marché Hespero, has declared a holy war against her, giving the king of Hansa the pretext he needs to unleash his vast might on the young queen and her unready army. But Hansa is the least of Anne’s worries. The Hellrune, war seer of Hansa, strikes at her through vision and prophecy. The Kept–last of the elder Skasloi lords–weaves his own dark webs. Anne’s teacher and ally in the sedos world might also be her worst enemy, and Anne’s own mounting strength compels her toward madness. Surviving these dangers and mastering her eldritch abilities are merely prelude to the real struggle. There are many–some with power matching or even exceeding Anne’s own–who are willing to kill in order to seize control. For whoever sits upon the throne will have the ultimate command to bring about the world’s salvation–or its apocalypse.

Spanning two centuries, this collection documents the lives of fifteen remarkable Latinas who witnessed, defined, defied, and wrote about the forces that shaped their lives. As entrepreneurs, community activists, mystics, educators, feminists, labor organizers, artists and entertainers, Latinas used the power of the pen to traverse and transgress cultural conventions.

Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-USX-NONEX-NONEVoices from the borderlands push against boundaries in more ways than one, as Donna M. Kabalen de Bichara ably demonstrates in this investigation into the twentieth-century autobiographical writing of four women of Mexican origin who lived in the American Southwest. Until recently, little attention has been paid to the writing of the women included in this study. As Kabalen de Bichara notes, it is precisely such historical exclusion of texts written by Mexican American women that gives particular significance to the reexamination of the five autobiographical works that provide the focus for this in-depth study. “Early Life and Education” and Dew on the Thorn by Jovita González (1904–83), deal with life experiences in Texas and were likely written between 1926 and the 1940s; both texts were published in 1997. Romance of a Little Village Girl, first published in 1955, focuses on life in New Mexico, and was written by Cleofas Jaramillo (1878–1956) when the author was in her seventies. A Beautiful, Cruel Country, by Eva Antonio Wilbur-Cruce (1904–98), introduces the reader to history and a way of life that developed in the cultural space of Arizona. Created over a ten-year period, this text was published in 1987, just eleven years before the author’s death. Hoyt Street, by Mary Helen Ponce (b. 1938), began as a research paper during the period of the autobiographer’s undergraduate studies (1974–80), and was published in its present form in 1993. These border autobiographies can be understood as attempts on the part of the Mexican American female autobiographers to put themselves into the text and thus write their experiences into existence.

In Spatial and Discursive Violence in the US Southwest Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita examine literary representations of settler colonial land enclosure and dispossession in the history of New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma. Sánchez and Pita analyze a range of Chicano/a and Native American novels, films, short stories, and other cultural artifacts from the eighteenth century to the present, showing how Chicano/a works often celebrate an idealized colonial Spanish past as a way to counter stereotypes of Mexican and Indigenous racial and ethnic inferiority. As they demonstrate, these texts often erase the participation of Spanish and Mexican settlers in the dispossession of Indigenous lands. Foregrounding the relationship between literature and settler colonialism, they consider how literary representations of land are manipulated and redefined in ways that point to the changing practices of dispossession. In so doing, Sánchez and Pita prompt critics to reconsider the role of settler colonialism in the deep history of the United States and how spatial and discursive violence are always correlated.

Written by a Mexican-American woman and her coauthor during the 1930s and 1940s, Caballero remained unprinted and unavailable to the public for over 50 years. The novel examines the impact of the 1846-48 war with Mexico on a tejano family and particularly on Mexican women. Paper edition (unseen), $19.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This book is a study of gender and place in twentieth-century Chicana/o literature and culture, covering the early period of regional writing to contemporary art. Remapping Chicana/o literary and cultural history from the critical regional perspective of the Mexican American Southwest, it uncovers the aesthetics of Chicana/o critical regionalism in the writings of Cleofas Jaramillo, Fray Angélico Chávez, Elena Zamora O’Shea, and Jovita González. In addition to bringing renewed attention to contemporary writers like Richard Rodriguez and introducing the work of Chicana artist Carlota d.Z. EspinoZa, the study also revisits the more recognized work of Américo Paredes, Mario Suárez, Mary Helen Ponce, and Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales to reconsider the aesthetics of gender and place in Chicana/o literature and culture.