"Literally, chilaquiles are a breakfast I grew up eating: fried corn tortillas with tomato-chile sauce. Symbolically, they are the culinary metaphor for how working-class women speak with the seasoning of their food."?from the Introduction?Through the ages and across cultures, women have carved out a domain in which their cooking allowed them to express themselves, strengthen family relationships, and create a world of shared meanings with other women. In Voices in the Kitchen, Meredith E. Abarca features the voices of her mother and several other family members and friends, seated at their kitchen tables, to share the grassroots world view of these working-class Mexican and Mexican American women. In the kitchen, Abarca demonstrates, women assert their own saz?n (seasoning), not only in their cooking but also in their lives. Through a series of oral histories, or charlas culinarias (culinary chats), the women interviewed address issues of space, sensual knowledge, artistic and narrative expression, and cultural and social change. From her mother?s breakfast chilaquiles to the most elaborate traditional dinner, these women share their lives as they share their savory, symbolic, and theoretical meanings of food. The charlas culinarias represent spoken personal narratives, testimonial autobiography, and a form of culinary memoir, one created by the cooks-as-writers who speak from their kitchen space. Abarca then looks at writers-as-cooks to add an additional dimension to the understanding of women?s power to define themselves. Voices in the Kitchen joins the extensive culinary research of the last decade in exploring the importance of the knowledge found in the practical, concrete, and temporal aspects of the ordinary practice of everyday cooking.

In the continuing U.S. debate over illegal immigration, a human face has rarely been shown. The topic has been presented as a monolithic abstraction, a creation of statistics, political rhetoric, and fear. This collection of letters between undocumented immigrants in California and their families back home reveals the other side of the story. Published for the first time in paperback, Between the Lines reveals the often poignant human drama currently being played out along the U.S.-Mexico border. The letters, presented in Spanish and English, express powerful feelings of hope, uncertainty, and fear among the undocumented travelers as they arrive in the United States and seek work, social support and legal status. The letters from their families in Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador return feelings of hope, love, and support. Translator/editor Siems provides a powerful and lyrical introductory essay that sets the stage for the letters that follow.

Souls in the Mist: A tale I lived is a novel where the people, places and customs portrayed represent the life of a rural community in Mexico in the time leading up to the Day of the Dead celebration. The common thread of the story is an old woman who, as she goes from her house to the market, the Church or cemetery during these festivity days, is encountering various inhabitants of the village. As she and the rest of her neighbors are doing various tasks specifi c to those days, she is narrating her life and sharing her thoughts and memories from the towns old days, and whenever she encounters someone in the village, she takes us by the hand to the inside of that persons story. The traditions associated with these festivities lend a magical aura to the plot of the novel, as the living characters seem not only to reminisce but also to interact with the souls of the deceased. The reader hears the voices of the villagers, and in their manner of speaking becomes witness to the towns deepest soul. Its tone takes a page from the style of Magic Realism made famous by Gabriel Garca-Marquezs One Hundred Years of Solitude, Juan Rulfos Pedro Pramo or Laura Esquivels Like Water for Chocolate.

One afternoon in fall 2015 Cristina Devereaux Ramírez’s mother called and, with a tone of urgency in her voice, asked her to come to the house and take a look at something she had discovered when she was sorting through boxes in the attic. When Ramírez arrived, she found her family sifting through papers in an old vegetable box, reading some of the more than 750 pages of Spanish language poems, short stories, fables, and dichos Ramírez’s maternal grandmother, Ramona González, had written. Some pieces were works in progress, complete with word and phrase strikethroughs and handwritten notes in the margins, while others were neatly typed prose or what might have been final drafts. None of González’s writings had seen the outside of that box for decades, at least since 1995 when the family matriarch passed away. González—or Doña Ramona, as she was often called—was born in 1906 in the El Paso border barrio of Chihuahuita, sometimes referred to as the Ellis Island of the Southwest. Her writing celebrates the rich Mexican American culture of Chihuahuita, a neighborhood the National Trust for Historic Preservation identified in 2016 as one of America’s most endangered historic places. A mother, corner grocery store owner, published writer, and community activist, González was one of the few Tejanas profiled in Worthy Mothers of Texas, 1776–1976 A Story of Stories from a Texas Border Barrio, Ramírez chronicles the life of her abuela with the care of a granddaughter and, with the eye of a scholar, analyzes selections from González’s work and its significance to El Paso history, Chicano literature, border barrio folklore, and cross-border civic movements in the mid-twentieth century.

(abridged and revised) This reference grammar offers intermediate and advanced students a reason ably comprehensive guide to the morphology and syntax of educated speech and plain prose in Spain and Latin America at the end of the twentieth century. Spanish is the main, usually the sole official language of twenty-one countries,} and it is set fair to overtake English by the year 2000 in numbers 2 of native speakers. This vast geographical and political diversity ensures that Spanish is a good deal less unified than French, German or even English, the latter more or less internationally standardized according to either American or British norms. Until the 1960s, the criteria of internationally correct Spanish were dictated by the Real Academia Espanola, but the prestige of this institution has now sunk so low that its most solemn decrees are hardly taken seriously - witness the fate of the spelling reforms listed in the Nuevas normas de prosodia y ortograjia, which were supposed to come into force in all Spanish-speaking countries in 1959 and, nearly forty years later, are still selectively ignored by publishers and literate persons everywhere. The fact is that in Spanish 'correctness' is nowadays decided, as it is in all living languages, by the consensus of native speakers; but consensus about linguistic usage is obviously difficult to achieve between more than twenty independent, widely scattered and sometimes mutually hostile countries. Peninsular Spanish is itself in flux.

This first-of-its-kind volume bridges Chicana/Latina feminist perspectives with education and offers innovative ideas on teaching and learning, and ways of knowing. This groundbreaking volume explores both Chicana/Latina feminist definitions of teaching and learning, and ways of knowing in education. The book’s contributors—Chicana/Latina feminist scholars—reinterpret the field of education as inter- and transdisciplinary and connected to ethnic, racial, and womanist scholarship. They examine mujer- (women-) centered definitions of pedagogy and epistemology rooted in Chicana/Latina theories and visions of life, family, community, and world. Armed with the tools of Chicana/Latina feminist thought, the contributors link cultural studies theories to critical/feminist pedagogies by re-envisioning the sites of pedagogy to include women’s brown bodies and their agency. Dolores Delgado Bernal is Associate Professor of Education and Chicana/o Studies at the University of Utah. C. Alejandra Elenes is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at Arizona State University. Francisca E. Godinez teaches Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at California State University at Sacramento.

Tudor and Stuart Seafarers tells the compelling story of how a small island positioned on the edge of Europe transformed itself into the world's leading maritime power. In 1485, England was an inward-looking country, its priorities largely domestic and European. Over the subsequent two centuries, however, this country was transformed, as the people of the British Isles turned to the sea in search of adventure, wealth and rule. Explorers voyaged into unknown regions of the world, while merchants, following in their wake, established lucrative trade routes with the furthest reaches of the globe. At home, people across Britain increasingly engaged with the sea, whether through their own lived experiences or through songs, prose and countless other forms of material culture. This exquisitely illustrated book delves into a tale of exploration, encounter, adventure, power, wealth and conflict. Topics include the exploration of the Americas, the growth of worldwide trade, piracy and privateering and the defeat of the Spanish Armada, brought to life through a variety of personalities from the well-known – Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Drake and Samuel Pepys – to the ordinary sailors, dockyard workers and their wives and families whose lives were so dramatically shaped by the sea.

Lopez examines the history of Puerto Rico from the extermination of the native Taino population, the importation of African slaves and Spanish colonial culture, to the 1980s movements for labor, student, and women's rights, and the debates over statehood or independence.