Santa Barraza paints bold representations of Nepantla, the Land Between. Her work depicts the historical, emotional, and spiritual land between Mexico and Texas, between the familiar and the sacred, between present reality and the mythic world of the ancient Aztecs and Mayas. More than thirty of her most powerful and characteristic works are offered in full color and considered in this ground-breaking study of a nationally important Tejana artist. Over the last twenty-five years of her career as a visual artist, Barraza has explored what it is to be a Chicana and a mestiza in this country. Utilizing a variety of media, she has embarked on an artistic journey full of family portraits, watercolor dream scenes, mixed media artist books, and murals that harken back to a pre-Columbian past. By tapping into pre-conquest symbols, personal memories, and traditional sacred art forms such as the retablo and the Codices, she incorporates the value of Mexican artistic traditions and their power to nurture and sustain cultural identity on this side of the border. Barraza's art, which includes public art in the form of murals and children's workshops, has increasingly drawn on the colors and forms of Mesoamerica. Most recently, the Aztec Codices offer her a symbolic form to claim her roots and to invoke much of the cosmology of her ancestors. Within the form, however, she adapts by drawing on contemporary figures such as her own mother, or labor leader Ema Tenayucca, or Barraza's sister with a physical heart (representing a heart transplant she had received) in place of the Virgen de Guadalupe and the Immaculate Heart. Scholars María Herrera-Sobek, Antonia Castañeda, Shifra M. Goldman, Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, and Dori Grace Udeagbor Lemeh contribute distinctive insights to the analysis of the forces that have shaped Barraza as a Chicana artist and the images and aesthetics that characterize the corpus of her work. Their perspectives also contribute to an understanding of the Chicano/a artists (including Barraza) who began their rise to prominence during the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, the text invites readers to view the Chicano/a as the "New American artist," suggesting that the elements of Barraza's painting are important not only to Chicanos/as, but to all Americans in our increasingly bicultural and even mestizo society.

"Creating Aztlâan interrogates the important role of Aztlâan in Chicano and Indigenous art and culture. Using the idea that lowriding is an Indigenous way of being, author Dylan A. T. Miner (Mâetis) discusses the multiple roles that Aztlâan has played atvarious moments in time, engaging pre-colonial indigeneities, alongside colonial, modern, and contemporary Xicano responses to colonization"--

Printing and collecting the revolution : the rise and impact of Chicano graphics, 1965 to now / E. Carmen Ramos -- Aesthetics of the message : Chicana/o posters, 1965-1987 / Terezita Romo -- War at home : conceptual iconoclasm in American printmaking / Tatiana Reinoza -- Chicanx graphics in the digital age / Claudia E. Zapata.

Bringing Aztlán to Mexican Chicago is the autobiography of Jóse Gamaliel González, an impassioned artist willing to risk all for the empowerment of his marginalized and oppressed community. Through recollections emerging in a series of interviews conducted over a period of six years by his friend Marc Zimmerman, González looks back on his life and his role in developing Mexican, Chicano, and Latino art as a fundamental dimension of the city he came to call home. Born near Monterey, Mexico, and raised in a steel mill town in northwest Indiana, González studied art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame. Settling in Chicago, he founded two major art groups: El Movimiento Artístico Chicano (MARCH) in the 1970s and Mi Raza Arts Consortium (MIRA) in the 1980s. With numerous illustrations, this book portrays González's all-but-forgotten community advocacy, his commitments and conflicts, and his long struggle to bring quality arts programming to the city. By turns dramatic and humorous, his narrative also covers his bouts of illness, his relationships with other artists and arts promoters, and his place within city and barrio politics.

After a decade of chasing stories around the globe, intrepid travel writer Stephanie Elizondo Griest followed the magnetic pull home--only to discover that her native South Texas had been radically transformed in her absence. Ravaged by drug wars and barricaded by an eighteen-foot steel wall, her ancestral land had become the nation's foremost crossing ground for undocumented workers, many of whom perished along the way. The frequency of these tragedies seemed like a terrible coincidence, before Elizondo Griest moved to the New York / Canada borderlands. Once she began to meet Mohawks from the Akwesasne Nation, however, she recognized striking parallels to life on the southern border. Having lost their land through devious treaties, their mother tongues at English-only schools, and their traditional occupations through capitalist ventures, Tejanos and Mohawks alike struggle under the legacy of colonialism. Toxic industries surround their neighborhoods while the U.S. Border Patrol militarizes them. Combating these forces are legions of artists and activists devoted to preserving their indigenous cultures. Complex belief systems, meanwhile, conjure miracles. In All the Agents and Saints, Elizondo Griest weaves seven years of stories into a meditation on the existential impact of international borderlines by illuminating the spaces in between and the people who live there.

Reexamining the Chicano civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, In the Spirit of a New People brings to light new insights about social activism in the twentieth-century and new lessons for progressive politics in the twenty-first. Randy J. Ontiveros explores the ways in which Chicano/a artists and activists used fiction, poetry, visual arts, theater, and other expressive forms to forge a common purpose and to challenge inequality in America. Focusing on cultural politics, Ontiveros reveals neglected stories about the Chicano movement and its impact: how writers used the street press to push back against the network news; how visual artists such as Santa Barraza used painting, installations, and mixed media to challenge racism in mainstream environmentalism; how El Teatro Campesino’s innovative “actos,” or short skits,sought to embody new, more inclusive forms of citizenship; and how Sandra Cisneros and other Chicana novelists broadened the narrative of the Chicano movement. In the Spirit of a New People articulates a fresh understanding of how the Chicano movement contributed to the social and political currents of postwar America, and how the movement remains meaningful today.

Their respective ancestral cultures in England and Spain, argue scholars Milo Kearney and Manuel Medrano, had common roots in medieval Europe, and both their conflicts and the shared understandings that may form the basis for their cooperation trace back to those days."--BOOK JACKET.

Dancing with the Sun is a celebration of the life and artwork of esteemed Chicano artist Manuel Hernandez Trujillo, as curated and edited by his dear friend and fellow artist Dr. Manuel N. Gomez. Trujillo's expansive body of work ranges from yarn paintings and personal watercolors to posters and wall murals. Though varied in subject, style, and color, Trujillo's work carries over-arching themes of his love for his family, the Chicano community, and struggles for social justice. Trujillo was drawn to creating art from a young age, beginning with sketches he created of fellow field workers and orange pickers in Southern California in the 1940s. Decades later, with extensive art education, teaching experience, and personal art exploration under his belt, and his artwork collection is extensive enough to fill an entire published work. Dancing with the Sun takes readers, history lovers, and art enthusiasts through the journey of Trujillo's life, with gorgeous photographs of his entire body of work accompanied by personal commentary, historical background, and insight from Gomez, Trujillo's trusted colleague. "The magnificent Dancing with the Sun, featuring the extraordinary artwork of Manuel Hernandez Trujillo, is a work of love designed and edited by his friend, the UC Irvine Vice Chancellor, Emeritus Manuel N. Gomez ... I had seen some of Trujillo's poster art over the years, but simply had no idea of his remarkable body of work across genres, all of which are lovingly photographed and pictured here." - Michael A. Olivas, author of No Undocumented Child Left Behind: Plyler v. Doe and the Education of Undocumented Children "Dancing with the Sun is a true tribute to one of the most effective activities and graceful artists of our time." - Helena Maria Viramontes, Author of Under the Feet of Jesus and Their Dogs Came With Them and Professor of Creative Writing, Cornell University "Manuel N. Gomez has rendered a splendid tribute to the artwork of visual artist from Santa Ana, California, Manuel Hernandez Trujillo, in this collection of art and poetry." - Maria Herrera Sobek, Editor of Santa Barraza: Artist of the Borderlands and Associate Vice Chancellor/Professor of Chicano Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara

International Latino Book Award winner, Best Cookbook More than just a cookbook, Decolonize Your Diet redefines what is meant by "traditional" Mexican food by reaching back through hundreds of years of history to reclaim heritage crops as a source of protection from modern diseases of development. Authors Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel are life partners; when Luz was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006, they both radically changed their diets and began seeking out recipes featuring healthy, vegetarian Mexican foods. They promote a diet that is rich in plants indigenous to the Americas (corn, beans, squash, greens, herbs, and seeds), and are passionate about the idea that Latinos in America, specifically Mexicans, need to ditch the fast food and return to their own culture's food roots for both physical health and spiritual fulfillment. This vegetarian cookbook features over 100 colorful, recipes based on Mesoamerican cuisine and also includes contributions from indigenous cultures throughout the Americas, such as Kabocha Squash in Green Pipian, Aguachile de Quinoa, Mesquite Corn Tortillas, Tepary Bean Salad, and Amaranth Chocolate Cake. Steeped in history but very much rooted in the contemporary world, Decolonize Your Diet will introduce readers to the the energizing, healing properties of a plant-based Mexican American diet. Full-color throughout. Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel are professors at California State East Bay and San Francisco State University, respectively. They grow fruits, vegetables, and herbs on their small urban farm. This is their first book.