This book is published by Floricanto Press. www.FloricantoPress.com www.LatinoBooks.Net #LatinoBooks In this collection of short stories, Irma Olmedo immerses her readers in the world of her childhood growing up in New York's El Barrio during the 1950s. Tinged with nostalgia for her years surrounded by family, celebratory meals, and togetherness while facing economic challenges as other working-class Puerto Rican families in la gran urbe, Olmedo's stories reclaim the humanity of displaced Puerto Rican families in New York through dialogues that are succinct yet truly human, exploding with a candidly felt, nurturing cariño. While the focus rests on her extended family, the stories reveal a larger social and historical moment in New York. Themes such as the mistranslations of migration through consumerism, the power of music and memory, the social alliances between Puerto Ricans and Italians, the limited access to resources, gender and sexual identities, and the diverse generational perspectives of identity and culture across time, all come together in these beautiful narratives of culture, family and communities. Olmedo's unique talent in assuming the voices of her family members throughout these stories, including her own as an adult, is evident throughout the collection. Bravo to a new voice that humanizes Puerto Ricans in the diaspora at a time when the State brutally dismisses our lives as unworthy of recognition. -Frances R. Aparicio, Professor Emerita, Northwestern University Barrio tales is a warm-hearted collection of short stories on memory, love, and loss told with compassion, humor and wit. Moving from Puerto Rico to barrios across the US, each story is a gem that captures the sights, sounds, smells, spirit, and emotions of a community on the move from the island to the diaspora. Irma María Olmedo has a keen ear for dialogue and is an original and inventive storyteller. Anyone interested in the immigrant experience will love these stories.-Dr. Lourdes Torres, Editor, Latino Studies, Vincent de Paul Professor, Department of Latin American and LatinoStudies, DePaul University Irma Maria Olmedo was born in Puerto Rico, and moved to New York City at the age of eight with her family. She remained in the Lower East Side of New York City, where she pursued a Bachelor's and Master's Degrees at the City University of New York. After marrying, she moved to Wisconsin, Chicago and Ohio, received a master's in Latin American Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Curriculum from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Education from Kent State University in Ohio. She taught in various colleges and universities, most recently at the University of Illinois-Chicago, from which she retired.

Freighted with meaning, “el barrio” is both place and metaphor for Latino populations in the United States. Though it has symbolized both marginalization and robust and empowered communities, the construct of el barrio has often reproduced static understandings of Latino life; they fail to account for recent demographic shifts in urban centers such as New York, Chicago, Miami, and Los Angeles, and in areas outside of these historic communities. Beyond El Barrio features new scholarship that critically interrogates how Latinos are portrayed in media, public policy and popular culture, as well as the material conditions in which different Latina/o groups build meaningful communities both within and across national affiliations. Drawing from history, media studies, cultural studies, and anthropology, the contributors illustrate how despite the hypervisibility of Latinos and Latin American immigrants in recent political debates and popular culture, the daily lives of America’s new “majority minority” remain largely invisible and mischaracterized. Taken together, these essays provide analyses that not only defy stubborn stereotypes, but also present novel narratives of Latina/o communities that do not fit within recognizable categories. In this way, this book helps us to move “beyond el barrio”: beyond stereotype and stigmatizing tropes, as well as nostalgic and uncritical portraits of complex and heterogeneous range of Latina/o lives.

The personal story of a girl born into the Barrio of San Antonio Who became a storyteller of her cultural heritage

Since the early twentieth century, thousands of Mexican Americans have lived, worked, and formed communities in Chicago’s steel mill neighborhoods. Drawing on individual stories and oral histories, Michael Innis-Jiménez tells the story of a vibrant, active community that continues to play a central role in American politics and society. Examining how the fortunes of Mexicans in South Chicago were linked to the environment they helped to build, Steel Barrio offers new insights into how and why Mexican Americans created community. This book investigates the years between the World Wars, the period that witnessed the first, massive influx of Mexicans into Chicago. South Chicago Mexicans lived in a neighborhood whose literal and figurative boundaries were defined by steel mills, which dominated economic life for Mexican immigrants. Yet while the mills provided jobs for Mexican men, they were neither the center of community life nor the source of collective identity. Steel Barrio argues that the Mexican immigrant and Mexican American men and women who came to South Chicago created physical and imagined community not only to defend against the ever-present social, political, and economic harassment and discrimination, but to grow in a foreign, polluted environment. Steel Barrio reconstructs the everyday strategies the working-class Mexican American community adopted to survive in areas from labor to sports to activism. This book links a particular community in South Chicago to broader issues in twentieth-century U.S. history, including race and labor, urban immigration, and the segregation of cities.

Sofia comes from a family of storytellers. Here are her tales of growing up in the barrio in McAllen, Texas, full of the magic and mystery of family traditions: making Easter cascarones, celebrating el Dia de los Muertos, preparing for quinceañera, rejoicing in the Christmas nacimiento, and curing homesickness by eating the tequila worm. When Sofia is singled out to receive a scholarship to boarding school, she longs to explore life beyond the barrio, even though it means leaving her family to navigate a strange world of rich, privileged kids. It’s a different mundo, but one where Sofia’s traditions take on new meaning and illuminate her path.

A young boy explores his vibrant Latino neighborhood, with its vegetable gardens instead of lawns, Nativity parades, quinceaera parties, and tejana and salsa music.

In the tradition of Laura Esquivel's Like Water For Chocolate, The House of Impossible Loves is a novel set in twentieth-century Spain and France revolving around a family of cursed women.

A candid, savvy, inspiring, and often hilarious memoir by one of America's most fearless political leaders.

Judith Ortiz Cofer's Pura Belpre award-winning collection of short stories about life in the barrio! Rita is exiled to Puerto Rico for a summer with her grandparents after her parents catch her with a boy. Luis sits atop a six-foot mountain of hubcaps in his father's junkyard, working off a sentence for breaking and entering. Sandra tries to reconcile her looks to the conventional Latino notion of beauty. And Arturo, different from his macho classmates, fantasizes about escaping his community. They are the teenagers of the barrio -- and this is their world.

The compelling history of how Latino immigrants revitalized the nation's cities after decades of disinvestment and white flight Thirty years ago, most people were ready to give up on American cities. We are commonly told that it was a "creative class" of young professionals who revived a moribund urban America in the 1990s and 2000s. But this stunning reversal owes much more to another, far less visible group: Latino and Latina newcomers. Award-winning historian A. K. Sandoval-Strausz reveals this history by focusing on two barrios: Chicago's Little Village and Dallas's Oak Cliff. These neighborhoods lost residents and jobs for decades before Latin American immigration turned them around beginning in the 1970s. As Sandoval-Strausz shows, Latinos made cities dynamic, stable, and safe by purchasing homes, opening businesses, and reviving street life. Barrio America uses vivid oral histories and detailed statistics to show how the great Latino migrations transformed America for the better.