ñDavid is mine!î Mrs. Renteria shouts out to her neighbors gathered about the dead but handsome young man found in the dry riverbed next to their homes in a Los Angeles barrio. ñDavid?î Tiburcio asked. ñSince when is his name David? He looks to me more like a ƒî Tiburcio glanced at the manÍs face, ñƒ a Luis.î Mrs. RenteriaÍs neighbors call out a litany of names that better suit the mysterious corpse: Roberto, Antonio, Henry, Enrique, Miguel, Roy, Rafael. The very first winner of the Chicano / Latino Literary Prize in 1974, Ron AriasÍ ñThe Wetbackî uses dark humor to reflect on the appearance of a dead brown man in their midst. This landmark collection of prize-winning fiction, poetry, and drama paints a historical and aesthetic panorama of Chicana/o and Latina/o letters over a twenty-five-year period beginning in 1974 and ending in 1999. Most, but not all, of the winning entries are featured in this anthology, which also includes second- and third-place winners, as well as honorable mentions. Now entering its thirty-first year, the award has recognized a wide variety of writers, from established ones such as Juan Felipe Herrera, Michael Nava, and Helena Maria Viramontes, to those that are lesser known. Many of the pieces in this anthology are considered to be foundational texts of Chicana/o and Latina/o literature, and those that are not as widely recognized deserve more serious study and attention. Presented in chronological order, the selected writings are primarily in English, although some are written in Spanish, and others in Spanglish. Some, like Francisco X. AlarconÍs poem ñRaices / Roots,î appear in both languages: ñMis raices / las cargo / siempre / conmigo / enrolladas / me sirven / de almohada.î ñI carry / my roots / with me / all the time / rolled up / I use them / as my pillow.î In addition to the diverse array of authors, styles, and genres, the works included in this collection cover a wide range of themes, from more political issues of ethnic, gender, and class.

Since 1994, the Camino del Sol series has been one of the premier vehicles for Latina/o literary voices. Launched under the auspices of Chicana/o luminary Ray Gonzalez, it quickly established itself in both the Latina/o community and the publishing world as it garnered awards for its outstanding writing. Featuring both established writers and first-time authors, Camino del Sol has published poetry and prose that convey something about the Latina/o experience—works that tap into universal truths through a distinct cultural lens. This volume celebrates fifteen years of books by bringing together some of the series’ best work, such as poetry from Francisco X. Alarcón, fiction from Christine Granados, and nonfiction from Luis Alberto Urrea. These voices echo the entire spectrum of Latina/o writing, from Chicana/o to Puerto Rican to Brazilian-American, and take in themes ranging from migration to gender. Awards bestowed upon Camino del Sol titles include the PEN/Beyond Margins Award to Richard Blanco’s Directions to the Beach of the Dead; Before Columbus Foundation American Book Awards to Diana García’s When Living Was a Labor Camp and Luis Alberto Urrea’s Nobody’s Son; International Latino Book Awards to Pat Mora’s Adobe Odes and Kathleen Alcalá’s The Desert Remembers My Name; the Premio Aztlán literary prize to Sergio Troncoso’s The Last Tortilla; and the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles National Literary Award to Kathleen de Azevedo’s Samba Dreamers. All of these works are represented in this outstanding collection. In a short span of time, Camino del Sol has cultivated an admirable and sizeable list of distinguished contemporary authors—and even garnered the first National Book Critics Circle Award for a Chicana/o for Juan Felipe Herrera’s Half of the World in Light. Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing is a benchmark for the series and a wonderful introduction to the world of Latina/o literature.

In this new study, Ylce Irizarry moves beyond literature that prioritizes assimilation to examine how contemporary fiction depicts being Cuban, Dominican, Mexican, or Puerto Rican within Chicana/o and Latina/o America. Irizarry establishes four dominant categories of narrative--loss, reclamation, fracture, and new memory--that address immigration, gender and sexuality, cultural nationalisms, and neocolonialism. As she shows, narrative concerns have moved away from the weathered notions of arrival and assimilation. Contemporary Chicana/o and Latina/o literatures instead tell stories that have little, if anything, to do with integration into the Anglo-American world. The result is the creation of new memory. This reformulation of cultural membership unmasks the neocolonial story and charts the conscious engagement of cultural memory. It outlines the ways contemporary Chicana/o and Latina/o communities create belonging and memory of their ethnic origins. An engaging contribution to an important literary tradition, Chicana/o and Latina/o Fiction privileges the stories Chicanas/os and Latinas/os remember about themselves rather than the stories of those subjugating them. NACCS Book Award, National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies, 2018; MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies, Modern Language Association, 2017

Theorizes shame and analyzes U. S. cultural practices of racializing shame through an examination of scenes of racialization in Latinx literature

This work contains poems and stories from the Third Chicano Literary Contest held at the University of California, Irvine.

All They Will Call You is the harrowing account of “the worst airplane disaster in California’s history,” which claimed the lives of thirty-two passengers, including twenty-eight Mexican citizens—farmworkers who were being deported by the U.S. government. Outraged that media reports omitted only the names of the Mexican passengers, American folk icon Woody Guthrie penned a poem that went on to become one of the most important protest songs of the twentieth century, “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee).” It was an attempt to restore the dignity of the anonymous lives whose unidentified remains were buried in an unmarked mass grave in California’s Central Valley. For nearly seven decades, the song’s message would be carried on by the greatest artists of our time, including Pete Seeger, Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, yet the question posed in Guthrie’s lyrics, “Who are these friends all scattered like dry leaves?” would remain unanswered—until now. Combining years of painstaking investigative research and masterful storytelling, award-winning author Tim Z. Hernandez weaves a captivating narrative from testimony, historical records, and eyewitness accounts, reconstructing the incident and the lives behind the legendary song. This singularly original account pushes narrative boundaries, while challenging perceptions of what it means to be an immigrant in America, but more importantly, it renders intimate portraits of the individual souls who, despite social status, race, or nationality, shared a common fate one frigid morning in January 1948.

Both heroic and tragic, this novel captures the spirit, energy, and imagination of the 1960s' Chicano movementa massive and intense struggle across a broad spectrum of political and cultural issuesthrough the passionate story of the King of the Chicanos, Ramon Hidalgo. From his very humble beginnings through the tumultuous decades of being a migrant farm worker, door-to-door salesman, prison inmate, political hack, and radical activist, the novel relates Hidalgo s personal failures and self-destructive personality amid the political turmoil of the times. With a gradual acceptance of his destiny as a leader and hero of the people, this impassioned novel relates the maturation of one man while encapsulating the fever of the Chicano movement."