For over three decades the work of Antonia I. Castañeda has shaped the fields of Western History and Chicana Studies. From her early articles on Chicana representation and political economy, to her most recent work mapping gendered violence and gendered resistance in the history of the U.S. Southwest, her work is consistently taught in classrooms and cited extensively. Yet Castañeda's work has been scattered throughout journals and anthologies, a "paper chase" for historians to track down. Three Decades of Engendering History ends the chase. This volume, edited by Linda Heidenreich, collects ten of Castañeda's best articles, including the widely circulated article "Engendering the History of Alta California, 1769-1848," in which she took a direct and honest look at sex and gender relations in colonial California. Demonstrating that there is no romantic past to which we can turn, she exposed stories of violence against women, as well as stories of survival and resistance. Other articles included are the prize-winning "Women of Color and the Rewriting of Western History," and two recent articles, "Lullabies y Canciones de Cuna" and "La Despedida." The latter two represent Castañeda’s most recent work excavating, mapping, and bringing forth the long and strong post-WWII history of Tejanas. Finally, the volume includes three interviews with Antonia Castañeda, conducted by Luz María Gordillo, that contribute the important narrative of her lived experiences, political perspective, her commitment to initiate and develop scholarship that highlights gender and Chicanas as a legitimate line of inquiry, and her drive to center Chicanas as historical subjects.

Based on articles written for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, author Richard J. Gonzales draws on his educational, inner-city and professional life experiences to weave eyewitness testimony into issues facing Chicanos, including economic, health, education, criminal justice, politics, immigration, and cultural issues. Raza Rising presents a personal recounting of a Chicano's struggle with and understanding of the socio-economic policies and historical actions that impact their ascendancy. Raza Rising offers first-hand observations, supported by well-documented scholarly research, of Chicanos' growth and subsequent struggles to participate fully in North Texas' political and economic life. Raza Rising takes the reader to the organization of a Fort Worth immigration reform march, to the actual march with 20,000 people on Main Street on Palm Sunday, to a protest demonstration of the City of Farmers Branch's attempt to prohibit renting to the undocumented immigrant, to the author's awakening in Chicago on the importance of learning, and to his poignant experience as a guest speaker in a Fort Worth public school classroom. Other observations offer insight on how Chicanos struggle with their ethnic identity and understanding of their history. In addition, the book highlights important historical and political events that illustrate Chicanos' attempts to overcome barriers to their rise. At a time when global economic competition threatens the United States' first world status, this country must nurture academic excellence for all its citizens. Raza Rising provides specific explanations for the Chicano educational lag and workable solutions to accelerate their political, economic and academic achievements. Prophetic state and national demographers have forecasted the steady increase in Chicano populations and decrease in white populations. Raza Rising offers students, instructors, policy makers, politicians and neighbors a deeper understanding of Chicanos, who in the near future will transition from minority to majority status in Texas.

In the early 1870s, Hubert H. Bancroft and his assistants set out to record the memoirs of early Californios, one of them being eighty-three-year-old Don Jose Maria Amador, a former Forty-Niner during the California Gold Rush and soldado de cuera at the Presidio of San Francisco. Amador tells of reconnoitering expeditions into the interior of California, where he encountered local indigenous populations. He speaks of political events of Mexican California and the widespread confiscation of the Californios' goods, livestock, and properties when the United States took control. A friend from Mission Santa Cruz, Lorenzo Asisara, also describes the harsh life and mistreatment the Indians faced from the priests. Both the Amador and Asisara narratives were used as sources in Bancroft's writing but never published themselves. Gregorio Mora-Torres has now rescued them from obscurity and presents their voices in English translation (with annotations) and in the original Spanish on facing pages. This bilingual edition will be of great interest to historians of the West, California, and Mexican American studies.

Engendering History broadens the base of empirical knowledge on Caribbean women's history and re-evaluates the body of work that exists. The book is pan-Caribbean in its approach, though most articles are on the English-speaking Caribbean, highlighting the research pattern in Caribbean women's history.

This is a collection of papers which focus on issues of gender and society in ancient Cyprus from the Neolithic to Roman periods.

This is the story of Victor Rodriguez, a man who began life with few advantages but who had continuing encouragement to persevere from the people who knew him best. From his earliest days in South Texas in the 1940s he broke many barriers. He and his sisters were among the first children in their town to advance from the fourth grade of the Mexican American school to the Anglo school and then to high school. As a football player and track star he set records and won trophies at Edna High School, at Victoria College, and at North Texas State College. At each stage of his education, he often found himself the only Mexican American in his group. His prowess in sports was based on the endurance he developed as the bell ringer for the church in Edna, when his teacher assigned him the task in the third grade as his “personal civic responsibility.” For nine years he rose at 4 a.m. to jog two miles to the church, dodging dogs along the way, to ring the bell before Mass. Within a decade, that commitment would serve him well as he distinguished himself as a standout in school and college cross-country running and track athlete. He earned the first Hispanic scholarships as an athlete at both Victoria Junior College and North Texas State College. After earning his degree at North Texas State in 1955, he began a career in the San Antonio School District (SASD) as a teacher and coach in Cooper Middle School. Subsequently he became coach at Lanier and then Highlands high schools, where he took track teams to new titles and fostered individual athletes to personal achievements. After a series of promotions through the administration of SASD, he retired in 1994 after twelve years as Superintendent of the District. As a pioneer Mexican American educator in San Antonio, he brought dignity and respect to the people of the Westside, where he remains a role model today.

Writing that Matters is a handbook on the craft of research and writing in the fields of Chicanx and Latinx studies. Geared toward students, Heidenreich and Urquijo-Ruiz walk scholars through the critical roots of these fields. They provide step-by-step instructions and examples of how to produce quality Chicanx and Latinx history and literature papers, while centering feminist and queer writings to create scholarship that matters.

2021 Lambda Literary Awards Finalist Nepantla Squared maps the lives of two transgender mestiz@s, one during the turn of the twentieth century and one during the turn of the twenty-first century, to chart the ways race, gender, sex, ethnicity, and capital function differently in different times. To address the erasure of transgender mestiz@ realities from history, Linda Heidenreich employs an intersectional analysis that critiques monopoly and global capitalism. Heidenreich builds on the work of Gloria Anzaldúa's concept of nepantleras, those who could live between and embody more than one culture, to coin the term nepantla2, marking times of capitalist transition where gender was also in motion. Transgender mestiz@s, too, embodied that movement. Heidenreich insists on a careful examination of the multiple in-between spaces that construct lives between cultures and genders during in-between times of shifting empire and capital. In so doing, they offer an important discussion of race, class, nation, and citizenship centered on transgender bodies of color that challenges readers to rethink the way they understand the gendered social and economic challenges of today.

Pacific Colony, a Southern California institution established to care for the “feebleminded,” justified the incarceration, sterilization, and forced mutilation of some of the most vulnerable members of society from the 1920s through the 1950s. Institutional records document the convergence of ableism and racism in Pacific Colony. Analyzing a vast archive, Natalie Lira reveals how political concerns over Mexican immigration—particularly ideas about the low intelligence, deviant sexuality, and inherent criminality of the “Mexican race”—shaped decisions regarding the treatment and reproductive future of Mexican-origin patients. Laboratory of Deficiency documents the ways Mexican-origin people sought out creative resistance to institutional control and offers insight into how race, disability, and social deviance have been called upon to justify the confinement and reproductive constraint of certain individuals in the name of public health and progress.

Perhaps no other industrial technology changed the course of Mexican history in the United States--and Mexico--than did the coming of the railroads. Tens of thousands of Mexicans worked for the railroads in the United States, especially in the Southwest and Midwest. Construction crews soon became railroad workers proper, along with maintenance crews later. Extensive Mexican American settlements appeared throughout the lower and upper Midwest as the result of the railroad. The substantial Mexican American populations in these regions today are largely attributable to 19th- and 20th-century railroad work. Only agricultural work surpassed railroad work in terms of employment of Mexicans. The full history of Mexican American railroad labor and settlement in the United States had not been told, however, until Jeffrey Marcos Garcílazo's groundbreaking research in Traqueros. Garcílazo mined numerous archives and other sources to provide the first and only comprehensive history of Mexican railroad workers across the United States, with particular attention to the Midwest. He first explores the origins and process of Mexican labor recruitment and immigration and then describes the areas of work performed. He reconstructs the workers' daily lives and explores not only what the workers did on the job but also what they did at home and how they accommodated and/or resisted Americanization. Boxcar communities, strike organizations, and "traquero culture" finally receive historical acknowledgment. Integral to his study is the importance of family settlement in shaping working class communities and consciousness throughout the Midwest.