Through biographical narratives, Claiming Home traces how queer migrant women living in Switzerland navigate often contradictory perspectives on sexuality, gender, and nation. Situated between heteronormative and racialized stereotypes of migrant women on the one hand, and the implicitly white figure of the lesbian on the other, queer migrant women are often rendered ›impossible subjects.‹ Claiming Home maps how they negotiate conflicting loyalties in this field and how they, in their own way, claim a sense of belonging and home.

Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano has described U.S. and Latin American culture as continually hobbled by amnesia—unable, or unwilling, to remember the influence of mestizos and indigenous populations. In Mestizos Come Home! author Robert Con Davis-Undiano documents the great awakening of Mexican American and Latino culture since the 1960s that has challenged this omission in collective memory. He maps a new awareness of the United States as intrinsically connected to the broader context of the Americas. At once native and new to the American Southwest, Mexican Americans have “come home” in a profound sense: they have reasserted their right to claim that land and U.S. culture as their own. Mestizos Come Home! explores key areas of change that Mexican Americans have brought to the United States. These areas include the recognition of mestizo identity, especially its historical development across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the re-emergence of indigenous relationships to land; and the promotion of Mesoamerican conceptions of the human body. Clarifying and bridging critical gaps in cultural history, Davis-Undiano considers important artifacts from the past and present, connecting the casta (caste) paintings of eighteenth-century Mexico to modern-day artists including John Valadez, Alma López, and Luis A. Jiménez Jr. He also examines such community celebrations as Day of the Dead, Cinco de Mayo, and lowrider car culture as examples of mestizo influence on mainstream American culture. Woven throughout is the search for meaning and understanding of mestizo identity. A large-scale landmark account of Mexican American culture, Mestizos Come Home! shows that mestizos are essential to U.S. national culture. As an argument for social justice and a renewal of America’s democratic ideals, this book marks a historic cultural homecoming.

This book chronicles a 10-year journey to develop and sustain Adelante, a university-school-community partnership designed specifically to address public education’s failure to meet the needs of students of color, particularly Chicana/o students. The authors examine the persistent barriers, mistakes, challenges, and successes that emerged in their community-based partnership with elementary school students, college students, teachers, parents, and educational leaders. Intertwining critical race theories with Chicana feminist theories, they propose a “critical race feminista praxis” and provide real-world examples of what this praxis can look like in the context of a racialized, gendered, and colonial landscape. The book offers practical advice and theoretical insight to those interested in disrupting pervasive inequities that shape the (mis)education of marginalized students. Book Features: Fills a void about how to engage in activist scholarship by describing concrete strategies and practices employed by the authors. Offers theoretical contributions through the braiding together of critical race and Chicana feminist theories. Proposes a partnership model for working with communities of color that promotes pathways to higher education. “Theoretically cutting-edge and with practical on-the-ground application, Transforming Educational Pathways is a brilliant example of how university–school–community collaborations can be reshaped into transformative praxis in the education of Chicanx, Latinx students. The balanced combination of community-engaged work and scholar-activist research in this groundbreaking book powerfully move us further in the spiritual journey of reimagining and transforming the inequities of educational institutions for Chicanx, Latinx students and their families and communities.” —Luis Urrieta, professor, The University of Texas at Austin “Delgado Bernal and Aleman start and end with the transformative idea that all students should be expected to attend college from their earliest experiences in public education—kindergarten. By challenging the deficit notions surrounding Chicana/o students and their communities, the authors provide the most compelling asset-based and theoretically grounded university–community partnership program I’ve seen in the K–8 sector.” —Daniel G. Solorzano, professor, University of California, Los Angeles “Transforming Educational Pathways for Chicana/o Students is a compelling and intimate account of the development of Adelante, an innovative university–school partnership. It is also an inspiring story of the impact of culturally affirming and anticolonial education on Latina/o children and their teachers, university student mentors, and parents. The process of changing deficit-based school culture is a difficult one, as the book shows. Yet, drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa’s feminist theorizing, Delgado Bernal and Alemán offer a theory of school change where collisions, difficult solidarities, and transformative moments constitute a praxis of hope, imagination, and social justice.” —Sofia Villenas, professor, Cornell University

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