Most articles previously published in Aztlaan: a journal of Chicano studies, between 1997 and 2003.

One of the most famous leaders of the Chicano civil rights movement, Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales was a multifaceted and charismatic, bigger-than-life hero who inspired his followers not only by taking direct political action but also by making eloquent speeches, writing incisive essays, and creating the kind of socially engaged poetry and drama that could be communicated easily through the barrios of Aztlán, populated by Chicanos in the United States. Gonzales is the author of I Am Joaquín , an epic poem of the Chicano movement that lives on in film, sound recording, and hundreds of anthologies. Gonzales and other Chicanos established the Crusade for Justice, a Denver-based civil rights organization, school, and community center, in 1966. The school, La Escuela Tlatelolco, lives on today almost four decades after its founding. In Message to Aztlán , Dr. Antonio Esquibel, Professor Emeritus of Metropolitan State College of Denver, has compiled the first collection of Gonzales diverse writings: the original I Am Joaquín (1976), along with a new Spanish translation, seven major speeches (1968-78); two plays, The Revolutionist and A Cross for Malcovio (1966-67); various poems written during the 1970s, and a selection of letters. These varied works demonstrate the evolution of Gonzales thought on human and civil rights. Any examination of the Chicano movement is incomplete without this volume. Eight pages of photographs accompany the text.

Aztlán Arizona is a history of the Chicano Movement in Arizona in the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing on community and student activism in Phoenix and Tucson, Darius V. Echeverría ties the Arizona events to the larger Chicano and civil rights movements against the backdrop of broad societal shifts that occurred throughout the country. Arizona’s unique role in the movement came from its (public) schools, which were the primary source of Chicano activism against the inequities in the judicial, social, economic, medical, political, and educational arenas. The word Aztlán, originally meaning the legendary ancestral home of the Nahua peoples of Mesoamerica, was adopted as a symbol of independence by Chicano/a activists during the movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In an era when poverty, prejudice, and considerable oppositional forces blighted the lives of roughly one-fifth of Arizonans, the author argues that understanding those societal realities is essential to defining the rise and power of the Chicano Movement. The book illustrates how Mexican American communities fostered a togetherness that ultimately modified larger Arizona society by revamping the educational history of the region. The concluding chapter outlines key Mexican American individuals and organizations that became politically active in order to address Chicano educational concerns. This Chicano unity, reflected in student, parent, and community leadership organizations, helped break barriers, dispel the Mexican American inferiority concept, and create educational change that benefited all Arizonans. No other scholar has examined the emergence of Chicano Movement politics and its related school reform efforts in Arizona. Echeverría’s thorough research, rich in scope and interpretation, is coupled with detailed and exact endnotes. The book helps readers understand the issues surrounding the Chicano Movement educational reform and ethnic identity. Equally important, the author shows how residual effects of these dynamics are still pertinent today in places such as Tucson.

Louie Pérez is a master musician and innovative visual artist who has spent the last forty years as founding member and principal songwriter for the internationally acclaimed group Los Lobos. Working with his songwriting partner, David Hidalgo, Pérez has written more than four hundred songs. Many of those songs, along with previously unpublished poems and short stories as well as paintings, sketches, and photos, are collected in this deeply personal, yet universally appealing volume. The book also features essays by musicians, artists and scholars who artfully dissect the significance of Pérez' work. Good Morning, Aztlán is, without question, a different kind of memoir.

"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"--

Mexican Americans/Chicana/os/Chicanx form a majority of the overall Latino population in the United States. In this collection, established and emerging Chicanx researchers diverge from the discipline’s traditional Southwest focus to offer academic and non-academic perspectives specifically on the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest. Their multidisciplinary papers address colonialism, gender, history, immigration, labor, literature, sociology, education, and religion, setting El Movimiento (the Chicanx movement) and the Chicanx experience beyond customary scholarship and illuminating how Chicanxs have challenged racialization, marginalization, and isolation in the northern borderlands. Contributors to We Are Aztlan! include Norma Cardenas (Eastern Washington University), Oscar Rosales Castaneda (activist, writer), Josue Q. Estrada (University of Washington), Theresa Melendez (Michigan State University, emeritus), the late Carlos Maldonado, Rachel Maldonado (Eastern Washington University, retired), Dylan Miner (Michigan State University), Ernesto Todd Mireles (Prescott College), and Dionicio Valdes (Michigan State University). Winner of a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title.

PEN Center West Award Winner: A novel of myth and migration set in a mid-twentieth–century New Mexico barrio, by the author of Bless Me, Ultima. Today is the day Benjie Chávez and his family will leave the town of Guadalupe behind. Far from the land of the eagle and the nopal, they travel west to find a new home of opportunity. But adapting to the big, impersonal city of Albuquerque is no easy task. As both life and death come to the barrio, a blind seer named Crispin arrives in the Chávezes’ world. At first everyone dismisses his stories about an elusive place called Aztlán as the ramblings of an old man. But gradually, they come to realize that he can see what they cannot. In earthy prose, American Book Award–winning author Rudolfo Anaya tells a spellbinding story of myth and migration, love and loss. Heart of Atzlán is a hopeful and heartbreaking novel about people in search of the shimmering mirage of a better life—and the land that keeps calling them back.

Journey to Aztlan is the powerful, inspirational, and heartwarming story about how one man overcame life-threatening Depression and found love. Juan Blea was ready to end his life. Depression had claimed his soul and left him seeing few options for his life. Developing through the veils of cultural confusion as a child and identity loss as a young adult, depression proved to be an enemy almost too strong to conquer. However, as a child he learned the power of language and he used that knowledge to reclaim his life and became a writer. Writing proved to be the path for Juan to find the source of all that s good and strong and beautiful. Juan calls this source, Aztlan, and it was through his Aztlan that he found love. In Journey to Aztlan, Juan shares his journey and provides insight into how we all can find our own source of strength, goodness, and beauty. Praise for Journey to Aztlan. . . Blea, in his maroma / somersault chronicles (Journey to Aztlan), takes us through the fractured visions of a man in search of his soul, his multicolored darkness. And we in turn notice the colliding identities of a son, a father, a lover in search of his homeland, a source of poetry, music, and computer ciphers yearning intimacy and oneness. I enjoyed this book for its daring and shifting psychological optics. And its Chicano spice I recognized many scenes, conflicts, parables, and even Jimmy Santiago Baca in cameo. What a book! Juan Felipe Herrera Poet Laureate of California. Juan Blea is an amazing man with deep insight into how to heal the millions & millions of men and women who suffer from addiction and depression. I love Juan s way of looking at mental illness; he s compassionate and brilliant and passionate. He s an amazing Aztlan curandero that the barrio has given us as a gift and Journey to Aztlan stands toe to toe with anything in print. Jimmy Santiago Baca Author of A Place to Stand, winner of the Pushcart Prize and American Book Award.

This expanded new edition of the classic 1989 collection of essays about Aztlán weighs its value.

Many within the Mexican-American community believe that the land won by the United States after the Mexican-American war of 1848 was nothing more than an illegal land grab. Under the euphemisms aHispanic Homelanda and aNation of Aztlan, a activists from numerous organizations yearn to annex portions of the southwest United States back to Mexico. Mystery, murder, terrorism and faith are explored in this present-day thriller. Watch how the director of Mexicoas Internal Security Department attempts to implement his plan for the restoration of ancient Aztlan. One man, however, whose tortured past now returns to haunt him, may be the only one able to derail the program. Reclaiming Aztlan explores current national events and challenges the reader to consider recent social and political realities.