This book uses a micro-narrative structure to explore the assault on the collective memory of Mexican Americans in the Southwest United States from 2010–2016. These communities’ survival depends on their histories and identities, which are being quickly erased by gentrification and dispersal, neoliberalism and privatization. This issue is most apparent in the education system, where Mexican American students receive inferior educations and lack access to higher education. Avoiding the overly-theoretical macro-narrative, this book uses case studies and micro-narratives to suggest possible changes and actions to address this issue. It also explores how the erasure of Mexican Americans’ history and identity mirrors society as a whole.

This book puts recent events in the Southwestern United States into historical context, exploring how and why powerful elites are laying an assault on the history and identity of Mexican Americans and Latinos. It argues that neoliberalism and the privatization of schools and higher education drives this phenomenon.

In 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois asked, "Does the Negro need separate schools?" His stunning query spoke to the erasure of cultural relevancy in the classroom and to reassurances given to White supremacy through curricula and pedagogy. Two decades later, as the Supreme Court ordered public schools to desegregate, educators still overlooked the intimations of his question. This book reflects upon the role K-12 education has played in enabling America's enduring racial tensions. Combining historical analysis, personal experience, and a theoretical exploration of critical race pedagogy, this book calls for placing race at the center of the pedagogical mission.

Originally published in the tumult of 1996, in an era of new nativism and panic about the Latinization of America, Anything But Mexican solidified Rodolfo Acua's place as "the W.E.B. Du Bois of Chicano Studies." A stirring, insightful chronicle of Los Angeles's working class chicanos, this new edition brings their story and struggles up to present day.

This book edition offers a collection of scholarship and reflections that goes beyond theoretical conversations. This volume helps reignite a dialogue not only by scholars but also by educators, activists, and students who believe in inclusive and equal access to education for all individuals regardless of race, ethnicity, immigration status, gender, sexuality, religion, and other identities. In this volume, the authors examine curriculum and pedagogy as a tool for recovery from political trauma and healing. They used thisas an opportunity to confront some of the politically shameful situations affecting educational environments, homes, neighborhoods, enclaves, and regions marked by socioeconomic inequality. The authors of Making a Spectacle present wide-open questions: How are educators and school leaders learning to interact with one another, students, their families, and community while facing increased mass school shootings, police violence, racial profiling, unequal access to education and basic needs during a pandemic (COVID-19), and other forms of sociopolitical stress influenced by discrimination, institutional racism, and White nationalism? What curricular and pedagogical geographies are educators and students afforded through which to process their emotional responses to ecological or political activities witnessed in schools and their surrounding areas? These chapters and reflections/perspectives represent a diversity of positionalities within critical intersections of power and privilege as they relate to identity, culture, and curriculum and social justice, schools, and society.

Powerfully persuasive and thought-provoking, Ending the Pursuit asks us to reimagine sexuality, romance and gender without the borders imposed by society. How did asexual identity form? What is aromanticism? How does agender identity function? Researcher and writer Michael Paramo explores these misunderstood experiences, from the complex challenge of coming out to navigating the western lens of attraction. Expertly mapping their history, Paramo traces the emergence of vital online communities to the origins of the Victorian binaries that still restrict us today. With a groundbreaking blend of memoir and poetry, online articles and discussions, Ending the Pursuit is a much-needed addition to the cultural conversation. It encourages us to end the search for ‘normalcy’ and gives voice to an often-misunderstood community. 'Important . . . Paramo refuses to take for granted the normalized ideas we are fed around how relationships should work and what they should look like' Dr. Ela Przybyło, Illinois State University

This book analyzes the ways collective memories of the US-Mexico War have shaped Mexican Americans' civil rights struggles over several generations. As the first Latinx people incorporated into the nation, Mexican Americans were offered US citizenship by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war. Because the 1790 Naturalization Act declared whites solely eligible for citizenship, the treaty pronounced Mexican Americans to be legally white. While their incorporation as citizens appeared as progress towards racial justice and the electorate's diversification, their second-class citizenship demonstrated a retrenchment in racial progress. Over several generations, civil rights activists summoned conquest memories to link Mexican Americans' poverty, electoral disenfranchisement, low educational attainment, and health disparities to structural and institutional inequalities resulting from racial retrenchments. Activists also recalled the treaty's citizenship guarantees to push for property rights, protection from vigilante attacks, and educational reform. Omar Valerio-Jimenez addresses the politics of memory by exploring how succeeding generations reinforced or modified earlier memories of conquest according to their contemporary social and political contexts. The book also examines collective memories in the US and Mexico to illustrate transnational influences on Mexican Americans and to demonstrate how community and national memories can be used strategically to advance political agendas.