With works by nearly fifty artists, including Richard Duardo, Sam Coronado, Vincent Valdez, Alex Rubio, Ester Hernández, Patssi Valdez, Gronk, César Martínez, and Luis Jiménez, this volume presents one of the most important collections of contemporary Mexican American prints in existence.

A witty and thought-provoking collection of visual poems constructed from stacks of books. Delighting in the look and feel of books, conceptual artist Nina Katchadourian’s playful photographic series proves that books’ covers—or more specifically, their spines—can speak volumes. Over the past two decades, Katchadourian has perused libraries across the globe, selecting, stacking, and photographing groupings of two, three, four, or five books so that their titles can be read as sentences, creating whimsical narratives from the text found there. Thought-provoking, clever, and at times laugh-out-loud funny (one cluster of titles from the Akron Museum of Art’s research library consists of: Primitive Art /Just Imagine/Picasso/Raised by Wolves), Sorted Books is an enthralling collection of visual poems full of wry wit and bookish smarts. Praise for Sorted Books “Katchadourian’s project . . . takes on a weight beyond its initial novelty. It’s a love letter to books, book collecting and the act of reading.” —San Francisco Chronicle “As a longtime fan of [Katchadourian’s] long-running Sorted Books project I’m thrilled for the release of Sorted Books—a collection spanning nearly two decades of her witty and wise minimalist mediations on life by way of ingeniously arranged book spines. . . . In an era drowned in periodic death tolls for the future of the physical book, her project stands as a celebration of the spirit embedded in the magnificent materiality of the printed page.” —Brain Pickings “Katchadourian’s stacks possess an understated sophistication; they are true to the intimate nature of books and yet reveal their dramatic features and unexpected potential.” —Publishers Weekly

In these vignettes set in the fictional county of Belken along the Texas-Mexico border in the early to mid-twentieth century, Rolando Hinojosa sketches a landscape of Mexican Texans and Anglo Texans living side by side, in good times and bad. ñThe worldÍs a drugstore: youÍll find a little bit of just about everything, and itÍs usually on sale, too. Belken County, Texas is part of the world, and so, itÍs no different; its people are packaged in cellophane and they, too, come in all sizes, shapes and in a choice of colors.î Some are brave; others are craven. Some are sharp, and some are dull. Death calls on a regular basis in this first installment of HinojosaÍs acclaimed Klail City Death Trip Series. JehÏ Malacara was seven when his mother died and nine when his father passed. He has family, but itÍs Don VÕctor Pelàez who takes him in and makes him an integral part of the Pelàez Tent Show. When la muerte comes for Don VÕctor, JehÏ is orphaned again. Others die in bar room brawls, in a clandestine amorous tryst at the local Holiday Inn and on the street. Hinojosa paints his canvas with a montage of lifeÍs events„births, weddings, friendships and love affairs„but his brushwork all too frequently highlights the discrimination experienced by Mexican Americans. They lose their land to Anglos, are paid with rotten fruit for their labor and are refused admission to certain cafes. But life goes on. Young men go to war and old men remember their wars, whether the Mexican Revolution, World War II or the Korean War. This classic novel was originally published in the early 1970s as Estampas del Valle and in the early 1980s as The Valley. Frequently compared to William FaulknerÍs Yoknapatawpha and Gabriel GarcÕa MàrquezÍs Macondo, Rolando HinojosaÍs Klail City Death Trip Series is required reading for anyone interested in life along the Texas-Mexico border in the twentieth century.

"Tatiana Reinoza examines how geography, immigration, and art all converged as deepening interests for Latinx graphic artists, specifically those working in different forms of printmaking. By highlighting the work of four artists, based out of four distinct studios in East LA, Tempe, Austin, and East Harlem, she is able to uncover how their work these past three decades has transcended the more defined lines of scholarship that focus on specific ethnic groups (Chicano, Puerto Rican, etc.). She makes a case for how spatial projects allow for a more collective critique of anti-immigrant discourse, visualize immigrant lives, and articulate the ways in which printmaking has been historically complicit in the colonizing of the Americas"--

Printing and collecting the revolution : the rise and impact of Chicano graphics, 1965 to now / E. Carmen Ramos -- Aesthetics of the message : Chicana/o posters, 1965-1987 / Terezita Romo -- War at home : conceptual iconoclasm in American printmaking / Tatiana Reinoza -- Chicanx graphics in the digital age / Claudia E. Zapata.

In the decades following the Mexican Revolution, nation builders, artists, and intellectuals manufactured ideologies that continue to give shape to popular understandings of indigeneity and mestizaje today. Postrevolutionary identity tropes emerged as part of broader efforts to reunify the nation and solve pressing social concerns, including what was posited in the racist rhetoric of the time as the “Indian problem.” Through a complex alchemy of appropriation and erasure, indigeneity was idealized as a relic of the past while mestizaje was positioned as the race of the future. This period of identity formation coincided with a boom in technology that introduced a sudden proliferation of images on the streets and in homes: there were more photographs in newspapers, movie houses cropped up across the country, and printing houses mass-produced calendar art and postcards. La Raza Cosmética traces postrevolutionary identity ideals and debates as they were dispersed to the greater public through emerging visual culture. Critically examining beauty pageants, cinema, tourism propaganda, photography, murals, and more, Natasha Varner shows how postrevolutionary understandings of mexicanidad were fundamentally structured by legacies of colonialism, as well as shifting ideas about race, place, and gender. This interdisciplinary study smartly weaves together cultural history, Indigenous and settler colonial studies, film and popular culture analysis, and environmental and urban history. It also traces a range of Indigenous interventions in order to disrupt top-down understandings of national identity construction and to “people” this history with voices that have all too often been entirely ignored.