Account of the evolution of the Hispanic culture of the Southwest, including politics, religion, language, art, and attitudes.

Located in Southwest Collection.

The Buenavida Dilemma is a rich account of the history and life experiences of Hispanics in the Southwest and West from the 1850s through today. Using five generations of the Buenavida family, the author describes the social and cultural events and issues, including legal conflicts affecting Hispanics. Hot and controversial topics such as "English Only" laws; discrimination in schools and environmental justice are examined and pointedly analyzed. The book will illuminate the Hispanic struggle to maintain one's culture while succeeding in the U.S. mainstream. Jose Uranga has successfully interwoven the history of Mexican Americans in the Southwest with the experiences of the Buenavida family. To be or not to be is a dilemma that many Latinos faced when they encountered Anglo society and the United States or local governments. The Buenavida family's journey on that path of adjustment always meant choices of giving up or suppressing their native culture in order to work with the larger Anglo culture. More often, choices were made for Latinos in terms of schools and classes, who their friends would be and what kinds of jobs they could have. This is an excellent book for anyone who wishes to more fully understand the historical contexts of Mexican Americans in the Southwest and the impact of Anglo society on Latinos. This book would be a fine addition for those teachers who also wish to have cultural materials for their classes at the middle, high school and college levels. Dr. Raymond Sandoval has taught at several universities including UCLA, University of Colorado at Denver and the University of Santa Clara. He is a well-recognized Latino scholar and expert in cultural diversity training.

The U.S.-Mexico border region is home to anthropologist Carlos VŽlez-Ib‡–ez. Into these pages he pours nearly half a century of searching and finding answers to the Mexican experience in the southwestern United States. He describes and analyzes the process, as generation upon generation of Mexicans moved north and attempted to create an identity or sense of cultural space and place. In todayÕs border fences he also sees barriers to how Mexicans understand themselves and how they are fundamentally understood. From prehistory to the present, VŽlez-Ib‡–ez traces the intense bumping among Native Americans, Spaniards, and Mexicans, as Mesoamerican populations and ideas moved northward. He demonstrates how cultural glue is constantly replenished by strengthening family ties that reach across both sides of the border. The author describes ways in which Mexicans have resisted and accommodated the dominant culture by creating communities and by forming labor unions, voluntary associations, and cultural movements. He analyzes the distribution of sadness, or overrepresentation of Mexicans in poverty, crime, illness, and war, and shows how that sadness is balanced by creative expressions of literature and art, especially mural art, in the ongoing search for space and place. Here is a book for the nineties and beyond, a book that relates to NAFTA, to complex questions of immigration, and to the expanding population of Mexicans in the U.S.-Mexico border region and other parts of the country. An important new volume for social science, humanities, and Latin American scholars, Border Visions will also attract general readers for its robust narrative and autobiographical edge. For all readers, the book points to new ways of seeing borders, whether they are visible walls of brick and stone or less visible, infinitely more powerful barriers of the mind.

If the Southwest is known for its distinctive regional culture, it is not only the indigenous influences that make it so. As Anglo Americans moved into the territories of the greater Southwest, they brought with them a desire to reestablish the highest culture of their former homes: opera, painting, sculpture, architecture, and literature. But their inherited culture was altered, challenged, and reshaped by Native American and Hispanic peoples, and a new, vibrant cultural life resulted. From Houston to Los Angeles, from Tulsa to Tucson, Keith L. Bryant traces the development of "high culture" in the Southwest. Humans create culture, but in the Southwest, Bryant argues, the land itself has also influenced that creation. "Incredible light, natural grandeur, . . . and a geography at once beautiful and yet brutal molded societies that sprang from unique cultural sources." The peoples of the American Southwest share a regional consciousness—an experience of place—that has helped to create a unified, but not homogenized, Southwestern culture. Bryant also examines a paradox of Southwestern cultural life. Southwesterners take pride in their cultural distinctiveness, yet they struggled to win recognition for their achievements in "high culture." A dynamic tension between those seeking to re-create a Western European culture and those desiring one based on regional themes and resources continues to stimulate creativity. Decade by decade and city by city, Bryant charts the growth of cultural institutions and patronage as he describes the contributions of artists and performers and of the elites who support them. Bryant focuses on the significant role women played as leaders in the formation of cultural institutions and as writers, artists, and musicians. The text is enhanced by more than fifty photographs depicting the interplay between the people and the land and the culture that has resulted.

In his groundbreaking work With the Ears of Strangers, Robinson presented a definitive documentation of the stereotype of the Mexican in American literature. This revision extends the scope to Chicano literature in "a book which should be read by every person wishing to gain a better understanding of the 'American' Southwest. There is not a better introduction to the subject."--Western American Literature