Using qualitative research data on Mexican/Mexican Americans and their historias de éxito that center on Mexican centric concepts such as buen trabajador, bien educado, and buena gente, Octavio Pimentel reveals that when social networks guide personal goals in these communities, goals become community-oriented rather than personally-oriented.

As the demographics of the United States shift, Mexican American issues and values are gaining traction. Written by someone whose family immigrated to the United States after leaving Mexico, this book explores the generations of Mexican immigrants and their American descendants who struggled for civil rights, whose lands have been colonized, and who have been the backbone of American industry and agriculture since the nineteenth century. This book exposes a fickle culture surrounding work relations in a country that treated Mexican Americans not only like disposable labor, but also like non-citizens or nonpersons, even with the Mexican government's complicity.

In communities across the US, people wrestle with which languages to use, and who gets to decide. Despite more than 67 million US residents using a language other than English at home, over half of the states in the US have successfully passed English-only policies. Drawing on archives and interviews, this book tells the origin story of the English-only movement, as well as the stories of contemporary language policy campaigns in four Maryland county governments, giving a rare glimpse into what motivates the people who most directly shape language policy in the US. It demonstrates that English-only policies grow from more local levels, rather than from nationalist ideologies, where they are downplayed as harmless community initiatives, but result in monolingual approaches to language remaining increasingly pervasive. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

This book argues that in addition to being a war of national liberation, Mexico's movement toward independence from Spain was also an internal war pitting classes and ethnic groups against each other, an intensely localized struggle by rural people, especially Indians, for the preservation of their communities.

The years following Mexican independence in 1821 were critical to the development of social, racial, and national identities. The visual arts played a decisive role in this process of self-definition. Mexican Costumbrismo reorients current understanding of this key period in the history of Mexican art by focusing on a distinctive genre of painting that emerged between 1821 and 1890: costumbrismo. In contrast to the neoclassical work favored by the Mexican academy, costumbrista artists portrayed the quotidian lives of the lower to middle classes, their clothes, food, dwellings, and occupations. Based on observations of similitude and difference, costumbrista imagery constructed stereotypes of behavioral and biological traits associated with distinct racial and social classes. In doing so, Mey-Yen Moriuchi argues, these works engaged with notions of universality and difference, contributed to the documentation and reification of social and racial types, and transformed the way Mexicans saw themselves, as well as how other nations saw them, during a time of rapid change for all aspects of national identity. Carefully researched and featuring more than thirty full-color exemplary reproductions of period work, Moriuchi’s study is a provocative art-historical examination of costumbrismo’s lasting impact on Mexican identity and history. E-book editions have been made possible through support of the Art History Publication Initiative (AHPI), a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

In the early decades of the twentieth-century, Main Street was the heart of Los Angeles’s Mexican immigrant community. It was also the hub for an extensive, largely forgotten film culture that thrived in L.A. during the early days of Hollywood. Drawing from rare archives, including the city’s Spanish-language newspapers, Colin Gunckel vividly demonstrates how this immigrant community pioneered a practice of transnational media convergence, consuming films from Hollywood and Mexico, while also producing fan publications, fiction, criticism, music, and live theatrical events. Mexico on Main Street locates this film culture at the center of a series of key debates concerning national identity, ethnicity, class, and the role of Mexicans within Hollywood before World War II. As Gunckel shows, the immigrant community’s cultural elite tried to rally the working-class population toward the cause of Mexican nationalism, while Hollywood sought to position them as part of a lucrative transnational Latin American market. Yet ironically, both Hollywood studios and Mexican American cultural elites used the media to present negative depictions of working-class Mexicans, portraying their behaviors as a threat to middle-class respectability. Rather than simply depicting working-class immigrants as pawns of these power players, however, Gunckel reveals their active participation in the era’s film culture. Gunckel’s innovative approach combines media studies, urban history, and ethnic studies to reconstruct a distinctive, richly layered immigrant film culture. Mexico on Main Street demonstrates how a site-specific study of cultural and ethnic issues challenges our existing conceptions of U.S. film history, Mexican cinema, and the history of Los Angeles.