There are few places where mobility has shaped identity as widely as the American West, but some locations and populations sit at its major crossroads, maintaining control over place and mobility, labor and race. In Collisions at the Crossroads, Genevieve Carpio argues that mobility, both permission to move freely and prohibitions on movement, helped shape racial formation in the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles and the Inland Empire throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By examining policies and forces as different as historical societies, Indian boarding schools, bicycle ordinances, immigration policy, incarceration, traffic checkpoints, and Route 66 heritage, she shows how local authorities constructed a racial hierarchy by allowing some people to move freely while placing limits on the mobility of others. Highlighting the ways people of color have negotiated their place within these systems, Carpio reveals a compelling and perceptive analysis of spatial mobility through physical movement and residence.

The history and experiences of the diverse groups labeled Latinos in this country are abundantly documented in this major new collection. From the Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1803 to remembrances of life on the frontier, to the Young Lords platform of 1969, to a discussion of Latinos and the war on Iraq today, this 3-volume collection showcases more than 400 crucial primary documents from and concerning the major Latino groups in the United States. Sources include letters, memoirs, speeches, articles, essays, interviews, treaties, government reports, testimony, and more. The voices include whites as well as Latinos, prominent and obscure, and Americans as well as foreigners. The bulk of the primary documents concern Mexico and the United States and Mexican Americans, who paved the way for immigrants from Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Central and South America to come. The scope also includes primary documents pertaining to events in Latin American and Caribbean history that have had an impact on these groups. Each primary document has a short introduction, placing it in historical and cultural context. An introduction that gives an historical overview, a chronology, a selected bibliography chock full of useful websites, and a set index provide added value. Sample documents: memoirs of early Texas, commentary by a Mexican diplomat on the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo of 1848, essay on the social condition of New Mexico in 1852, Cuban independence leader Jose Marti in New York on race (1894), El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez— a ballad about a Mexican who stood up to the Texas Rangers in 1901, excerpts from an autobiography by Ella Winter on school segregation in the 1930s, a Latino soldier's reminiscences of World War II, testimony from a Bracero worker in the 1950s, article on Cuban Miami in the 1960s, socioeconomic profile of Dominicans in the United States in 2000, interview with Subcomandante Marcos from the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.

Artículos sobre obras de literatura que incluyen autores como Manuel Puig, José Corrales, Maya Islas, Angela de Hoyos, Vicente Huidobro, José M. Oxhlom, Marcel Hennart, Carlota O'Neill y temas como "La disputa sobre la paternidad del creacionismo", "La relatividad de la realidad", "El aparte en el teatro y en cine moderno", "Determinismo y libertad en Jacques le Fataliste", Prólogo a Chicano poems for the barrio.