Needed at one moment, scorned at others, Mexican agricultural workers have moved back and forth across the US–Mexico border for the past century. In South Texas, Anglo growers’ dreams of creating a modern agricultural empire depended on continuous access to Mexican workers. While this access was officially regulated by immigration laws and policy promulgated in Washington, DC, in practice the migration of Mexican labor involved daily, on-the-ground negotiations among growers, workers, and the US Border Patrol. In a very real sense, these groups set the parameters of border enforcement policy. Managed Migrations examines the relationship between immigration laws and policy and the agricultural labor relations of growers and workers in South Texas and El Paso during the 1940s and 1950s. Cristina Salinas argues that immigration law was mainly enacted not in embassies or the halls of Congress but on the ground, as a result of daily decisions by the Border Patrol that growers and workers negotiated and contested. She describes how the INS devised techniques to facilitate high-volume yearly deportations and shows how the agency used these enforcement practices to manage the seasonal agricultural labor migration across the border. Her pioneering research reveals the great extent to which immigration policy was made at the local level, as well as the agency of Mexican farmworkers who managed to maintain their mobility and kinship networks despite the constraints of grower paternalism and enforcement actions by the Border Patrol.

George I. Sánchez was a reformer, activist, and intellectual, and one of the most influential members of the "Mexican American Generation" (1930–1960). A professor of education at the University of Texas from the beginning of World War II until the early 1970s, Sánchez was an outspoken proponent of integration and assimilation. He spent his life combating racial prejudice while working with such organizations as the ACLU and LULAC in the fight to improve educational and political opportunities for Mexican Americans. Yet his fervor was not always appreciated by those for whom he advocated, and some of his more unpopular stands made him a polarizing figure within the Latino community. Carlos Blanton has published the first biography of this complex man of notable contradictions. The author honors Sánchez’s efforts, hitherto mostly unrecognized, in the struggle for equal opportunity, while not shying away from his subject’s personal faults and foibles. The result is a long-overdue portrait of a towering figure in mid-twentieth-century America and the all-important cause to which he dedicated his life: Mexican American integration.

Mexican American author Josie M&éndez-Negrete's memoir of how she and her siblings and mother survived years of violence and sexual abuse at the hands of her father.

In Indian Given María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo addresses current racialized violence and resistance in Mexico and the United States with a genealogy that reaches back to the sixteenth century. Saldaña-Portillo formulates the central place of indigenous peoples in the construction of national spaces and racialized notions of citizenship, showing, for instance, how Chicanos/as in the U.S./Mexico borderlands might affirm or reject their indigenous background based on their location. In this and other ways, she demonstrates how the legacies of colonial Spain's and Britain's differing approaches to encountering indigenous peoples continue to shape perceptions of the natural, racial, and cultural landscapes of the United States and Mexico. Drawing on a mix of archival, historical, literary, and legal texts, Saldaña-Portillo shows how los indios/Indians provided the condition of possibility for the emergence of Mexico and the United States.

Explores the resounding musical performances of Mexican American women such as Chelo Silva, Eva Ybarra, Eva Garza, and Selena within Tejano/Chicano music

'Moraga demonstrates her virtuosity as a poet; and, as a poet, she brings to her nonfiction essays images so hard, honest, and disturbing that her political analysis is breathtakingly personal and immediate.' San Francisco ChronicleThis new edition of Moragaâ__s seminal work on identity, sexuality, history, and the politics of Chicana feminism includes a new Introduction, three new chapters, and new poetry from Moraga. Weaving together poetry and prose, Spanish and English, family history and political theory, Loving in the War Years has been a classic in the feminist and Chicano canon since its 1983 release.