Between 1932 and 1934, José Clemente Orozco painted the twenty-four-panel mural cycle entitled The Epic of American Civilization in Dartmouth College's Baker-Berry Library. An artifact of Orozco's migration from Mexico to the United States, the Epic represents a turning point in his career, standing as the only fresco in which he explores both US-American and Mexican narratives of national history, progress, and identity. While his title invokes the heroic epic form, the mural indicts history as complicit in colonial violence. It questions the claims of Manifest Destiny in the United States and the Mexican desire to mend the wounds of conquest in pursuit of a postcolonial national project. In Orozco's American Epic Mary K. Coffey places Orozco in the context of his contemporaries, such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, and demonstrates the Epic's power as a melancholic critique of official indigenism, industrial progress, and Marxist messianism. In the process, Coffey finds within Orozco's work a call for justice that resonates with contemporary debates about race, immigration, borders, and nationality.

Los tres grandes: Jose Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Now legendary, these men have emerged as the most prominent figures of the famed Mexican mural movement, which lasted from the '20s through the early '70s and was hailed as the most significant achievement in public art of the 20th century. The dramatic story of the movement is told here in a fascinating history of the artists, accompanied by over 100 spectacular color reproductions of the murals. Showcasing popular as well as lesser-known works from around the US and Mexico, this is the first high-quality paperback to do justice to a subject that will captivate every lover of Mexican art and culture, Rivera fan, and art historian, as well as anyone who appreciates a beautiful, intelligent art book.

Looks at the life and career of the Mexican mural painter.

The essayist Adela Sloss-Vento (1901–1998) was a powerhouse of activism in South Texas’s Lower Rio Grande Valley throughout the Mexican American civil rights movement beginning in 1920 and the subsequent Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. At last presenting the full story of Sloss-Vento’s achievements, Agent of Change revives a forgotten history of a major female Latina leader. Bringing to light the economic and political transformations that swept through South Texas in the 1920s as ranching declined and agribusiness proliferated, Cynthia E. Orozco situates Sloss-Vento’s early years within the context of the Jim Crow/Juan Crow era. Recounting Sloss-Vento’s rise to prominence as a public intellectual, Orozco highlights a partnership with Alonso S. Perales, the principal founder of the League of United Latin American Citizens. Agent of Change explores such contradictions as Sloss-Vento’s tolerance of LULAC’s gender-segregated chapters, even though the activist was an outspoken critic of male privilege in the home and a decidedly progressive wife and mother. Inspiring and illuminating, this is a complete portrait of a savvy, brazen critic who demanded reform on both sides of the US-Mexico border.

Founded by Mexican American men in 1929, the League of United Latin-American Citizens (LULAC) has usually been judged according to Chicano nationalist standards of the late 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on extensive archival research, including the personal papers of Alonso S. Perales and Adela Sloss-Vento, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed presents the history of LULAC in a new light, restoring its early twentieth-century context. Cynthia Orozco also provides evidence that perceptions of LULAC as a petite bourgeoisie, assimilationist, conservative, anti-Mexican, anti-working class organization belie the realities of the group's early activism. Supplemented by oral history, this sweeping study probes LULAC's predecessors, such as the Order Sons of America, blending historiography and cultural studies. Against a backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, World War I, gender discrimination, and racial segregation, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed recasts LULAC at the forefront of civil rights movements in America.

Now in the midst of the largest wave of immigration in history, America, mythical land of immigrants, is once again contemplating a future in which new arrivals will play a crucial role in reworking the fabric of the nation. At the center of this prospect are the children of immigrants, who make up one fifth of America's youth. This book, written by the codirectors of the largest ongoing longitudinal study of immigrant children and their families, offers a clear, broad, interdisciplinary view of who these children are and what their future might hold. For immigrant children, the authors write, it is the best of times and the worst. These children are more likely than any previous generation of immigrants to end up in Ivy League universities--or unschooled, on parole, or in prison. Most arrive as motivated students, respectful of authority and quick to learn English. Yet, at the same time, many face huge obstacles to success, such as poverty, prejudice, the trauma of immigration itself, and exposure to the materialistic, hedonistic world of their native-born peers. The authors vividly describe how forces within and outside the family shape these children's developing sense of identity and their ambivalent relationship with their adopted country. Their book demonstrates how "Americanization," long an immigrant ideal, has, in a nation so diverse and full of contradictions, become ever harder to define, let alone achieve.

In an age of catastrophes—unchecked climate change, extreme poverty, forced migrations, war, and terror, all compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic—how can schooling be reengineered and education reimagined? This book calls for a new global approach to education that responds to these overlapping crises in order to enrich and enhance the lives of children everywhere. Marcelo Suárez-Orozco and Carola Suárez-Orozco convene scholars and practitioners from a range of disciplines—including anthropology, neuroscience, demography, psychology, child development, sociology, and economics—who offer incisive essays on the global state of education. Contributors consider how educational policy and practice can foster social inclusion and improve outcomes for all children. They emphasize the centrality of education to social and environmental justice, as well as the philosophical foundations of education and its centrality to human flourishing, personal dignity, and sustainable development. Chapters examine topics such as the neuroscience of education; the uses of technology to engage children who are not reached by traditional schooling; education for climate change; the education of immigrants, refugees, and the forcibly displaced; and how to address and mitigate the effects of inequality and xenophobia in the classroom. Global and interdisciplinary, Education speaks directly to urgent contemporary challenges. Contributors include Stefania Giannini, the director of education for UNESCO; development economist Jeffrey Sachs; cognitive psychologist Howard Gardner; Carla Rinaldi, president of the Reggio Children Foundation; and academics from leading global universities. The book features a foreword by Pope Francis.