In 1979, Mexican President José López Portilla assured his compatriots that the prosperity of the petroleum boom would reach every corner of the Republic of Mexico. The mother of the narrator in the first passage asks, "Do you believe what the president says?" The young narrator listens agape at the president's statements, while his work-weary parents contemplate a trip to el Norte. When the promised prosperity doesn't reach the corners of San Luis Potosí, the narrator sets out with his father to try to improve their finances. With the dream of the wealthy Hollywood that he sees on television tucked in his pocket, he, along with the other narrators in this collection of Spanish language testimonials, struggles to reach the United States. Radio personality Alicia Alarcón invited listeners who had migrated to the United States to call and share their stories. In these pages, Alarcón collects the footsteps of these travelers, through their flight and their falls. Their stories highlight the true American experience for immigrants from all over South and Central America who decide to leave their respective homelands. These intriguing but heartbreaking passages reveal young and old, men and women, who must overcome the impossible as they hope to find a better place than the one they've left behind. These difficult and gritty stories are the stories of the successful, the ones who make it across, past the natural and the bureaucratic obstacles along the border, only to scratch together lives on the other side.

Winner of the 2017 International Latino Book Award for Best Nonfiction – Multi-Author Migrant Deaths in the Arizona Desert addresses the tragic results of government policies on immigration. The contributors consist of a multidisciplinary group who are dedicated to the thousands of men, women, and children who have lost their lives while crossing the desert in search of a better life. Each chapter in this important new volume seeks answers to migrant deaths, speaking to the complexity of this tragedy via a range of community and scholarly approaches. The activists, artists, and scholars included in this volume confront migrant deaths and disappearances in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as they reflect on the startling realities of death, migration, and public policy. Chapters touch on immigration and how it is studied, community responses to crisis, government policy, definitions of citizenship, and the role of the arts and human expression in response to state violence. Collectively the contributions throw a spotlight on the multivocal, transdisciplinary efforts to address the historical silence surrounding this human tragedy. Despite numerous changes in the migration processes and growing attention to the problem, many people who attempt border crossings continue to disappear and die. This book offers a timely exploration of the ways that residents, scholars, activists, and artists are responding to this humanitarian crisis on their doorstep.

Diego Rivera’s mural Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central is a fascinating critique of high society and wealthy elites. It also offers a multitude of other stories that intersect in a web of historical memory. The massive mural, the histories it depicts, and even its physical journey after a devastating earthquake, hold answers to many of the questions readers might ask about Mexico. It also demonstrates how cultural artifacts explain the world around us and expose intersections and entanglements of specific power dynamics. Modern Mexican Culture offers an enriching and deep investigation of key ideas and events in Mexico through an examination of art and history. Experts in Mexican cultural and literary studies cover the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre, the figure of the charro (cowboy), the construct of the postrevolutionary teacher, the class-correlated construct of gente decente, a borderlands response to the rhetoric of dominance, and the “democratic transition” in late twentieth-century Mexico. Each essay is a rich reading experience, providing teachers and students alike with a deep and well-contextualized sense of Mexican life, culture, and politics. Each chapter provides a historical grounding of its topic, followed by a multifaceted analysis through various artistic representations that provide a more complex view of Mexico. Chapters are accompanied by lists of readily available murals, political cartoons, plays, pamphlets, posters, films, poems, novels, and other cultural products. Modern Mexican Culture demonstrates the power of art and artists to question, explain, and influence the world around us. Contributors: Rafael Acosta Morales Jacqueline E. Bixler Marta Caminero-Santangelo Debra A. Castillo Christopher Conway David S. Dalton Stuart A. Day Emily Hind Robert McKee Irwin Ryan Long Dana A. Meredith Magalí Rabasa Luis Alberto Rodríguez Cortés Fernando Fabio Sánchez Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado Analisa Taylor Oswaldo Zavala

Looking at the work of Junot Díaz, Cristina García, Julia Alvarez, and other Latino/a authors who are U.S. citizens, Marta Caminero-Santangelo examines how writers are increasingly expressing their solidarity with undocumented immigrants. Through storytelling, these writers create community and a sense of peoplehood that includes non-citizen Latino/as. This volume also foregrounds the narratives of unauthorized migrants themselves, showing how their stories are emerging into the public sphere. Immigration and citizenship are multifaceted issues, and the voices are myriad. They challenge common interpretations of "illegal" immigration, explore inevitable traumas and ethical dilemmas, protest their own silencing in immigration debates, and even capitalize on the topic for the commercial market. Yet these texts all seek to affect political discourse by advancing the possibility of empathy across lines of ethnicity and citizenship status. As border enforcement strategies escalate along with political rhetoric, detentions, and deaths, these counternarratives are more significant than ever before, and their perspectives cannot be ignored. What we are witnessing, argues Caminero-Santangelo, is a mass mobilization of stories. This growing body of literature is critical to understanding not only the Latino/a immigrant experience but also alternative visions of nation and belonging.

This comprehensive survey systematically explores the dynamic historic and contemporary interface between Mexico and the United States along the shared 1,954-mile international land boundary. Now fully updated and revised, the book provides an overview of the history of the region and traces the economic cycles and social movements from the 1880s through the second decade of the twenty-first century. The border region shares characteristics of both nations while maintaining an internal social and economic coherence that transcends its divisive international boundary. The authors conclude with an in-depth analysis of key contemporary issues. These include industrial development and manufacturing, bilateral trade, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, rapid urbanization, border culture, population and migration issues, environmental crisis and climate change, Native Americans, cooperation and conflict at the border, drug trafficking and violence, the border wall and security, populist national leaders and the border, and the Covid-19 pandemic at the border. They also place the border in its global context, examining it as a region caught between the developed and developing world and highlighting the continued importance of borders in a rapidly globalizing world. Richly illustrated with photographs, maps, charts, and up-to-date statistical tables, this book is an invaluable resource for all those interested in borderlands and U.S.-Mexican relations.

Almost All Aliens offers a unique reinterpretation of immigration in the history of the United States. Leaving behind the traditional melting-pot model of immigrant assimilation, Paul Spickard puts forward a fresh and provocative reconceptualization that embraces the multicultural reality of immigration that has always existed in the United States. His astute study illustrates the complex relationship between ethnic identity and race, slavery, and colonial expansion. Examining not only the lives of those who crossed the Atlantic, but also those who crossed the Pacific, the Caribbean, and the North American Borderlands, Almost All Aliens provides a distinct, inclusive analysis of immigration and identity in the United States from 1600 until the present. For additional information and classroom resources please visit the Almost All Aliens companion website at www.routledge.com/textbooks/almostallaliens.

This volume springs from that fruitful project of scientific cooperation between the humanities departments of Università di Firenze and University of Arizona which was the Forum for the Study of the Literary Cultures of the Southwest (2000-2007). Tri-cultural, at least (Native, Hispanic and Anglo-American), and multi-lingual, today's Southwest presents a complex coexistence of different cultures, the equal of which would be hard to find elsewhere in the United States. Of this virtually inexhaustible object of study, the essays here collected tackle an ample range of themes. While the majority of them are concerned with the literatures of the Southwest, still a good third falls into the fields of history, art history, ethnography, sociology or cultural studies. They are partitioned in four sections, the first three reflecting the chronology of the stratification of the three major cultures and the fourth highlighting one of the most sensitive topics in and about contemporary Southwest - the borderlands/la frontera