United States History from a Chicano Perspective provides students with engaging and enlightening readings that introduce them to contemporary Mesoamerica and illuminate the ways the past and present are constantly interacting within this landscape. The anthology highlights the themes of survival, resilience, and resistance, showing how Mexicans and Chicanos continue to thrive despite a history marked with grave adversity and seemingly insurmountable struggles. The readings within the anthology trace the impacts of colonialism on Mexicans and Mexican Americans and also demonstrate how Chicanos have endured by embracing indigenous traditions and developing their own unique culture. Particular selections explore Mexican religious healing practices, the reclamation of Mesoamerican foods, identity construction in representations of Malinche, the reformation of the concept of "home" by queering Aztlán, and more. These selections examine the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, demonstrating a robust spectrum of diversity within the Mexican and Chicano experience. United States History from a Chicano Perspective provides students with a unique lens through which to view and analyze U.S. history. It is an ideal supplementary resource for courses in U.S. history, multicultural studies, and any course with emphasis on the Chicano experience.

This revised, second edition of The Chicano Experience offers a new interpretation of the social, cultural, and economic forces that shape the situation of Chicanos today. For more than thirty years, and now in its ninth printing, Alfredo Mirandé’s The Chicano Experience has captivated readers with its groundbreaking analysis of Chicanos in the United States. Although its original context differs markedly from the current demographic landscape, it remains no less relevant today—Latinos have emerged as the largest minority population in the United States. With updated chapters revised in light of contemporary scholarship, this second edition speaks to the Chicano of today, in addition to puertoriqueños, Central Americans, and other groups who share common experiences of colonization, racialization, and, especially in the last decade, demonization. In this foundational text, Mirandé develops a comprehensive framework for Chicano sociology that, in attending closely to Chicano experience, aims to correct the biases and misconceptions that have prevailed in the field. He demonstrates how the conventional immigrant group model of society, with its focus on assimilation into mainstream American culture, does not apply to Chicanos. Supporting this constructive proposal are analyses of Chicano social history and culture, with chapters focusing on the economy, the border, law, education, family, gender and machismo, and religion. The book concludes with a case study of community attitudes toward the police in an urban barrio. In many ways, the first edition of The Chicano Experience anticipated the sensitivity to the experiences of the underrepresented in American culture. This second edition reaffirms the prescience of Mirandé’s work and makes it available to a new generation of students and scholars of Chicano and Latino studies, ethnic and race studies, sociology, and cultural studies.

“A rich and moving chronicle for our very present.” —Julio Ortega, New York Times Book Review The United States is still typically conceived of as an offshoot of England, with our history unfolding east to west beginning with the first English settlers in Jamestown. This view overlooks the significance of America’s Hispanic past. With the profile of the United States increasingly Hispanic, the importance of recovering the Hispanic dimension to our national story has never been greater. This absorbing narrative begins with the explorers and conquistadores who planted Spain’s first colonies in Puerto Rico, Florida, and the Southwest. Missionaries and rancheros carry Spain’s expansive impulse into the late eighteenth century, settling California, mapping the American interior to the Rockies, and charting the Pacific coast. During the nineteenth century Anglo-America expands west under the banner of “Manifest Destiny” and consolidates control through war with Mexico. In the Hispanic resurgence that follows, it is the peoples of Latin America who overspread the continent, from the Hispanic heartland in the West to major cities such as Chicago, Miami, New York, and Boston. The United States clearly has a Hispanic present and future. And here is its Hispanic past, presented with characteristic insight and wit by one of our greatest historians.

Anthropologist-historian James Diego Vigil distills an enormous amount of information to provide a perceptive ethnohistorical introduction to the Mexican-American experience in the United States. He uses brief, clear outlines of each stage of Mexican-American history, charting the culture change sequences in the Pre-Columbian, Spanish Colonial, Mexican Independence and Nationalism, and Anglo-American and Mexicanization periods. In a very understandable fashion, he analyzes events and the underlying conditions that affect them. Readers become fully engaged with the historical developments and the specific socioeconomic, sociocultural, and sociopsychological forces involved in the dynamics that shaped contemporary Chicano life. Considered a pioneering achievement when first published, From Indians to Chicanos continues to offer readers an informed and penetrating approach to the history of Chicano development. The richly illustrated Third Edition incorporates data from the latest literature. Moreover, a new chapter updates discussions of immigration, institutional discrimination, the Mexicanization of the Chicano population, and issues of gender, labor, and education.

The largest social movement by people of Mexican descent in the U.S. to date, the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 70s linked civil rights activism with a new, assertive ethnic identity: Chicano Power! Beginning with the farmworkers' struggle led by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, the Movement expanded to urban areas throughout the Southwest, Midwest and Pacific Northwest, as a generation of self-proclaimed Chicanos fought to empower their communities. Recently, a new generation of historians has produced an explosion of interesting work on the Movement. The Chicano Movement: Perspectives from the Twenty-First Century collects the various strands of this research into one readable collection, exploring the contours of the Movement while disputing the idea of it being one monolithic group. Bringing the story up through the 1980s, The Chicano Movement introduces students to the impact of the Movement, and enables them to expand their understanding of what it means to be an activist, a Chicano, and an American.

Takaki traces the economic and political history of Indians, African Americans, Mexicans, Japanese, Chinese, Irish, and Jewish people in America, with considerable attention given to instances and consequences of racism. The narrative is laced with short quotations, cameos of personal experiences, and excerpts from folk music and literature. Well-known occurrences, such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the Trail of Tears, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Japanese internment are included. Students may be surprised by some of the revelations, but will recognize a constant thread of rampant racism. The author concludes with a summary of today's changing economic climate and offers Rodney King's challenge to all of us to try to get along. Readers will find this overview to be an accessible, cogent jumping-off place for American history and political science plus a guide to the myriad other sources identified in the notes.