Despite its wonderful everyday weather and beautiful surf-ridden beaches, Oxnard, California, has a reputation of being dangerous and demoralizing due to its gang presence. In this book, Mart�n Alberto Gonzalez takes this reputation head on through a series of social justice-oriented stories loosely based on his experiences and observations growing up in Oxnard as a first-generation Xicano. Rather than focusing on everything that deems the city bad, such as its overabundance of undereducated Brown people, Mart�n flips the script through counterstorytelling and testimonies in order to shed light on various injustices directly impacting his community, such as inequitable schooling practices, segregation, gentrification, and many more.

La Colonia is half a square mile of land separated from the rest of Oxnard by the railroad tracks and home to the people who keep an agricultural empire running. In decades past, milpas of corn and squash grew in tiny front yards, kids played in the alleys and neighbors ran tortillerias out of their homes. Back then, it was the place to get the best raspadas on Earth. It was a home to Cesar Chavez and a campaign stop for presidential candidate Robert Kennedy. As one Colonia native put it, "We may not have had what the other kids had, but we were just as rich." Through the voices of the people, the authors share the challenges and triumphs of growing up in this treasured place.

From award-winning poet Saeed Jones, How We Fight for Our Lives—winner of the Kirkus Prize and the Stonewall Book Award—is a “moving, bracingly honest memoir” (The New York Times Book Review) written at the crossroads of sex, race, and power. One of the best books of the year as selected by The New York Times; The Washington Post; NPR; Time; The New Yorker; O, The Oprah Magazine; Harper’s Bazaar; Elle; BuzzFeed; Goodreads; and many more. “People don’t just happen,” writes Saeed Jones. “We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us. The ‘I’ it seems doesn’t exist until we are able to say, ‘I am no longer yours.’” Haunted and haunting, How We Fight for Our Lives is a stunning coming-of-age memoir about a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence—into tumultuous relationships with his family, into passing flings with lovers, friends, and strangers. Each piece builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another—and to one another—as we fight to become ourselves. An award-winning poet, Jones has developed a style that’s as beautiful as it is powerful—a voice that’s by turns a river, a blues, and a nightscape set ablaze. How We Fight for Our Lives is a one-of-a-kind memoir and a book that cements Saeed Jones as an essential writer for our time.

This collection explores Chicano, Mexican, and Cuban musical forms and styles and their transformation in the United States. Employing musical, historical, and sociocultural analyses, Loza addresses issues such as marginality, identity, intercultural conflict and aesthetics, reinterpretation, postnationalism, and mestizaje--the mixing of race and culture--in the production and reception of Chicano/Latino music. Barrio Harmonics opens with a comprehensive overview that begins with music in the US Southwest in the seventeenth century and ends with the Grammy Awards for Latin American music in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In the following chapters, Loza discusses artists whose music ranges from sones, rancheros, and corridos to Latin jazz, R & B, and rock and roll. Among those he considers in depth are Pancho Sánchez, Lalo Guerrero, Tito Puente, and Los Lobos. He also surveys the contributions of scores of other individuals and groups who have shaped the current contour of Chicano/Latino music. Other topics include the music industry and the impact of globalization, the African diaspora, and Latin American music in Japan. In addition, Loza offers a candid assessment of intellectual capitalism and the void of nonwestern voices in contemporary scholarship.

Named for the Spanish padres who established a network of missions along California's southern and central coasts, the Los Padres National Forest is the second-largest National Forest in the state, encompassing approximately 1,950,000 acres - nearly half of which is federally-designated wilderness. Hiking and Backpacking Santa Barbara and Ventura fills a huge gap in coverage of this great hiking and backpacking destination, leading the reader through the varied terrain of the forest's southern districts, from the fern-clad grottoes of the Santa Barbara frontcountry to the sweeping vistas and granite-clad ridges of the Chumash Wilderness.No other guide covers the region in such detail, and not since Dennis Gagnon's near-legendary guides in the 70s and 80s has the Santa Barbara (and Ventura) backcountry been given the guidebook treatment ... but this book goes even further. Every official trail (and many use trails) in the Santa Barbara, Ojai, and Mt. Pinos districts are covered here, including those in the southern San Rafael Wilderness, Dick Smith Wilderness, Matilija Wilderness, Sespe Wilderness, Chumash Wilderness, the Santa Ynez Recreation Area, Rose Valley, the Santa Barbara and Montecito frontcountry, the Ojai frontcountry, and the Santa Paula/Fillmore frontcountry.

Michele Serros (1966–2015) is widely known for her groundbreaking book Chicana Falsa and Other Stories of Death, Identity, and Oxnard. Despite her status as a major figure in Chicanx literature, no scholar has written a book-length examination of her body of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—until now. Cristina Herrera, also from Oxnard, weaves in history, autoethnography, and literary analysis to explore Chicana adolescence and young womanhood with a focus on place-making. Factoring in location, region, and landscape, Herrera asks what it means to grow up Chicana in settings that carry centuries of colonial violence, segregation, and everyday racism against Mexican American communities. She contends that Serros used her hometown to broaden understandings of who and what constitutes Chicanx communities and identities. By reading Serros’s work in tandem with her lived experience in the same setting, Herrera uncovers moments of adolescent subjectivity that could only be vocalized and constructed within this particular locale. Herrera pushes against the tendency to separate the author from the text and argues for a spatial understanding of Chicana adolescence, race, class, and young womanhood.