Insurgent Aztlán The Liberating Power of Cultural Resistance reconstructs the relationship between social political insurgent theory and Xicano literature, film and myth. Based on decades of organizing experience and scholarly review of the writings of recognized observers and leaders of the process of national liberation movements, the author, Ernesto Todd Mireles, shares a remarkable work of scholarship that incorporates not only the essence of earlier resistance writing, but provides a new paradigm of liberation guidelines for the particular situation of Mexican Americans.Mireles makes a solid case for addressing the decades-long decline of Mexican American identity within itself and broadly among sectors of American society by asserting the powerful role of culture and history, each value unable to exist without the other, in the preservation and political advancement of a people. In the case of Mexican Americans, which consists of an estimated 40 million people and boasts the highest birth rate in the U.S., they constitute "a nation within a nation."The intellectual challenge, Mireles asserts, is connecting insurgent social political theory with the existing body of Xicano literature, film and myth. The organizing challenge is how to build an insurgent identity that fosters a "return to history" to build a consensus among Mexican Americans, who are a complex collective of culturally, educationally, politically, and economically diverse people, to reclaim their historical presence in the Americas and the world.Insurgent Aztlán must be read by students from high school to graduate studies, their professors, organizers in the fields and factories, union shops, and urban community organizations, wherever Mexican Americans sense the need to re-evaluate their goals and aspirations for themselves and their families.

This exciting new volume from Armando Navarro offers the most current and comprehensive political history of the Mexicano experience in the United States. Viewing Mexicanos today as an occupied and colonized people, Navarro calls for the formation of a new movement to reinvigorate the struggle for resistance and change. His book is a valuable resource for social activists and instructors in Latino politics, U.S. race relations, and social movements.

This book provides a long-needed overview of the Chicana and Chicano movement’s social history as it grew, flourished, and then slowly fragmented. The authors examine the movement’s origins in the 1960s and 1970s, showing how it evolved from a variety of organizations and activities united in their quest for basic equities for Mexican Americans in U.S. society. Within this matrix of agendas, objectives, strategies, approaches, ideologies, and identities, numerous electrifying moments stitched together the struggle for civil and human rights. Gómez-Quiñones and Vásquez show how these convergences underscored tensions among diverse individuals and organizations at every level. Their narrative offers an assessment of U.S. society and the Mexican American community at a critical time, offering a unique understanding of its civic progress toward a more equitable social order.

Weaving archival records, ancient maps and narratives, and the wisdom of the elders, Roberto Cintli Rodriguez offers compelling evidence that maíz is the historical connector between Indigenous peoples of this continent. Rodriguez brings together the wisdom of scholars and elders to show how maíz/corn connects the peoples of the Americas.

Land Uprising reframes Indigenous land reclamation as a horizon to decolonize the settler colonial conditions of literary, intellectual, and activist labor. Simón Ventura Trujillo argues that land provides grounding for rethinking the connection between Native storytelling practices and Latinx racialization across overlapping colonial and nation-state forms. Trujillo situates his inquiry in the cultural production of La Alianza Federal de Mercedes, a formative yet understudied organization of the Chicanx movement of the 1960s and 1970s. La Alianza sought to recover Mexican and Spanish land grants in New Mexico that had been dispossessed after the Mexican-American War. During graduate school, Trujillo realized that his grandparents were activists in La Alianza. Written in response to this discovery, Land Uprising bridges La Alianza’s insurgency and New Mexican land grant struggles to the writings of Leslie Marmon Silko, Ana Castillo, Simon Ortiz, and the Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. In doing so, the book reveals uncanny connections between Chicanx, Latinx, Latin American, and Native American and Indigenous studies to grapple with Native land reclamation as the future horizon for Chicanx and Latinx indigeneities.

As they have done historically, innovative institutions enrich the college ecosystem, helping the higher educational industry develop flexible resilience. The chapters in this book showcase perspectives, hard-won lessons, challenges and provocative ideas about how historically innovative institutions can contribute to the current discourse on innovation in higher education. The chapters in this book include case studies of innovative campuses and practices, as well as future-looking directions for innovation. Taken together, they ask, is there a way to consider how future trends can be navigated in effective ways, so that the most important features of higher education––student learning, the liberal arts, the cultivation of critical thinking––can remain central to tomorrow’s institutions?