Fiesta San Antonio began in 1891 and through the twentieth century expanded from a single parade to over two hundred events spanning a ten-day period. Laura Hernández-Ehrisman examines Fiesta's development as part of San Antonio's culture of power relations between men and women, Anglos and Mexicanos. In some ways Fiesta resembles hundreds of urban celebrations across the country, but San Antonio offers a unique fusion of Southern, Western, and Mexican cultures that articulates a distinct community identity. From its beginning as a celebration of a new social order in San Antonio controlled by a German and Anglo elite to the citywide spectacle of today, Hernández-Ehrisman traces the connections between Fiesta and the construction of the city's tourist industry and social change in San Antonio.

The story of how the multicultural identity of San Antonio, Texas, has been shaped and polished through its annual fiesta since the late nineteenth century.

The importance of citywide festivals like Mardi Gras and Fiesta for the LGBTQ community Festivals like Mardi Gras and Fiesta have come to be annual events in which entire cities participate, and LGBTQ people are a visible part of these celebrations. In other words, the party is on, the party is queer, and everyone is invited. In Queer Carnival, Amy Stone takes us inside these colorful, eye-catching, and often raucous events, highlighting their importance to queer life in America’s urban South and Southwest. Drawing on five years of research, and over a hundred days at LGBTQ events in cities such as San Antonio, Santa Fe, Baton Rouge, and Mobile, Stone gives readers a front-row seat to festivals, carnivals, and Mardi Gras celebrations, vividly bringing these queer cultural spaces and the people that create and participate in them to life. Stone shows how these events serve a larger fundamental purpose, helping LGBTQ people to cultivate a sense of belonging in cities that may be otherwise hostile. Queer Carnival provides an important new perspective on queer life in the South and Southwest, showing us the ways that LGBTQ communities not only survive, but thrive, even in the most unexpected places.

Fiesta San Antonio began in 1891 began as a parade in honor of the battles of the Alamo and San Jacinto and has evolved into an annual Mardi Gras-like festival attended by four million with more than 100 cultural events raising money for nonprofit organizations in San Antonio, Texas. At Fiesta's start, the events were socially exclusive, one of the most prominent being the Coronation of the Queen of the Order of the Alamo, a lavish, debutante pageant crowning a queen of the festival. Cornyation was created in 1951 by members of the San Antonio's theater community as a satire, mocking the elite with their own flamboyant duchesses, empresses, and queens, accompanied by men in drag and local political figures in outrageous costume. The stage show quickly transformed into a controversial parody of local and national politics and culture. Cornyation is the first history of this major Fiesta San Antonio event, tracing how it has become one of Texas’s iconic and longest-running LGBT events, and one of the Southwest's first large-scale fundraisers for HIV-AIDS research, raising more than $2.5 million since 1990.

Discussing global society entails discussing the predominant characteristics of knowledge-based activities in all walks of life. Its main characteristics are based on creativity, innovation, freedom, and networking. The emergence of such a society poses several challenges to all disciplines of social sciences. Within such a context, sociologists must have practical encounters to the theoretical, methodological, and empirical challenges imposed within contemporary global society. In this vein, studying creative cities from an interdisciplinary perspective helps provide critical readings of the phenomenon and the different levels of the concept in reality. The Handbook of Research on Creative Cities and Advanced Models for Knowledge-Based Urban Development provides global models and best practices of creative cities worldwide and illustrates different theoretical blueprints for the better understanding of contemporary global society. While defining key concepts of creative cities, global society, and creative class, the book also clarifies the main differences between hubs, parks, and precincts and their contributions to knowledge-based development. Covering topics that include knowledge economy, social inclusion, and urban mobility, this comprehensive reference is ideal for sociologists, urban planners/designers, political scientists, economists, anthropologists, historians, policymakers, researchers, academicians, and students.

Written in the 1950s and discovered by family members years after her death, Margaret Brown Kilik’s shocking coming-of-age novel of the emotional and sexual brutality of young women’s lives in wartime San Antonio deserves a place on the shelf alongside classic novels like Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding. The Duchess of Angus reworks Kilik’s unusual personal history (her mother spent the 1930s running flophouse hotels all over the United States, leaving Margaret to be brought up by a host of relatives) into a riveting portrait of a young woman navigating a conflicted and rapidly changing world, one in which sex promises both freedom from convention and violent subjection to men’s will. Strikingly modern in its depiction of protagonist Jane Davis and her gorgeous, unreadable friend Wade Howell, The Duchess of Angus covers some of the same emotional territory as novels like Emma Cline’s The Girls and Robyn Wasserman’s Girls on Fire. Includes an introduction by Jenny Davidson and contextual essays by Laura Hernández-Ehrisma and Char Miller.

As the Great Depression gripped the United States in the early 1930s, the Hoover administration sought to preserve jobs for Anglo-Americans by targeting Mexicans, including long-time residents and even US citizens, for deportation. Mexicans comprised more than 46 percent of all people deported between 1930 and 1939, despite being only 1 percent of the US population. In all, about half a million people of Mexican descent were deported to Mexico, a “homeland” many of them had never seen, or returned voluntarily in fear of deportation. They Came to Toil investigates how the news reporting of this episode in immigration history created frames for representing Mexicans and immigrants that persist to the present. Melita M. Garza sets the story in San Antonio, a city central to the formation of Mexican American identity, and contrasts how the city’s three daily newspapers covered the forced deportations of Mexicans. She shows that the Spanish-language La Prensa not surprisingly provided the fullest and most sympathetic coverage of immigration issues, while the locally owned San Antonio Express and the Hearst chain-owned San Antonio Light varied between supporting Mexican labor and demonizing it. Garza analyzes how these media narratives, particularly in the English-language press, contributed to the racial “othering” of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Adding an important new chapter to the history of the Long Civil Rights Movement, They Came to Toil brings needed historical context to immigration issues that dominate today’s headlines.