Set on the Texas/Mexico border during the early years of Reagan’s “War on Drugs,” Mariguano tells the story of contrabandisto Don Julio Cortina’s ill-fated attempt to secure the Plaza at a national level by fixing the 1988 Mexican Presidential elections. The story is told through the eyes of Cortina’s son, El Johnny, who bears witness to his father’s cocaine-fueled transformation from devoted head of family to self-destructive head of a criminal organization that is rife with betrayal and deceit. Anyone who wants to understand the tragedy of modern-day Mexico and America’s complicity in the Mexican drug wars will want to read Mariguano, a novel that recalls classic crime narratives such as Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguys or William S. Burroughs’s Junky but also reads like the work of the best Mexican and Latin American novelists such as Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez.

Pa’l Otro Lado, a prequel to Mariguano, spans five generations of violence and tragedy in the Cortina family while narrating their forced migration to the United States from Northern Mexico. It is the tale of every working-class family who has come to realize that “you just can’t win.” Hunger and poverty drive the characters in this novel to abandon all hopes of attaining the American Dream and to resign themselves simply to survive. P’al Otro Lado is full of the baddest hombres and the nastiest women we all know, love, and call family.

This book, continuously in print since 1983, has become a classic Spanish reference book, widely used in classrooms across the United States. Linguist and folklorist Rubén Cobos, now in his nineties, has been diligently working on revisions for the past decade. Much expanded—the number of pages has increased by seventy—this revised edition will assume its place as the most authoritative reference on the archaic dialect of Spanish spoken in this region.

An intriguing study of the popular culture of early twentieth century Mexico as seen through the penny broadsheets--bullfighters, bandits, politics, and the revolution.

Love and Despair explores the multiple and mostly unknown ways progressive and conservative Catholic actors, such as priests, lay activists, journalists, intellectuals, and filmmakers, responded to the significant social and cultural shifts that formed competing notions of modernity in Cold War Mexico. Jaime M. Pensado demonstrates how the Catholic Church as a heterogeneous institution—with key transnational networks in Latin America and Western Europe—was invested in youth activism, state repression, and the counterculture from the postwar period to the more radical Sixties. Similar to their secular counterparts, progressive Catholics often saw themselves as revolutionary actors and nearly always framed their activism as an act of love. When their movements were repressed and their ideas were co-opted, marginalized, and commercialized at the end of the Sixties, the liberating hope of love often turned into a sense of despair.