This reader introduces students to the variety and complexity of Latinxs′ experiences in the U.S., and prepares them for further study in this interdisciplinary field. The opening essay, written by the editors, offers a broad overview of the approximately 59 million people in the U.S. who identify as Hispanic. The rest of the book will consist of contributed essays from Latina(o)/Chicana(o) scholars on a range of subjects including immigration, citizenship, and deportation; racial identities; political participation and power; educational and economic achievement; family; religion; media and popular culture. Although the essays are written for lower-division undergraduates, they reflect many of the leading theoretical and methodological approaches in the field. The essays are unified by an intersectional approach, demonstrating how experiences and life chances of Latinxs are also shaped by gender, social class, sexuality, age, and citizenship status.

Achieving peace is often thought about in terms of military operations or state negotiations. Yet it also happens at the grassroots level, where communities envision and create peace on their own. The San José de Apartadó Peace Community of small-scale farmers has not waited for a top-down peace treaty. Instead, they have actively resisted forced displacement and co-optation by guerrillas, army soldiers, and paramilitaries for two decades in Colombia’s war-torn Urabá region. Based on ethnographic action research over a twelve-year period, Christopher Courtheyn illuminates the community’s understandings of peace and territorial practices against ongoing assassinations and displacement. San José’s peace through autonomy reflects an alternative to traditional modes of politics practiced through electoral representation and armed struggle. Courtheyn explores the meaning of peace and territory, while also interrogating the role of race in Colombia’s war and the relationship between memory and peace. Amid the widespread violence of today’s global crisis, Community of Peace illustrates San José’s rupture from the logics of colonialism and capitalism through the construction of political solidarity and communal peace.

Most recent works about the efforts of local communities caught up in a civil war have focused on their efforts to remain places of security and safety from the violence that surrounds them—neutral peace communities or zones. This book, in contrast, focuses on local peace communities facing new challenges and opportunities once a peace agreement has been signed at the national level, such as those in South Africa, the Philippines, Burundi, East Timor, Sierra Leone, and the present peace process in Colombia between the FARC and the Colombian Government. The communities’ task is to make a stable and durable peace in the aftermath of a violent civil war and a deal on which local people have usually had little or no influence. Such agreements seek to involve them in both short and longer term peace-building, and expect local communities to cope with problems of armed ex-combatants, IDPs and refugees, law and order in the absence of much state presence, high unemployment and the need for widespread and massive reconstruction of physical infrastructure damaged or destroyed during the war. How local communities have coped with the demands of “peace” is thus the theme that runs through each of these individual chapters, written by authors with direct experience of grassroots communities struggling with such “problems of peace.” ​