Bringing to life the stories of political teatristas, feminists, gunrunners, labor organizers, poets, journalists, ex-prisoners, and other revolutionaries, The Revolutionary Imaginations of Greater Mexico examines the inspiration Chicanas/os found in social movements in Mexico and Latin America from 1971 to 1979. Drawing on fifteen years of interviews and archival research, including examinations of declassified government documents from Mexico, this study uncovers encounters between activists and artists across borders while sharing a socialist-oriented, anticapitalist vision. In discussions ranging from the Nuevo Teatro Popular movement across Latin America to the Revolutionary Proletariat Party of America in Mexico and the Peronista Youth organizers in Argentina, Alan Eladio Gómez brings to light the transnational nature of leftist organizing by people of Mexican descent in the United States, tracing an array of festivals, assemblies, labor strikes, clandestine organizations, and public protests linked to an international movement of solidarity against imperialism. Taking its title from the “greater Mexico” designation used by Américo Paredes to describe the present and historical movement of Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Chicanas/os back and forth across the US-Mexico border, this book analyzes the radical creativity and global justice that animated “Greater Mexico” leftists during a pivotal decade. While not all the participants were of one mind politically or personally, they nonetheless shared an international solidarity that was enacted in local arenas, giving voice to a political and cultural imaginary that circulated throughout a broad geographic terrain while forging multifaceted identities. The epilogue considers the politics of going beyond solidarity.

Bringing to life the stories of political teatristas, feminists, gunrunners, labor organizers, poets, journalists, ex-prisoners, and other revolutionaries, The Revolutionary Imaginations of Greater Mexico examines the inspiration Chicanas/os found in social movements in Mexico and Latin America from 1971 to 1979. Drawing on fifteen years of interviews and archival research, including examinations of declassified government documents from Mexico, this study uncovers encounters between activists and artists across borders while sharing a socialist-oriented, anticapitalist vision. In discussions ranging from the Nuevo Teatro Popular movement across Latin America to the Revolutionary Proletariat Party of America in Mexico and the Peronista Youth organizers in Argentina, Alan Eladio Gómez brings to light the transnational nature of leftist organizing by people of Mexican descent in the United States, tracing an array of festivals, assemblies, labor strikes, clandestine organizations, and public protests linked to an international movement of solidarity against imperialism. Taking its title from the “greater Mexico” designation used by Américo Paredes to describe the present and historical movement of Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Chicanas/os back and forth across the US-Mexico border, this book analyzes the radical creativity and global justice that animated “Greater Mexico” leftists during a pivotal decade. While not all the participants were of one mind politically or personally, they nonetheless shared an international solidarity that was enacted in local arenas, giving voice to a political and cultural imaginary that circulated throughout a broad geographic terrain while forging multifaceted identities. The epilogue considers the politics of going beyond solidarity.

Near Tijuana, Baja California, the autonomous community of Maclovio Rojas demonstrates what is possible for urban place-based political movements. More than a community, Maclovio Rojas is a women-led social movement that works for economic and political autonomy to address issues of health, education, housing, nutrition, and security. Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas tells the story of the community’s struggle to carve out space for survival and thriving in the shadows of the U.S.-Mexico geopolitical border. This ethnography by Michelle Téllez demonstrates the state’s neglect in providing social services and local infrastructure. This neglect exacerbates the structural violence endemic to the border region—a continuation of colonial systems of power on the urban, rural, and racialized poor. Téllez shows that in creating the community of Maclovio Rojas, residents have challenged prescriptive notions of nation and belonging. Through women’s active participation and leadership, a women’s political subjectivity has emerged—Maclovianas. These border women both contest and invoke their citizenship as they struggle to have their land rights recognized, and they transform traditional political roles into that of agency and responsibility. This book highlights the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as a space of resistance, conviviality, agency, and creative community building where transformative politics can take place. It shows hope, struggle, and possibility in the context of gendered violences of racial capitalism on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border.

A necessary reconceptualization of Latinx identity, literature, and politics In Latinx Revolutionary Horizons, Renee Hudson theorizes a liberatory latinidad that is not yet here and conceptualizes a hemispheric project in which contemporary Latinx authors return to earlier moments of revolution. Rather than viewing Latinx as solely a category of identification, she argues for an expansive, historicized sense of the term that illuminates its political potential. Claiming the “x” in Latinx as marking the suspension and tension between how Latin American descended people identify and the future politics the “x” points us toward, Hudson contends that latinidad can signal a politics grounded in shared struggles and histories rather than merely a mode of identification. In this way, Latinx Revolutionary Horizons reads against current calls for cancelling latinidad based on its presumed anti-Black and anti-Indigenous framework. Instead, she examines the not-yet-here of latinidad to investigate the connection between the revolutionary history of the Americas and the creation of new genres in the hemisphere, from conversion narratives and dictator novels to neoslave narratives and testimonios. By comparing colonialisms, she charts a revolutionary genealogy across a range of movements such as the Mexican Revolution, the Filipino People Power Revolution, resistance to Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and the Cuban Revolution. In pairing nineteenth-century authors alongside contemporary Latinx ones, Hudson examines a longer genealogy of Latinx resistance while expanding its literary canon, from the works of José Rizal and Martin Delany to those of Julia Alvarez, Jessica Hagedorn, and Leslie Marmon Silko. In imagining a truly transnational latinidad, Latinx Revolutionary Horizons thus rewrites our understanding of the nationalist formations that continue to characterize Latinx Studies.

A history of Mexican comic books, their readers, their producers, their critics, and their complex relations with the government and the Church that discusses cultural nationalism, popular taste, and social change.

Spanning the first half of the twentieth century, Deportes uncovers the hidden experiences of Mexican male and female athletes, teams and leagues and their supporters who fought for a more level playing field on both sides of the border. Despite a widespread belief that Mexicans shunned physical exercise, teamwork or “good sportsmanship,” they proved that they could compete in a wide variety of sports at amateur, semiprofessional, Olympic and professional levels. Some even made their mark in the sports world by becoming the “first” Mexican athlete to reach the big leagues and win Olympic medals or world boxing and tennis titles. These sporting achievements were not theirs alone, an entire cadre of supporters—families, friends, coaches, managers, promoters, sportswriters, and fans—rallied around them and celebrated their athletic success. The Mexican nation and community, at home or abroad, elevated Mexican athletes to sports hero status with a deep sense of cultural and national pride. Alamillo argues that Mexican-origin males and females in the United States used sports to empower themselves and their community by developing and sustaining transnational networks with Mexico. Ultimately, these athletes and their supporters created a “sporting Mexican diaspora” that overcame economic barriers, challenged racial and gender assumptions, forged sporting networks across borders, developed new hybrid identities and raised awareness about civil rights within and beyond the sporting world.

The 1910 Revolution is still tangibly present in Mexico in the festivals that celebrate its victories, on the monuments to its heroes, and, most important, in the stories and memories of the Mexican people. Yet there has never been general agreement on what the revolution meant, what its objectives were, and whether they have been accomplished. This pathfinding book shows how Mexicans from 1910 through the 1950s interpreted the revolution, tried to make sense of it, and, through collective memory, myth-making, and history writing, invented an idea called "la Revolución." In part one, Thomas Benjamin follows the historical development of different and often opposing revolutionary traditions and the state's efforts to forge them into one unified and unifying narrative. In part two, he examines ways of remembering the past and making it relevant to the present through fiestas, monuments, and official history. This research clarifies how the revolution has served to authorize and legitimize political factions and particular regimes to the present day. Beyond the Mexican case, it demonstrates how history is used to serve the needs of the present.