Doña Luz


Book Description

Content with her tertuha, or gathering of close friends, her devotions, her books, and her daily routine, Dona Luz is unmoved by the prospect of marriage, because of her illegitimacy and her extremely modest financial status." "But then two men enter her life: Father Enrique, the ailing missionary nephew of Don Acisclo who returns from the Philippines to rest, and Don Jaime Pimentel, the dashing young military man whom Don Acisclo has chosen to back as the district representative in an uncoming election. How Dona Luz responds to both men determines the direction her life will take and the manner in which her illegitimacy will be explained."--Jacket.




Doña Luz


Book Description




Growing Up Latino


Book Description

A comprehensive collection of Latino writing of fiction and nonfiction works in English.




Cosmopolitan


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The Learned Ones


Book Description

In The Learned Ones Kelly S. McDonough gives sustained attention to the complex nature of Nahua intellectualism and writing from the colonial period through the present day. This collaborative ethnography shows the heterogeneity of Nahua knowledge and writing, as well as indigenous experiences in Mexico.




Blood Novels


Book Description

In the late nineteenth century, Spain’s most prominent writers – Juan Valera, Leopoldo Alas, and Benito Pérez Galdós – made blood a crucial feature of their fiction. Blood Novels examines the cultural and literary significance of blood, unsettling the dominant assumption of the period that blood no longer played a decisive role in social hierarchies. By examining fictional works through the rubric of "blood novels," Julia H. Chang identifies a shared fascination with blood that probes the limits of realism through blood’s dual nature of matter and metaphor. Situating the literature within broader cultural and theoretical debates, Blood Novels attends to the aesthetic contours of material blood and in particular how bleeding is inflected by gender, caste, and race. Critically engaging with feminist theory, theories of race and whiteness, literary criticism, and medical literature, this innovative study makes a case for treating blood as a critical analytic tool that not only sheds new light on Spanish realism but, more broadly, challenges our understanding of gendered and racialized embodiment in Spain.




Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies


Book Description

Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies is a synthesis of changes and innovations in methodologies in Indigenous Studies, focusing on sources over a broad chronological and geographical range. Written by a group of highly respected Indigenous Studies scholars from across an array of disciplines, this collection offers insight into the methodological approaches contributors take to research, and how these methods have developed in recent years. The book has a two-part structure that looks, firstly, at the theoretical and disciplinary movement of Indigenous Studies within history, literature, anthropology, and the social sciences. Chapters in this section reveal that, while engaging with other disciplines, Indigenous Studies has forged its own intellectual path by borrowing and innovating from other fields. In part two, the book examines the many different areas with which sources for indigenous history have been engaged, including the importance of family, gender, feminism, and sexuality, as well as various elements of expressive culture such as material culture, literature, and museums. Together, the chapters offer readers an overview of the dynamic state of the field in Indigenous Studies. This book shines a spotlight on the ways in which scholarship is transforming Indigenous Studies in methodologically innovative and exciting ways, and will be essential reading for students and scholars in the field.




De León, a Tejano Family History


Book Description

Winner, Presidio La Bahia Award, 2004 San Antonio Conservation Society Citation, 2005 La familia de León was one of the foundation stones on which Texas was built. Martín de León and his wife Patricia de la Garza left a comfortable life in Mexico for the hardships and uncertainties of the Texas frontier in 1801. Together, they established family ranches in South Texas and, in 1824, the town of Victoria and the de León colony on the Guadalupe River (along with Stephen F. Austin's colony, the only completely successful colonization effort in Texas). They and their descendents survived and prospered under four governments, as the society in which they lived evolved from autocratic to republican and the economy from which they drew their livelihood changed from one of mercantile control to one characterized by capitalistic investments. Combining the storytelling flair of a novelist with a scholar's concern for the facts, Ana Carolina Castillo Crimm here recounts the history of three generations of the de León family. She follows Martín and Patricia from their beginnings in Mexico through the establishment of the family ranches in Texas and the founding of the de León colony and the town of Victoria. Then she details how, after Martín's death in 1834, Patricia and her children endured the Texas Revolution, exile in New Orleans and Mexico, expropriation of their lands, and, after returning to Texas, years of legal battles to regain their property. Representative of the experiences of many Tejanos whose stories have yet to be written, the history of the de León family is the story of the Tejano settlers of Texas.




Black Women in Latin America and the Caribbean


Book Description

Black Women in Latin America and the Caribbean: Critical Research and Perspectives employs an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach to examine Black cisgender women’s social, cultural, economic, and political experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean. It presents critical empirical research emphasizing Black women’s innovative, theoretical, and methodological approaches to activism and class-based gendered racism and Black politics. While there are a few single-authored books focused on Black women in Latin American and Caribbean, the vast majority of the scholarship on Black women in Latin America and the Caribbean has been published as theses, dissertations, articles, and book chapters. This volume situates these social and political analyses as interrelated and dialogic and contributes a transnational perspective to contemporary conversations surrounding the continued relevance of Black women as a category of social science inquiry. Many of the contributing authors are from Latin American and Caribbean countries, reflecting a commitment to representing the valuable observations and lived experiences of scholars from this region. When read together, the chapters offer a hemispheric framework for understanding the lasting legacies of colonialism, transatlantic slavery, plantation life, and persistent socio-economic and cultural violence.




Maya Medicine


Book Description

This account of the practice of traditional Maya medicine examines the work of curers in Pisté, Mexico, a small town in the Yucatán Peninsula near the ruins of Chichén Itzá. The traditions of plant use and ethnomedicine applied by these healers have been transmitted from one generation to the next since the colonial period throughout the state of Yucatán and the adjoining states of Campeche and Quintana Roo. In addition to plants, traditional healers use Western medicine and traditional rituals that include magical elements, for curing in Yucatán is at once deeply spiritual and empirically oriented, addressing problems of the body, spirit, and mind. Curers either learn from elders or are recruited through revelatory dreams. The men who learn their skills through dreams communicate with supernatural beings by means of divining stones and crystals. Some of the locals acknowledge their medical skills; some disparage them as rustics or vilify them as witches. The curer may act as a doctor, priest, and psychiatrist. This book traces the entire process of curing. The author collected plants with traditional healers and observed their techniques including prayer and massage as well as plant medicine, western medicine, and ritual practices. Plant medicine, she found, was the common denominator, and her book includes information on the plants she worked with and studied.