Man of Aztlan


Book Description

Founder of Chicano literature, author of Bless Me, Ultima




Queer in Aztlán


Book Description

"The anthology Queer in Aztlan: Chicano Male Recollections of Consciousness and Coming Out gives readers the opportunity to experience deeply personal narratives from queer Chicanos/Mexicanos, and makes it possible for them to understand and sympathize with the stories' protagonists. It was also a finalist for a 2014 Lambda Award. The book explores issues of queer youth identity, sexuality, masculinity, homophobia, sexism, and violence in Mexican and American culture, presents a complex view of queer Chicanos/Mexicanos, and contests dominant sexual norms. It challenges current scholarship in Chicana/Chicano studies to expand beyond the traditional confines of male sexuality. The seven sections of the book survey the queer experience from a variety of perspectives through reading selections that focus on presence, recollection, embodied self, men of heart, Coatlicue state, and Joteria studies. A unique transnational bibliography gives emphasis to themes on, or by, queer Chicano and Mexicano authors on male sexuality, homoerotic writing, literary criticism, and fiction. Adelaida R. Del Castillo is an associate professor in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at San Diego State University, and from 2007 to 2010 Professor Del Castillo served as the first Chicana chair of the department. Her research interests include Chicana feminisms, the economic survival strategies of working-class women in Mexico City, rights discourse, and postnational notions of citizenship. Gibran Gudo is a doctoral student in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. In 2010 he organized the 5th Annual Queer People of Color Conference at San Diego State University, and co-organized the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies 3rd Joteria Conference. He is a recipient of the Richard P. Geyser Ethics Memorial Scholarship."




Reclaiming Aztlan


Book Description

Many within the Mexican-American community believe that the land won by the United States after the Mexican-American war of 1848 was nothing more than an illegal land grab. Under the euphemisms aHispanic Homelanda and aNation of Aztlan, a activists from numerous organizations yearn to annex portions of the southwest United States back to Mexico. Mystery, murder, terrorism and faith are explored in this present-day thriller. Watch how the director of Mexicoas Internal Security Department attempts to implement his plan for the restoration of ancient Aztlan. One man, however, whose tortured past now returns to haunt him, may be the only one able to derail the program. Reclaiming Aztlan explores current national events and challenges the reader to consider recent social and political realities.




Aztlán


Book Description

During the Chicano Movement in the 1960s and 1970s, the idea of Aztlán, homeland of the ancient Aztecs, served as a unifying force in an emerging cultural renaissance. Does the term remain useful? This expanded new edition of the classic 1989 collection of essays about Aztlán weighs its value. To encompass new developments in the discourse the editors have added six new essays.




Journey to Aztlan


Book Description

Journey to Aztlan is the powerful, inspirational, and heartwarming story about how one man overcame life-threatening Depression and found love. Juan Blea was ready to end his life. Depression had claimed his soul and left him seeing few options for his life. Developing through the veils of cultural confusion as a child and identity loss as a young adult, depression proved to be an enemy almost too strong to conquer. However, as a child he learned the power of language and he used that knowledge to reclaim his life and became a writer. Writing proved to be the path for Juan to find the source of all that s good and strong and beautiful. Juan calls this source, Aztlan, and it was through his Aztlan that he found love. In Journey to Aztlan, Juan shares his journey and provides insight into how we all can find our own source of strength, goodness, and beauty. Praise for Journey to Aztlan. . . Blea, in his maroma / somersault chronicles (Journey to Aztlan), takes us through the fractured visions of a man in search of his soul, his multicolored darkness. And we in turn notice the colliding identities of a son, a father, a lover in search of his homeland, a source of poetry, music, and computer ciphers yearning intimacy and oneness. I enjoyed this book for its daring and shifting psychological optics. And its Chicano spice I recognized many scenes, conflicts, parables, and even Jimmy Santiago Baca in cameo. What a book! Juan Felipe Herrera Poet Laureate of California. Juan Blea is an amazing man with deep insight into how to heal the millions & millions of men and women who suffer from addiction and depression. I love Juan s way of looking at mental illness; he s compassionate and brilliant and passionate. He s an amazing Aztlan curandero that the barrio has given us as a gift and Journey to Aztlan stands toe to toe with anything in print. Jimmy Santiago Baca Author of A Place to Stand, winner of the Pushcart Prize and American Book Award.




Bringing Aztlan to Mexican Chicago


Book Description

Bringing Aztlán to Mexican Chicago is the autobiography of Jóse Gamaliel González, an impassioned artist willing to risk all for the empowerment of his marginalized and oppressed community. Through recollections emerging in a series of interviews conducted over a period of six years by his friend Marc Zimmerman, González looks back on his life and his role in developing Mexican, Chicano, and Latino art as a fundamental dimension of the city he came to call home. Born near Monterey, Mexico, and raised in a steel mill town in northwest Indiana, González studied art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame. Settling in Chicago, he founded two major art groups: El Movimiento Artístico Chicano (MARCH) in the 1970s and Mi Raza Arts Consortium (MIRA) in the 1980s. With numerous illustrations, this book portrays González's all-but-forgotten community advocacy, his commitments and conflicts, and his long struggle to bring quality arts programming to the city. By turns dramatic and humorous, his narrative also covers his bouts of illness, his relationships with other artists and arts promoters, and his place within city and barrio politics.




Chicana Movidas


Book Description

With contributions from a wide array of scholars and activists, including leading Chicana feminists from the period, this groundbreaking anthology is the first collection of scholarly essays and testimonios that focuses on Chicana organizing, activism, and leadership in the movement years. The essays in Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activisim and Feminism in the Movement Era demonstrate how Chicanas enacted a new kind of politica at the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and developed innovative concepts, tactics, and methodologies that in turn generated new theories, art forms, organizational spaces, and strategies of alliance. These are the technologies of resistance documented in Chicana Movidas, a volume that brings together critical biographies of Chicana activists and their bodies of work; essays that focus on understudied organizations, mobilizations, regions, and subjects; examinations of emergent Chicana archives and the politics of collection; and scholarly approaches that challenge the temporal, political, heteronormative, and spatial limits of established Chicano movement narratives. Charting the rise of a field of knowledge that crosses the boundaries of Chicano studies, feminist theory, and queer theory, Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activisim and Feminism in the Movement Era offers a transgenerational perspective on the intellectual and political legacies of early Chicana feminism.




Heart of Aztlan


Book Description

For use in schools and libraries only. Chronicles the lives of a Mexican American family in Albuquerque, New Mexico.




Heart of Aztlan


Book Description

PEN Center West Award Winner: A novel of myth and migration set in a mid-twentieth–century New Mexico barrio, by the author of Bless Me, Ultima. Today is the day Benjie Chávez and his family will leave the town of Guadalupe behind. Far from the land of the eagle and the nopal, they travel west to find a new home of opportunity. But adapting to the big, impersonal city of Albuquerque is no easy task. As both life and death come to the barrio, a blind seer named Crispin arrives in the Chávezes’ world. At first everyone dismisses his stories about an elusive place called Aztlán as the ramblings of an old man. But gradually, they come to realize that he can see what they cannot. In earthy prose, American Book Award–winning author Rudolfo Anaya tells a spellbinding story of myth and migration, love and loss. Heart of Atzlán is a hopeful and heartbreaking novel about people in search of the shimmering mirage of a better life—and the land that keeps calling them back.




The House of the Scorpion


Book Description

Newberry Honour Award Winner & National Book Award Winner. Matt is six years old when he discovers that he is different from other children and other people. To most, Matt isn't considered a boy at all, but a beast, dirty and disgusting. But to El Patron, lord of a country called Opium, Matt is the guarantee of eternal life. El Patron loves Matt as he loves himself - for Matt is himself. They share the exact same DNA. As Matt struggles to understand his existence and what that existence truly means, he is threatened by a host of sinister and manipulating characters, from El Patron's power-hungry family to the brain-deadened eejits and mindless slaves that toil Opium's poppy fields. Surrounded by a dangerous army of bodyguards, escape is the only chance Matt has to survive. But even escape is no guarantee of freedom . . . because Matt is marked by his difference in ways that he doesn't even suspect. Praise for The House of Scorpions: 'It's a pleasure to read science fiction that's full of warm, strong characters... that doesn't rely on violence as the solution to complex problems of right and wrong. It's a pleasure to read.' Ursula K. LeGuin 'Fabulous' Diana Wynne Jones Also by Nancy Farmer: The Sea of Trolls Land of the Silver Apples The Islands of the Blessed The Lord of Opium