Sofi Mendoza's Guide to Getting Lost in Mexico


Book Description

When Southern California high school senior Sofi Mendoza lies to her parents and crosses the border for a weekend party, she has no idea that she will get stuck in a Mexican village with family she has never met before, unable to return to the United States and the easy life she knew.




Scales of Captivity


Book Description

In Scales of Captivity, Mary Pat Brady traces the figure of the captive or cast-off child in Latinx and Chicanx literature and art between chattel slavery’s final years and the mass deportations of the twenty-first century. She shows how Latinx expressive practices expose how every rescaling of economic and military power requires new modalities of capture, new ways to bracket and hedge life. Through readings of novels by Helena María Viramontes, Oscar Casares, Lorraine López, Maceo Montoya, Reyna Grande, Daniel Peña, and others, Brady illustrates how submerged captivities reveal the way mechanisms of constraint such as deportability ground institutional forms of carceral modernity and how such practices scale relations by naturalizing the logic of scalar hierarchies underpinning racial capitalism. By showing how representations of the captive child critique the entrenched logic undergirding colonial power, Brady challenges racialized modes of citizenship while offering visions for living beyond borders.




Theorizing Ethnicity and Nationality in the Chick Lit Genre


Book Description

Scholars and readers alike need little help identifying the infamous Bridget Jones or Carrie Bradshaw. While it is no stretch to say that these fictional characters are the most recognizable within the chic lit genre, there are certainly many others that have helped define this body of work. While previous research has focused primarily on white American chick lit, Theorizing Ethnicity and Nationality in the Chick Lit Genre, takes a wider look at the genre, by exploring chick lit novels featuring protagonists from a variety of ethnic backgrounds set both within and outside of the US.




Estrella's Quinceañera


Book Description

In this touching debut novel, Estrella Alvarez is about to turn 15, and there's nothing her meddling mother and T'a Lucky want more than to throw her a gaudy "quinceaera"--a party that Estrella would rather avoid.




Latino/a Children's and Young Adult Writers on the Art of Storytelling


Book Description

Children's and young adult literature has become an essential medium for identity formation in contemporary Latino/a culture in the United States. This book is an original collection of more than thirty interviews led by Frederick Luis Aldama with Latino/a authors working in the genre. The conversations revolve around the conveyance of young Latino/a experience, and what that means for the authors as they overcome societal obstacles and aesthetic complexity. The authors also speak extensively about their experiences within the publishing industry and with their audiences. As such, Aldama's collection presents an open forum to contemporary Latino/a writers working in a vital literary category and sheds new light on the myriad formats, distinctive nature, and cultural impact it offers.




Teaching Young Adult Literature Today


Book Description

Teaching Young Adult Literature Today introduces the reader to what is current and relevant in the plethora of good books available for adolescents. More importantly, literary experts illustrate how teachers everywhere can help their students become lifelong readers by simply introducing them to great reads—smart, insightful, and engaging books that are specifically written for adolescents. Hayn, Kaplan, and their contributors address a wide range of topics: how to avoid common obstacles to using YAL; selecting quality YAL for classrooms while balancing these with curriculum requirements; engaging disenfranchised readers; pairing YAL with technology as an innovative way to teach curriculum standards across all content areas. Contributors also discuss more theoretical subjects, such as the absence of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) young adult literature in secondary classrooms; and contemporary YAL that responds to the changing expectations of digital generation readers who want to blur the boundaries between page and screen. This book has been updated to reflect the wealth of new YA literature that has been published since the first edition appeared in March 2012, and to reflect new trends in technology that influences how adolescents are reading and responding to literature.




Visible Borders, Invisible Economies


Book Description

Globalization in the United States can seem paradoxical: free trade coincides with fortification of the southern border, while immigration is reimagined as a national-security threat. US politics turn aggressively against Latinx migrants and subjects even as post-NAFTA markets become thoroughly reliant on migrant and racialized workers. But in fact, there is no incongruity here. Rather, anti-immigrant politics reflect a strategy whereby capital uses specialized forms of violence to create a reserve army of the living, laboring dead. Visible Borders, Invisible Economies turns to Latinx literature, photography, and films that render this unseen scheme shockingly vivid. Works such as Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends and Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer crystallize the experience of Latinx subjects and migrants subjugated to social death, their political existence erased by disenfranchisement and racist violence while their bodies still toil in behalf of corporate profits. In Kristy L. Ulibarri’s telling, art clarifies what power obscures: the national-security state performs anti-immigrant and xenophobic politics that substitute cathartic nationalism for protections from the free market while ensuring maximal corporate profits through the manufacture of disposable migrant labor.




Quince Clash (Border Town #2)


Book Description

In Dos Rios, Texas, life is all about borders -- and what happens when you cross the line. A fresh new series in the tradition of Bluford High explores what it's like to grow up on the edge.A quinceanera for the record books?If Fabiola Garza had her way, her quinceanera would be as simple and as non-traditional as possible-just two airline tickets to New York City and her best friend in tow. Sadly, things hardly ever go Fabi's way. After mean girl Melodee lays down a quinceanera challenge in front of the entire school, Fabi is forced to upgrade her party plans. Melodee is rich and popular-her quinceanera will be effortlessly epic. Fabi is at a loss as to how to make her party remotely as fun and fabulous as Melodee's is sure to be. Younger sister Alexis steps in with a scheme to get Fabi on the TV show Quince Dreams-but Fabi isn't convinced she won't end up in a quince nightmare instead.




Falling Too Fast (Border Town #3)


Book Description

In Dos Rios, Texas, things aren't always as they seem.Alexis Garza has music in her blood. She's certain that one day, she'll be leaving the border town of Dos Rios, Texas behind for a glamorous life of singing stardom. Until then, however, she'll have to content herself with belting her heart out at voice classes, going to high school mariachi band practice, and helping out at the Graza family restaurant.Alexis's ordinary life takes a turn for the extraordinary when she meets the swoon-worthy lead singer of a rival high school's mariachi band. His singing (and his smile) make Alexis melt. There's one small problem-- this suave singer doesn't seem to know that Alexis exists. She's determined to make herself heard-- no matter what the cost.




Rejection of Victimhood in Literature


Book Description

This book examines how selected works of fiction advocate for just memories and promote identities that accept ethical agency and that exercise power and control over their own lives and destinies, no matter how limited such control may be.