Annihilation In Austin

★★★ Murder. Chaos. Outrage. ★★★ This was the mode in Texas' capital city, Austin from 1884 to 1885. The city had been haunted by a string of bloody murders. Women were not just killed--they were dragged alive from their beds, taken outside where they were often tortured and then murdered. Six of the victims, all women, were found dead with sharp objects inserted in their ears. As horrifying as the murders were, what's more, horrifying is that the person who committed these heinous acts of violence was never found. To this day it remains one of the most famous unsolved crimes. It has long been suspected by several noted historians that the real killer may have been none other than Jack the Ripper. Written with gripping, page-turning suspense, this book brings you back in time to Austin, Texas, so you can experience the horror and panic for yourself. Faint at heart turn away!

For Mexican workers on the American home front during World War II, unprecedented new employment opportunities contrasted sharply with continuing discrimination, inequality, and hardship.

Anthropologist-historian James Diego Vigil distills an enormous amount of information to provide a perceptive ethnohistorical introduction to the Mexican-American experience in the United States. He uses brief, clear outlines of each stage of Mexican-American history, charting the culture change sequences in the Pre-Columbian, Spanish Colonial, Mexican Independence and Nationalism, and Anglo-American and Mexicanization periods. In a very understandable fashion, he analyzes events and the underlying conditions that affect them. Readers become fully engaged with the historical developments and the specific socioeconomic, sociocultural, and sociopsychological forces involved in the dynamics that shaped contemporary Chicano life. Considered a pioneering achievement when first published, From Indians to Chicanos continues to offer readers an informed and penetrating approach to the history of Chicano development. The richly illustrated Third Edition incorporates data from the latest literature. Moreover, a new chapter updates discussions of immigration, institutional discrimination, the Mexicanization of the Chicano population, and issues of gender, labor, and education.

The Quest for Tejano Identity was written as a study of Mexican American consciousness, and a history of the assumptions and intellectual responses of Mexican Americans in south Texas. The work uses history to inquire why different ethnic groups think, act and speak as they do as they encounter American society.

This volume of essays marks the fifteenth year of archival and critical work conducted under the auspices of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project at the University of Houston. This ongoing and comprehensive program seeks to locate, identify, preserve, and disseminate the literary contributions of U.S. Latinos from the Spanish Colonial Period to contemporary times. The contributors explore key issues and challenges in this project, such as the issue of its legitimacy and acceptance in teh academic canon, whether the basic archival phase of the Recovery Project is complete, and if teh assumption that there is widespread recognition of the existence and vitality of a centuries-long U.S. Hispanic literary tradition may be premature and perhaps imprudent. Originally presented at the biennial conferences of the Recovery project, the essays are divided in five sections: "Rethinking Latino/a Subject Positions," "Negotiating Cultural Authority and the Canon," "Orality, Performance, and the Archive," "Re-Contextualizing Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton," and "Bibliographic Reports." Covering a wide range of topics, essays include "Bending Chicano Identity and Experience in Arturo Isla's Early Borderland Short Stories," "Recovering Mexican America in the Classroom," and "Early New Mexican Criticism: The Case of Breve Resena de la literatura hispana de Nuevo Mexico y Colorado." In their introduction, editors Kenya Dworkin y Mendez and Agnes Lugo-Ortiz give an overview of the editorial framing of the previous volumes in the series and discuss the significant research issues and agendas raised over the past fifteen years. This volume, like the ones that precede it, is bilingual, confirming the cultural politics that have animated the Recovery Project since its inception: the understanding that the U.S. is a complex multicultural and multilingual society.

Contemporary observers often quip that the American Southwest has become “Mexicanized,” but this view ignores the history of the region as well as the social reality. Mexican people and their culture have been continuously present in the territory for the past four hundred years, and Mexican Americans were actors in United States history long before the national media began to focus on them—even long before an international border existed between the United States and Mexico. North to Aztlán, an inclusive, readable, and affordable survey history, explores the Indian roots, culture, society, lifestyles, politics, and art of Mexican Americans and the contributions of the people to and their influence on American history and the mainstream culture. Though cognizant of changing interpretations that divide scholars, Drs. De León and Griswold del Castillo provide a holistic vision of the development of Mexican American society, one that attributes great importance to immigration (before and after 1900) and the ongoing influence of new arrivals on the evolving identity of Mexican Americans. Also showcased is the role of gender in shaping the cultural and political history of La Raza, as exemplified by the stories of outstanding Mexicana and Chicana leaders as well as those of largely unsung female heros, among them ranch and business owners and managers, labor leaders, community activists, and artists and writers. In short, readers will come away from this extensively revised and completely up-to-date second edition with a new understanding of the lives of a people who currently compose the largest minority in the nation. Completely revised, re-edited, and redesigned, featuring a great many new photographs and maps, North to Aztlán is certain to take its rightful place as the best college-level survey text of Americans of Mexican descent on the market today.

"Limerick is one of the most engaging historians writing today." --Richard White The "settling" of the American West has been perceived throughout the world as a series of quaint, violent, and romantic adventures. But in fact, Patricia Nelson Limerick argues, the West has a history grounded primarily in economic reality; in hardheaded questions of profit, loss, competition, and consolidation. Here she interprets the stories and the characters in a new way: the trappers, traders, Indians, farmers, oilmen, cowboys, and sheriffs of the Old West "meant business" in more ways than one, and their descendents mean business today.