Mexican American Voices

This short, comprehensive collection of primary documents provides an indispensable introduction to Mexican American history and culture. Includes over 90 carefully chosen selections, with a succinct introduction and comprehensive headnotes that identify the major issues raised by the documents Emphasizes key themes in US history, from immigration and geographical expansion to urbanization, industrialization, and civil rights struggles Includes a 'visual history' chapter of images that supplement the documents, as well as an extensive bibliography

Today, Mexican Americans are the youngest and fastest growing ethnic group in the United States. But Mexican Americans are also among the nation’s oldest communities, with a rich and complex history. This book seeks to restore Mexican Americans to their rightful place in the narrative of American history. Through its 71 carefully edited selections, the book draws on the voices of Mexican Americans to chronicle and interpret their experience from the beginnings of Spanish colonization of the northern Mexican frontier to the present. This documentary history provides an indispensable introduction to Mexican American history and culture.

Writings by and about Mexican Americans by Daniel Garza, Amado Muro, Durango Mendoza, Richard Dokey, Raymond Barrio, Luis Valdez, Cesar Chavez, Sister Mary Prudence Moylan, Ronald Arias, Jesus Ascension Arreola Jr., Manuel Aragon, James Santibanez, Antonio Gomez, Philip D. Ortega, Feliciano Rivera, Richard Vasquez, Reies Lopez Tijerina, Eliu Carranza, Albert Herrera, Roberto and Jose Aragon, Joan Baez, and Enrique Hank Lopez.

“Literally, chilaquiles are a breakfast I grew up eating: fried corn tortillas with tomato-chile sauce. Symbolically, they are the culinary metaphor for how working-class women speak with the seasoning of their food.”—from the Introduction Through the ages and across cultures, women have carved out a domain in which their cooking allowed them to express themselves, strengthen family relationships, and create a world of shared meanings with other women. In Voices in the Kitchen, Meredith E. Abarca features the voices of her mother and several other family members and friends, seated at their kitchen tables, to share the grassroots world view of these working-class Mexican and Mexican American women. In the kitchen, Abarca demonstrates, women assert their own sazón (seasoning), not only in their cooking but also in their lives. Through a series of oral histories, or charlas culinarias (culinary chats), the women interviewed address issues of space, sensual knowledge, artistic and narrative expression, and cultural and social change. From her mother’s breakfast chilaquiles to the most elaborate traditional dinner, these women share their lives as they share their savory, symbolic, and theoretical meanings of food. The charlas culinarias represent spoken personal narratives, testimonial autobiography, and a form of culinary memoir, one created by the cooks-as-writers who speak from their kitchen space. Abarca then looks at writers-as-cooks to add an additional dimension to the understanding of women’s power to define themselves. Voices in the Kitchen joins the extensive culinary research of the last decade in exploring the importance of the knowledge found in the practical, concrete, and temporal aspects of the ordinary practice of everyday cooking.

Corazón Abierto: Mexican American Voices in Texas Music provides a wide view of the myriad contributions Mexican American artists have made to music in Texas and the United States. Based on interviews with longtime stalwarts of Mexican American music—Flaco Jiménez, Tish Hinojosa, Ernie Durawa, Rosie Flores, and others—and also conversations with newer voices like Lesly Reynaga, Marisa Rose Mejia, Josh Baca, and many more, Kathleen Hudson allows the musicians to tell their own stories in a unique and personal way. As the artists reveal in their free-ranging discussions with Hudson, their influences go far beyond traditionally Mexican genres like conjunto, norteño, and Tejano to extend into rock, jazz, country-western, zydeco, and many other styles. Hudson’s survey also includes essays, poetry, and other creative works by Dagoberto Gilb, Sandra Cisneros, and others, but the core of the book consists of what she describes as “a collection of voices from different locations in Texas. . . . Some represent voices from the edge, while others give us a view from the center.” Weaving together a tapestry that combines “family, borders, creativity, music, food, and community,” the book presents an image as varied and difficult to define as the musicians themselves. By sharing the artists’ accounts of their influences, their experiences, their family stories, and their musical and cultural journeys, Corazón Abierto reminds us that borders can be gateways, that differences enrich, rather than isolate.

Every day, 40,000 commuters cross the U.S. Mexico border at Tijuana San Diego to go to work. Untold numbers cross illegally. Since NAFTA was signed into law, the border has become a greater obstacle for people moving between countries. Transnational powers have exerted greater control over the flow of goods, services, information, and people. Mexican Voices of the Border Region examines the flow of people, commercial traffic, and the development of relationships across this border. Through first-person narratives, Laura Velasco Ortiz and Oscar F. Contreras show that since NAFTA, Tijuana has become a dynamic and significant place for both nations in terms of jobs and residents. The authors emphasize that the border itself has different meanings whether one crosses it frequently or not at all. The interviews probe into matters of race, class, gender, ethnicity, place, violence, and political economy as well as the individual's sense of agency.

In these vivid recollections, recorded both in Mexico and the U.S., 90 Mexican-Americans share their innermost thoughts and feelings and reveal a wealth of experiences: the risks they take, what they left behind, their dreams versus the realities, and how immigration has changed their lives.

In the early 1870s, Hubert H. Bancroft and his assistants set out to record the memoirs of early Californios, one of them being eighty-three-year-old Don Jose Maria Amador, a former Forty-Niner during the California Gold Rush and soldado de cuera at the Presidio of San Francisco. Amador tells of reconnoitering expeditions into the interior of California, where he encountered local indigenous populations. He speaks of political events of Mexican California and the widespread confiscation of the Californios' goods, livestock, and properties when the United States took control. A friend from Mission Santa Cruz, Lorenzo Asisara, also describes the harsh life and mistreatment the Indians faced from the priests. Both the Amador and Asisara narratives were used as sources in Bancroft's writing but never published themselves. Gregorio Mora-Torres has now rescued them from obscurity and presents their voices in English translation (with annotations) and in the original Spanish on facing pages. This bilingual edition will be of great interest to historians of the West, California, and Mexican American studies.