The Roots Of Latino Urban Agency

The 2010 U.S. Census data showed that over the last decade the Latino population grew from 35.3 million to 50.5 million, accounting for more than half of the nation’s population growth. The editors of The Roots of Latino Urban Agency, Sharon Navarro and Rodolfo Rosales, have collected essays that examine this phenomenal growth. The greatest demographic expansion of communities of Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans seeking political inclusion and access has been observed in Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, and San Antonio. Three premises guide this study. The first premise holds that in order to understand the Latino community in all its diversity, the analysis has to begin at the grassroots level. The second premise maintains that the political future of the Latino community in the United States in the twenty-first century will be largely determined by the various roles they have played in the major urban centers across the nation. The third premise argues that across the urban political landscape the Latino community has experienced different political formations, strategies and ultimately political outcomes in their various urban settings. These essays collectively suggest that political agency can encompass everything from voting, lobbying, networking, grassroots organizing, and mobilization, to dramatic protest. Latinos are in fact gaining access to the same political institutions that worked so hard to marginalize them.

This book illuminates the ways in which Chicanas, Puerto Rican women, and other Latinas organize and lead social movements, either on the ground or digitally, in major cities of the continental United States and Puerto Rico. It shows how they challenge racism, sexism, homophobia, and anti-immigrant policies through their political praxis and spiritual activism. Drawing from a range of disciplines and perspectives, academic and activist authors offer unique insights into environmental justice, peace and conflict resolution, women’s rights, LGBTQ coalition-building, and more—all through a distinctive Latina lens. Designed for use in a wide range of college courses, this book is also aimed at practitioners, community organizers, and grassroots leaders.

This encyclopedia provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution of Hispanic Americans engaged in U.S. politics, from increased visibility as governors and other lawmakers at the local, state, and federal levels to their growing importance as a voting constituency. This encyclopedia comprehensively surveys the evolution of Latina/o engagement in US politics as voters, candidates, lawmakers, and public officials. It is an authoritative resource for public library patrons, high school students, and undergraduates in a variety of curricular studies, including political science, civics, American history, and Latino studies. The set's A–Z entries were carefully selected and crafted to ensure thorough coverage of all of the individuals, organizations, cultural forces, political issues, and legal decisions that have combined to elevate the role of Latinos at the polls, on the campaign trail, in Washington, and in mayors' offices, city councils, school boards, and statehouses all across the country. In-depth essays on the rising prominence of Latino Americans as voters, candidates, public officials, lawmakers, and opinion leaders will provide further context for understanding their impact on modern U.S. political processes and institutions from the perspective of liberals and conservatives alike.

More than 53 million Latinos now constitute the largest, fastest-growing, and most diverse minority group in the United States, and the nation’s political future may well be shaped by Latinos’ continuing political incorporation. In the 2012 election, Latinos proved to be a critical voting bloc in both Presidential and Congressional races; this demographic will only become more important in future American elections. Using new evidence from the largest-ever scientific survey addressed exclusively to Latino/Hispanic respondents, Latino Politics en Ciencia Política explores political diversity within the Latino community, considering how intra-community differences influence political behavior and policy preferences. The editors and contributors, all noted scholars of race and politics, examine key issues of Latino politics in the contemporary United States: Latino/a identities (latinidad), transnationalism, acculturation, political community, and racial consciousness. The book contextualizes today’s research within the history of Latino political studies, from the field’s beginnings to the present, explaining how systematic analysis of Latino political behavior has over time become integral to the study of political science. Latino Politics en Ciencia Política is thus an ideal text for learning both the state of the field today, and key dimensions of Latino political attitudes.

Activist planning shows how communities, neighbourhoods and social movements use their own alternative spatial planning to oppose interventions from the government. This book is a systematic overview of scholarly reported activist planning cases. It includes descriptions of the various kinds of activist planning and contains a comprehensive bibliography of academic publications related to the 164 cases. The book informs the planning community what activist planning is in practice, and offers a classification scheme where all reported cases fit in. This text is needed because no comprehensive collection of activist planning cases exists, nor does a classification comprising all types of activist planning. There is, to date, no database of cases and associated literature providing researchers and students with an authoritative source. The search for cases in the English language has been global, and the cases and 122 supplementary examples are sorted by country and world region ‒ Australasia, Europe, the Global South and North America.

Texas-based affiliates in the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF)—built on ideas, principles, and actions from the late Saul Alinsky—offer a strong, mature organizing model compared with other community organizations in the state and the United States as a whole. IAF affiliates’ members consist of institutions, most of them faith-based congregations and synagogues. Local volunteer leaders in those institutions work together in relationships of trust that draw strength, unity, and purpose from IAF principles and the social-justice precepts of their different faiths. In Hope for Justice and Power, Kathleen Staudt examines the twenty-first-century activities of the Texas IAF in multiple cities and towns around the state, drawing on forty years of academic teaching and on twenty years of active leadership experiences in the IAF. She identifies major contradictions, tensions, and their resolutions in IAF organizing related to centralism versus local control, reformist versus radical goals, stable revenue generation, greater gender balance in leadership, and evolving IAF principles. The political context in modern Texas is a challenging one compared to the Texas IAF founding period in the last quarter of the twentieth century, yet local IAF volunteer leaders achieve their goals with a strong political base in divergent urban regions around the state. With declining religious affiliation in U.S. society, the Texas IAF has begun to recruit members from broad-based institutions, such as schools and health clinics. The hope and winnable goals that sustain IAF organizing show the importance of organized power, trained volunteer leaders, and relationships with public officials in between elections. With cross-class alliances, IAF affiliates work to foster equitable change toward a more just society. To analyze the Texas IAF, Staudt draws on participant observation in El Paso, statewide meetings and training, on interviews, and on archival documents and media coverage. This book will appeal to those interested in community-based organizing and leadership, Mexican American and women’s politics, civic-capacity building in education, political socialization, and both Texas and urban politics.

The year 2020 will mark the 100th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment giving many women in the United States the right to vote. The struggle for suffrage lasted over six decades and involved more than a million women; yet, even at the moment of the amendment's enactment, women's activists disagreed heartily over how much had been achieved, whether it was necessary for women to continue organizing for political rights, and what those political rights would bring. Looking forward to the 100-year anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, this collection of original essays takes a long view of the past century of women's political engagement to gauge how much women have achieved in the political arena. The volume looks back at the decades since women won the right to vote to analyze the changes, developments, and even continuities in women's roles in the broad political sphere. Ultimately, the book asks two important questions about the last 100 years of women's suffrage: 1) How did the Nineteenth Amendment alter the American political system? and 2) How has women's engagement in politics changed over the last 100 years? As the chapters reveal, while women have made substantial strides in the political realm--voting at higher rates than men and gaining prominent leadership roles--barriers to gender equality remain. Women continue to be underrepresented in political office and to confront gender bias in a myriad of political settings. The contributors also remind us of the important understanding to be gained from an intersectional perspective to women's political engagement. In particular, several chapters discuss the failure of the Nineteenth Amendment to provide full political rights and representation to African American, Latina, and poorer women. The work also considers women's extra-institutional activism in a wide variety of settings, including in the feminist, civil rights, environmental, and far-right movements. As the volume traces women's forceful presence and limitations in politics over the past century, it also helps us look forward to consider the next 100 years: what additional victories might be won and what new defeats will need women's response?