Synopses & Reviews
College can be a complex time for Latinas, who are traditionally expected to leave home when they get married. In her essay “Only Daughter,” author Sandra Cisneros remarks, “After four years in college and two more in graduate school, and still no husband, my father shakes his head even now and says I wasted all that education.”
Wise Latinas is a collection of personal essays addressing the varied landscape of the Latina experience in higher education. For some Latinas, college, where they are vastly underrepresented, is the first time they are immersed in American culture outside their homes—and where the values of two cultures often clash. Wise Latinas is in part a response to this widening gap.
Featuring acclaimed writers such as Sandra Cisneros, Norma Cantú, and Julia Alvarez, to name a few, Wise Latinas shows that there is no one Latina college experience. With thoughtful and engaging pieces, Wise Latinas provides a platform for Latina writers to share their experiences in higher education and gives a voice to the many Latina women who have taken risks; embraced the new, confronted change; and maintained (and in some cases found) their roots.
Review
andldquo;[Range Wars] will be highly significant to the fields of western history, environmental history, military history, and political and economic history. It will have far-reaching influence on similar studies underway in other regions of the country.andrdquo;andmdash;Durwood Ball, editor of New Mexico Historical Review and author of Army Regulars on the Western Frontier
Review
andldquo;Edgington has written a very smart, compelling, and provocative book.andrdquo;andmdash;Char Miller, W. M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis at Pomona College and author of Seeking the Greatest Good: The Conservation Legacy of Gifford Pinchot
Review
andldquo;Of great importance to environmental history, the history of the American West, the history of animals, the social history of the place, and of personal stories and national security debates. An important and timely subject.andrdquo;andmdash;Erika Bsumek, author of
Indian-Made: Navajo Culture in the Marketplace, 1868andndash;1940Review
http://nebraskapress.typepad.com/university_of_nebraska_pr/2014/08/from-the-desk-of-ryan-h-edgington.html
Review
"The abundance of high-quality material makes the book hard to put down."—Kirkus
Review
"[Wise Latinas] holds relevance for any young person setting out of their homes for the first time."—Ru Freeman, Huffington Post
Review
“An extraordinary collection of testimonies. There is plenty of honesty and no pretension in the voices included in
Wise Latinas. These essays elicit the gamut of emotions from the reader, from chuckles to gasps to tears. An excellent anthology.”—Rigoberto González, author of
Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa
Review
“On the most fundamental level,
Wise Latinas aims to provide models for other Latinas. . . . [It was] a joy to read this book, and a reminder of the footsteps that we all trace.”—Marta Caminero-Santangelo, author of
On Latinidad: U.S. Latino Literature and the Construction of EthnicitySynopsis
Founded by Mexican American men in 1929, the League of United Latin-American Citizens (LULAC) has usually been judged according to Chicano nationalist standards of the late 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on extensive archival research, including the personal papers of Alonso S. Perales and Adela Sloss-Vento, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed presents the history of LULAC in a new light, restoring its early twentieth-century context.
Cynthia Orozco also provides evidence that perceptions of LULAC as a petite bourgeoisie, assimilationist, conservative, anti-Mexican, anti-working class organization belie the realities of the group's early activism. Supplemented by oral history, this sweeping study probes LULAC's predecessors, such as the Order Sons of America, blending historiography and cultural studies. Against a backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, World War I, gender discrimination, and racial segregation, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed recasts LULAC at the forefront of civil rights movements in America.
Synopsis
Established in south-central New Mexico at the end of World War II, White Sands Missile Range is the largest overland military reserve in the western hemisphere. It was the site of the first nuclear explosion, the birthplace of the American space program, and the primary site for testing U.S. missile capabilities.
In this environmental history of White Sands Missile Range, Ryan H. Edgington traces the uneasy relationships between the military, the federal government, local ranchers, environmentalists, state game and fish personnel, biologists and ecologists, state and federal political figures, hunters, and tourists after World War IIand#8212;as they all struggled to define and productively use the militarized western landscape. Environmentalists, ranchers, tourists, and other groups joined together to transform the meaning and uses of this region, challenging the authority of the national security state to dictate the environmental and cultural value of a rural American landscape. As a result, White Sands became a locus of competing geographies informed not only by the far-reaching intellectual, economic, and environmental changes wrought by the cold war but also by regional history, culture, and traditions.
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About the Author
Jennifer De Leon is a teacher in the Boston Public Schools district and an instructor at the Grub Street Creative Writing Center. Her writing has appeared in
Ploughshares,
Fourth Genre,
Ms. Magazine,
Poets & Writers,
The Best Womens Travel Writing 2010, and elsewhere.