Hispanic Heritage Month

Bestselling author Julissa Arce calls for a celebration of our uniqueness, our origins, our heritage, and the beauty of the differences that make us Americans in this powerful polemic against the myth that assimilation leads to happiness and belonging for immigrants. "You sound like a white girl." These were the words spoken to Julissa by a high school crush as she struggled to find her place in America. As a brown immigrant from Mexico, assimilation had been demanded of her since the moment she set foot in San Antonio, Texas, in 1994. She'd spent so much time getting rid of her accent so no one could tell English was her second language that in that moment she felt those words--you sound like a white girl?--were a compliment. As a child, she didn't yet understand that assimilating to "American" culture really meant imitating "white" America--that sounding like a white girl was a racist idea meant to tame her, change her, and make her small. She ran the race, completing each stage, but never quite fit in, until she stopped running altogether. In this dual polemic and manifesto, Julissa dives into and tears apart the lie that assimilation leads to belonging. She combs through history and her own story to break down this myth, arguing that assimilation is a moving finish line designed to keep Black and brown Americans and immigrants chasing racist American ideals. She talks about the Lie of Success, the Lie of Legality, the Lie of Whiteness, and the Lie of English--each promising that if you obtain these things, you will reach acceptance and won't be an outsider anymore. Julissa deftly argues that these demands leave her and those like her in a purgatory--neither able to secure the power and belonging within whiteness nor find it in the community and cultures whiteness demands immigrants and people of color leave behind. In You Sound Like a White Girl, Julissa offers a bold new promise: Belonging only comes through celebrating yourself, your history, your culture, and everything that makes you uniquely you. Only in turning away from the white gaze can we truly make America beautiful. An America where difference is celebrated, heritage is shared and embraced, and belonging is for everyone. Through unearthing veiled history and reclaiming her own identity, Julissa shows us how to do this.

A stunning bilingual, illustrated, and photographic account of a celebrated Mexican tradition The lively Mexican holiday of Dia de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) brings together sorrow and laughter, drawing from indigenous traditions of celebrating one's ancestors and loved ones who have been lost. It's a day of serenity, family, and exuberant creativity, where sugar and skulls can exist side by side. In this bilingual book, beloved Mexican art and culture magazine Artes de México creates a stunning written, illustrated, and photographic account that takes readers through the tradition's origins, its history and evolution, and the many ways it is celebrated today. Alongside the visually stunning displays of altars, cemeteries, costumes, and festivities, a group of renowned Mexican writers has contributed essays that cover topics including the holiday's rural and urban distinctions, occult ancestry, and indigenous rituals. Their words are imbued with spectacular personal significance--and impressive academic rigor--as they recount local legends, family traditions, and tales of life, death, and wandering souls.

An insightful investigation of how and why the two major political parties have failed to appeal to the Latino vote--the largest ethnic voting group in the country--and the impact it will have on American democracy and politics for decades to come. In 2020, Latinos became the second largest ethnic voting group in the country. They make up the largest plurality of residents in the most populous states in the union, as well as the fastest segment of the most important swing states in the US Electoral College. Fitting neither the stereotype of the aggrieved minority voter nor the traditional assimilating immigrant group, Latinos are challenging both political parties' notions of race, religious beliefs, economic success, and the American dream. Given their exploding numbers--and their growing ability to determine the fate of local, state, and national elections--you'd think the two major political parties would understand Latino voters. After all, their emergence on the national scene is not a new phenomenon. But they still don't. Republicans, not because of their best efforts but rather despite them, are just beginning to see a movement of Latinos toward the GOP. Democrats, for the moment, still win a commanding share of the Latino vote, but that share is dwindling fast. Now, in The Latino Century, veteran political consultant Mike Madrid uses thirty years of research and campaign experience at some of the highest levels on both sides of the aisle to address what might be the most critical questions of our time: Will the rise of Latino voters continue to foment the hyper-partisan and explosive tribalism of our age or will they usher in a new pluralism that advances the arc of social progress? How and why are both political parties so uniquely unprepared for the coming wave of Latino votes? And what must each party do to win those votes? By answering these questions, The Latino Century explores the true meaning of America at a time of rapid cultural change, the founding principles of self-government and individual responsibility, and one man's journey through a political party that has turned itself inside out.

"A perfect representation of Latino diversity" (The Washington Post), LatinoLand draws from hundreds of interviews and prodigious research to give us both a vibrant portrait and the little-known history of our largest and fastest-growing minority, in "a work of prophecy, sympathy, and courage" (Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author). LatinoLand is an exceptional, all-encompassing overview of Hispanic America based on personal interviews, deep research, and Marie Arana's life experience as a Latina. At present, Latinos comprise twenty percent of the US population, a number that is growing. By 2050, census reports project that one in every three Americans will claim Latino heritage. But Latinos are not a monolith. They do not represent a single group. The largest groups are Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Salvadorans, and Cubans. Each has a different cultural and political background. Puerto Ricans, for example, are US citizens, whereas some Mexican Americans never immigrated because the US-Mexico border shifted after the US invasion of 1848, incorporating what is now the entire southwest of the United States. Cubans came in two great waves: those escaping communism in the early years of Castro, many of whom were professionals and wealthy, and those permitted to leave in the Mariel boat lift twenty years later, representing some of the poorest Cubans, including prisoners. As LatinoLand shows, Latinos were some of the earliest immigrants to what is now the US--some of them arriving in the 1500s. They are racially diverse--a random infusion of white, Black, indigenous, and Asian. Once overwhelmingly Catholic, they are becoming increasingly Protestant and Evangelical. They range from domestic workers and day laborers to successful artists, corporate CEOs, and US senators. Formerly solidly Democratic, they now vote Republican in growing numbers. They are as culturally varied as any immigrants from Europe or Asia. Marie Arana draws on her own experience as the daughter of an American mother and Peruvian father who came to the US at age nine, straddling two worlds, as many Latinos do. "Thorough, accessible, and necessary" (Ms. magazine), LatinoLand unabashedly celebrates Latino resilience and character and shows us why we must understand the fastest-growing minority in America.

A powerful and challenging look at what "success" and belonging mean in America, through the eyes of Latino high schoolers striving toward community- and care-focused futures.   This book challenges dominant representations of the so-called American Dream, those "patriotic" narratives that focus on personal achievement as the way to become an American. This narrative misaligns with the lived experience of many first- and second-generation Latino immigrant youth who thrive because of the nurture of their loved ones. A story of social reproduction and change, The Succeeders illustrates how ideological struggles over who belongs in this country, who is valuable, and who is an American are worked out by young people through their ordinary acts of striving in school and caring for friends and family.   In this eye-opening ethnography of education, Andrea Flores examines the experiences of everyday high school student, some undocumented, some citizen, and some from families with mixed legal status. She tracks how the Succeeders--Latino immigrant-origin youth in a Tennessee college access program--leverage educational success toward national belonging for themselves, their family, friends, and community. Succeeders strive not for personal gain but because they are committed to reinvesting in their communities and expanding their capacity to care for extended families and friends. These young people come to redefine national belonging in the United States by both conforming to and contesting the myth of an American identity rooted in individual betterment. Despite being the focus of xenophobic ire, the Succeeders challenge the boundaries of national inclusion. Their efforts demonstrate that meaningful national belonging can be based in our actions of caring for others. Ultimately, The Succeeders emphasizes the vital role that immigrants play throughout the United States in strengthening the social fabric of society, helping communities everywhere to thrive.

Latinos across the United States are redefining identities, pushing boundaries, and awakening politically in powerful and surprising ways. Many-Afrolatino, indigenous, Muslim, queer and undocumented, living in large cities and small towns-are voices who have been chronically overlooked in how the diverse population of almost sixty million Latinos in the U.S. has been represented. No longer. In this empowering cross-country travelogue, journalist and activist Paola Ramos embarks on a journey to find the communities of people defining the controversial term, "Latinx." She introduces us to the indigenous Oaxacans who rebuilt the main street in a post-industrial town in upstate New York, the "Las Poderosas" who fight for reproductive rights in Texas, the musicians in Milwaukee whose beats reassure others of their belonging, as well as drag queens, environmental activists, farmworkers, and the migrants detained at our border. Drawing on intensive field research as well as her own personal story, Ramos chronicles how "Latinx" has given rise to a sense of collectivity and solidarity among Latinos unseen in this country for decades. A vital and inspiring work of reportage, Finding Latinx calls on all of us to expand our understanding of what it means to be Latino and what it means to be American. The first step towards change, writes Ramos, is for us to recognize who we are.

Social justice work is more crucial than ever, but it can be physically and emotionally draining. Longtime activist Denise Collazo offers three keys to help Hispanic women keep their focus, morale, and energy high. Winner of the gold medal at the International Latino Book Awards for Best Latina-Themed Book and Best Self-Transformational Book! Doing the work of social change is hard. Waking up every day to take on the biggest challenges of our time can be overwhelming, and sometimes progress is hard to see. She understands that Latina and all women of color activists do their best work when they are thriving, not simply surviving. Denise Padín Collazo has been there. She is the first Latina, the first woman of color, and the first woman period to raise a family and stay in the work of community organizing at Faith in Action, an international progressive network of 3,000 congregations and 2 million members. Drawing on her own experiences of triumph and failure, and those of other Latina activists, Collazo lays out three keys to thriving in the movement for social change: leading into your vision, living into the fullest version of yourself, and loving past negatives that hold you back. She also warns about the three signs that you may be surrendering: wishing for a future reality to emerge, wondering where your limits are, and waiting for permission and answers to come from others.  Using this framework, Collazo offers wise and compassionate advice on some of the most important leadership challenges facing Latina activists. She explains how you can integrate family and work, step out of the background and claim your leadership potential, confront anti-Blackness in your own culture, keep focused on your ultimate purpose, and raise the necessary resources to keep fighting for justice. This honest, practical, and inspirational book will help Latina activists to burn bright, not burn out.

The election of Donald Trump has called attention to the border wall and anti-Mexican discourses and policies, yet these issues are not new. Building Walls puts the recent calls to build a border wall along the US-Mexico border into a larger social and historical context. This book describes the building of walls, symbolic and physical, between Americans and Mexicans, as well as the consequences that these walls have in the lives of immigrants and Latin communities in the United States. The book is divided into three parts: categorical thinking, anti-immigrant speech, and immigration as an experience. The sections discuss how the idea of the nation-state itself constructs borders, how political strategy and racist ideologies reinforce the idea of irreconcilable differences between whites and Latinos, and how immigrants and their families overcome their struggles to continue living in America. They analyze historical precedents, normative frameworks, divisive discourses, and contemporary daily interactions between whites and Latin individuals. It discusses the debates on how to name people of Latin American origin and the framing of immigrants as a threat and contrasts them to the experiences of migrants and border residents. Building Walls makes a theoretical contribution by showing how different dimensions work together to create durable inequalities between U.S. native whites, Latinos, and newcomers. It provides a sophisticated analysis and empirical description of racializing and exclusionary processes. View a separate blog for the book here: https://dornsife.usc.edu/csii/blog-building-walls-excluding-people/

As the largest and youngest minority group in the United States, the 60 million Latinos living in the U.S. represent the second-largest concentration of Hispanic people in the entire world, after Mexico. Needless to say, the population of Latinos in the U.S. is causing a shift, not only changing the demographic landscape of the country, but also impacting national culture, politics, and spoken language. While Latinos comprise a diverse minority group - with various religious beliefs, political ideologies, and social values - commentators on both sides of the political divide have lumped Latino Americans into a homogenous group that is often misunderstood. Latinos in the United States: What Everyone Need to Know® provides a wide-ranging, multifaceted exploration of Latino American history and culture, as well as the forces shaping this minority group in the U.S. From exploring the origins of the term "Latino" and examining what constitutes Latin America, to tracing topical issues like DREAMers, the mass incarceration of Latino males, and the controversial relationship between Latin America and the United States, Ilan Stavans seeks to understand the complexities and unique position of Latino Americans. Throughout he breaks down the various subgroups within the Latino minority (Mexican-Americans, Dominican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, Puerto Ricans on the mainland, and so on), and the degree to which these groups constitute - or don't - a homogenous community, their history, and where their future challenges lie.Stavans, one of the world's foremost authorities on global Hispanic civilization, sees Latino culture as undergoing dramatic changes as a result of acculturation, changes that are fostering a new "mestizo" identity that is part Hispanic and part American. However, Latinos living in the United States are also impacting American culture. As Ilan Stavans argues, no other minority group will have a more decisive impact on the future of the United States.

Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano has described U.S. and Latin American culture as continually hobbled by amnesia--unable, or unwilling, to remember the influence of mestizos and indigenous populations. In Mestizos Come Home! author Robert Con Davis-Undiano documents the great awakening of Mexican American and Latino culture since the 1960s that has challenged this omission in collective memory. He maps a new awareness of the United States as intrinsically connected to the broader context of the Americas. At once native and new to the American Southwest, Mexican Americans have "come home" in a profound sense: they have reasserted their right to claim that land and U.S. culture as their own. Mestizos Come Home! explores key areas of change that Mexican Americans have brought to the United States. These areas include the recognition of mestizo identity, especially its historical development across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the re-emergence of indigenous relationships to land; and the promotion of Mesoamerican conceptions of the human body. Clarifying and bridging critical gaps in cultural history, Davis-Undiano considers important artifacts from the past and present, connecting the casta (caste) paintings of eighteenth-century Mexico to modern-day artists including John Valadez, Alma López, and Luis A. Jiménez Jr. He also examines such community celebrations as Day of the Dead, Cinco de Mayo, and lowrider car culture as examples of mestizo influence on mainstream American culture. Woven throughout is the search for meaning and understanding of mestizo identity. A large-scale landmark account of Mexican American culture, Mestizos Come Home! shows that mestizos are essential to U.S. national culture. As an argument for social justice and a renewal of America's democratic ideals, this book marks a historic cultural homecoming.

This timely edited collection presents a holistic and biopsychosocial analysis of LGBTQ People of Color well-being, focused on heart, brain, and mental health, and employs a unique incorporation of minority stress, intersectionality, and allostatic load frameworks. Bringing together established and emerging academics, its authors present a critical analysis of the latest research that encompasses the study of both risk and resilience factors in LGBTQ People of Color health. Across the book, they highlight the precise nature of the behavioral health disparities experienced by these communities, but further, they reveal the unique roles of intersectional discrimination and structural stigma as mechanisms for these disparities. With chapters also dedicated to federal policies and public health, this multidisciplinary work marks a seminal contribution that will pave the way for further advances in research, theory, and practice. It offers a valuable resource on an understudied population that will appeal to researchers, practitioners and policy makers in the fields of health psychology, public health, epidemiology, sociology, health sciences and medicine.

Citizenship, along with legality and rights, holds varied meanings for Latinx youth coming of age in the United States. Through an ethnography, Growing Up Latinx documents how Latinx reproduce and challenge meanings of citizenship as they forge opportunities to develop and enact their sociopolitical agency within school, family and communities.

How workers navigate race, gender, and class in the food service industry Two unequal worlds of work exist within the upscale restaurant scene of Los Angeles. White, college-educated servers operate in the front of the house--also known as the public areas of the restaurant--while Latino immigrants toil in the back of the house and out of customer view. In Front of the House, Back of the House, Eli Revelle Yano Wilson shows us what keeps these workers apart, exploring race, class, and gender inequalities in the food service industry. Drawing on research at three different high-end restaurants in Los Angeles, Wilson highlights why these inequalities persist in the twenty-first century, pointing to discriminatory hiring and supervisory practices that ultimately grant educated whites access to the most desirable positions. Additionally, he shows us how workers navigate these inequalities under the same roof, making sense of their jobs, their identities, and each other in a world that reinforces their separateness. Front of the House, Back of the House takes us behind the scenes of the food service industry, providing a window into the unequal lives of white and Latino restaurant workers.

How Latinx kids and their undocumented parents struggle in the informal street food economy Street food markets have become wildly popular in Los Angeles--and behind the scenes, Latinx children have been instrumental in making these small informal businesses grow. In Kids at Work, Emir Estrada shines a light on the surprising labor of these young workers, providing the first ethnography on the participation of Latinx children in street vending. Drawing on dozens of interviews with children and their undocumented parents, as well as three years spent on the streets shadowing families at work, Estrada brings attention to the unique set of hardships Latinx youth experience in this occupation. She also highlights how these hardships can serve to cement family bonds, develop empathy towards parents, encourage hard work, and support children--and their parents--in their efforts to make a living together in the United States. Kids at Work provides a compassionate, up-close portrait of Latinx children, detailing the complexities and nuances of family relations when children help generate income for the household as they peddle the streets of LA alongside their immigrant parents.

This book presents a bilingual introduction to five Spanish-speaking countries and one commonwealth: Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Puerto Rico. Each chapter combines simple, tantalizing recipes with general and cultural information, suggestions for additional learning opportunities, vocabulary, a short fiction reading list, and Internet resources.