Dialogues Across Diasporas focuses on the shared historical legacies of members of the Africana and Latina diasporas, and the cultural impact of the African diaspora in the Americas. This book seeks to emphasize connections rather than divisions among different migratory ethnic communities via a reconfiguration of borders and ethnic identities. This collection of essays has three major goals: first, to foreground shared themes and strategies in the literary productions of women of Africana...

Central to a transformational approach to conflict is the idea that conflicts must be viewed as embedded within broader relational patterns, and social and discursive structures—and must be addressed as such. This implies the need for systemic change at generative levels, in order to create genuine transformation at the level of particular conflicts. Central, also, to this book is the idea that the origins of transformation can be momentary, or situational, small-scale or micro-level, as w...

In 1836, the murder of a young prostitute made headlines in New York City and around the country, inaugurating a sex-and-death sensationalism in news reporting that haunts us today. Patricia Cline Cohen goes behind these first lurid accounts to reconstruct the story of the mysterious victim, Helen Jewett.From her beginnings as a servant girl in Maine, Helen Jewett refashioned herself, using four successive aliases, into a highly paid courtesan. She invented life stories for herself...

The first Latin American actor to become a superstar, Ramon Novarro was for years one of Hollywood's top actors. Born Ram¢n Samaniego to a prominent Mexican family, he arrived in America in 1916, a refugee from civil wars. By the mid-1920s, he had become one of MGM's biggest box office attractions, starring in now-classic films, including The Student Prince, Mata Hari, and the original version of Ben-Hur. He shared the screen with the era's top leading ladies, su...

Is it time to take a break from feminism? In this pathbreaking book, Janet Halley reassesses the place of feminism in the law and politics of sexuality. She argues that sexuality involves deeply contested and clashing realities and interests, and that feminism helps us understand only some of them. To see crucial dimensions of sexuality that feminism does not reveal--the interests of gays and lesbians to be sure, but also those of men, and of constituencies and values beyond the realm of s...

John L. Kessell’s Spain in the Southwest presents a fast-paced, abundantly illustrated history of the Spanish colonies that became the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California. With an eye for human interest, Kessell tells the story of New Spain’s vast frontier--today’s American Southwest and Mexican North--which for two centuries served as a dynamic yet disjoined periphery of the Spanish empire.Chronicling the period of Hispanic activity from the time of Colum...

Fleshing the Spirit brings together established and new writers exploring the relationships between the physical body, the spirit and spirituality, and social justice activism. Examining the complex and dynamic connections among these concepts, the writers emphasize the value of “flesh and blood experience” as a site of knowledge. They argue that spirituality—something quite different from institutional religious practice—can heal the mind/body split and set the stage for social c...

Nilo Cruz is the most produced Cuban American playwright in the United States and was the first dramatist of Hispanic descent to receive the Pulitzer Prize. In his plays, Cruz almost always journeys back to Cuba, even when the play is not set there. Cruz is a sensualist, a conjurer of mysterious voyages and luxuriant landscapes. He is a poetic chronicler, a documentarian of the presence of Latin people in American life. He conveys the strength and persistence of the Cuban spirit through a ...

In Homegrown, cultural critics bell hooks and Amalia Mesa-Bains reflect on the innate solidarity between Black and Latino culture. Riffing on everything from home and family to multiculturalism and the mass media, hooks and Mesa-Bains invite readers to re-examine and confront the polarizing mainstream discourse about Black-Latino relationships that is too often negative in its emphasis on political splits between people of color. A work of activism through dialogue, Homegrown

THROUGH THE EYES OF REBEL WOMEN: The Young Lords, 1969-1976 is the first account of women members — a "story within a story" told from the inside out. The Young Lords Organization emerged in the late sixties to fight poverty, racial and gender inequality, and the colonial status of Puerto Rico. Women joined to build a people's movement for justice and fought the "revolution within the revolution" believing that women's equality was inseparable from the society's progress as a whole.

Contributing to feminist approaches to masculinities, this book examines men's contextual experiences of masculine identity. Drawing on new data which compares men as they move across and between public and domestic spaces, it explores the implications of this for the nature of contemporary masculinity.

The first book-length study of women's involvement in the Chicano Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, ¡Chicana Power! tells the powerful story of the emergence of Chicana feminism within student and community-based organizations throughout southern California and the Southwest. As Chicanos engaged in widespread protest in their struggle for social justice, civil rights, and self-determination, women in el movimiento became increasingly militant about the gap between the...