She is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body traces the history of the Cuban mulata and her association with hips, sensuality and popular dance. It examines how the mulata choreographs her racialised identity through her hips and enacts an embodied theory called hip(g)nosis. By focusing on her living and dancing body in order to flesh out the process of identity formation, this book makes a claim for how subaltern bodies negotiate a cultural identity that continues to mark their bodies on a daily basis. Combining literary and personal narratives with historical and theoretical accounts of Cuban popular dance history, religiosity and culture, this work investigates the power of embodied exchanges: bodies watching, looking, touching and dancing with one another. It sets up a genealogy of how the representations and venerations of the dancing mulata continue to circulate and participate in the volatile political and social economy of contemporary Cuba.

The book speaks to antiquity of black African people as well as the, the backward condition in which black people find themselves today. The book also speaks to the progress black people made during the early years of the 20th century.

"It is a rare thing for me to stand with a book, explicitly about race and equity, that is written by a white person. Why? Because it is a rare thing to encounter a white person who has followed the lead of people of color into their own transformation so deeply that I trust the message coming from their white body. Idelette McVicker has done the work."--Lisa Sharon Harper (from the foreword) As a white Afrikaner woman growing up in South Africa during apartheid, Idelette McVicker was steeped in a community and a church that reinforced racism and shielded her from seeing her neighbors' oppression. But a series of circumstances led her to begin questioning everything she thought was true about her identity, her country, and her faith. Recovering Racists shares McVicker's journey over thirty years and across three continents to shatter the lies of white supremacy embedded deep within her soul. She helps us realize that grappling with the legacy of white supremacy and recovering from racism is lifelong work that requires both inner transformation and societal change. It is for those of us who have hit rock bottom in the human story of race, says McVicker. We must acknowledge our internalized racism, repent of our complicity, and learn new ways of being human. This book invites us on the long, slow journey of healing the past, making things right, changing old stories, and becoming human together. As we work for the liberation of everyone, we also find liberation for ourselves. Each chapter ends with discussion questions.

Ends of Assimilation compares sociological and Chicano/a (Mexican American) literary representations of assimilation. It argues that while Chicano/a literary works engage assimilation in complex, often contradictory ways, they manifest an underlying conviction in literature's productive power. At the same time, Chicano/a literature demonstrates assimilation sociology's inattention to its status as a representational discourse. As twentieth-century sociologists employ the term, assimilation reinscribes as fact the fiction of a unitary national culture, ignores the interlinking of race and gender in cultural formation, and valorizes upward economic mobility as a politically neutral index of success. The study unfolds chronologically, describing how the historical formation of Chicano/a literature confronts the specter of assimilation discourse. It tracks how the figurative, rhetorical, and lyrical power of Chicano/a literary works compels us to compare literary discourse with the self-authorizing empiricism of assimilation sociology. It also challenges presumptions of authenticity on the part of Chicano/a cultural nationalist works, arguing that Chicano/a literature must reckon with cultural dynamism and develop models of relational authenticity to counter essentialist discourses. The book advances these arguments through sustained close readings of canonical and noncanonical figures and gives an account of various moments in the history and institutional development of Chicano/a literature, such as the rise and fall of Quinto Sol Publications, asserting that Chicano/a writers, editors, and publishers have self-consciously sought to acquire and redistribute literary cultural capital.

German Cincinnati Revisited illuminates the major festivities, celebrations, and events throughout the calendar year in the Greater Cincinnati area that reflect the German heritage of the region. It begins with the celebration of Bockfest in March, heralding the end of winter and the beginning of spring, continuing on with chapters on Maifest, German Day, RoeblingFest, Schuetzenfest, Oktoberfest, and German-American Heritage Month. A final chapter covers the German Heritage Museum of Cincinnati.

Following World War II, Puerto Ricans moved to New York in record numbers and joined a community of compatriots who had emigrated decades before or were born in diaspora. In a series of vivid images, Pioneros II: Puerto Ricans in New York City 1948-1998 brings to life their stories and struggles, culture and values, entrepreneurship, and civic, political, and educational gains. The Puerto Rican community's long history and achievements opened pathways for the city's newer Latino immigrant communities.

Black Print Unbound explores the development of the Christian Recorder during and just after the American Civil War. As a study of the official African Methodist Episcopal Church newspaper (a periodical of national reach and scope among free African Americans), Black Print Unbound is thus at once a massive recovery effort of a publication by African Americans for African Americans, a consideration of the nexus of African Americanist inquiry and print culture studies, and an intervention in the study of literatures of the Civil War, faith communities, and periodicals. The book pairs a longitudinal sense of the Recorder's ideological, political, and aesthetic development with the fullest account available of how the physical paper moved from composition to real, traceable subscribers. It builds from this cultural and material history to recover and analyze diverse and often unknown texts published in the Recorder including letters, poems, and a serialized novel-texts that were crucial to the development of African American literature and culture and that challenge our senses of genre, authorship, and community. In this, Black Print Unbound offers a case study for understanding how African Americans inserted themselves in an often-hostile American print culture in the midst of the most complex conflict the young nation had yet seen, and it thus calls for a significant rewriting of our senses of African American-and so American-literary history.

2020 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) Book Award Winner Honorable Mention, Ramirez Family Award for Most Significant Scholarly Book, Texas Institute of Letters, 2019 Managed Migrations examines the concurrent development of a border agricultural industry and changing methods of border enforcement in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas during the past century. Needed at one moment, scorned at others, Mexican agricultural workers have moved back and forth across the US–Mexico border for the past century. In South Texas, Anglo growers’ dreams of creating a modern agricultural empire depended on continuous access to Mexican workers. While this access was officially regulated by immigration laws and policy promulgated in Washington, DC, in practice the migration of Mexican labor involved daily, on-the-ground negotiations among growers, workers, and the US Border Patrol. In a very real sense, these groups set the parameters of border enforcement policy. Managed Migrations examines the relationship between immigration laws and policy and the agricultural labor relations of growers and workers in South Texas and El Paso during the 1940s and 1950s. Cristina Salinas argues that immigration law was mainly enacted not in embassies or the halls of Congress but on the ground, as a result of daily decisions by the Border Patrol that growers and workers negotiated and contested. She describes how the INS devised techniques to facilitate high-volume yearly deportations and shows how the agency used these enforcement practices to manage the seasonal agricultural labor migration across the border. Her pioneering research reveals the great extent to which immigration policy was made at the local level, as well as the agency of Mexican farmworkers who managed to maintain their mobility and kinship networks despite the constraints of grower paternalism and enforcement actions by the Border Patrol.