A compelling blend of art history, social analysis, and personal testimony, "Creative Collectives" presents a new paradigm for understanding Chicana/o studies. By following the artistic and ideological journeys of two groups of northern California Chicana artists, MarA-a Ochoa argues that the women involved in these collectives created complex images whose powerful visual social commentary sprang from the daily experiences of their lives.

Ochoa's artistic narrative first focuses on Mujeres Muralistas, a pathbreaking San Francisco group of mural painters organized in the early 1970s at the height of the Chicana/o Movement. The story then turns its attention to Co-Madres Artistas, a group of artists who came together in the 1990s after spending decades tending their families, becoming successful in their careers, and launching key Chicana/o cultural institutions in the Sacramento Valley. Ochoa tells the stories of the individual members of these collectives to show how they combined art and activism.

Through an innovative application of oral history interviews, a fascinating compilation of individual and collective stories emerges. Creative Collectives is notable for its skillful weaving of personal recollections, representational analysis of mural and easel painting, and social movement narration.

In this audacious book, Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier explores how listening has been central to the production of notions of language, music, voice, and sound that determine the politics of life. Drawing primarily from nineteenth-century Colombian sources, Ochoa Gautier locates sounds produced by different living entities at the juncture of the human and nonhuman. Her "acoustically tuned" analysis of a wide array of texts reveals multiple debates on the nature of the aural. These discussions were central to a politics of the voice harnessed in the service of the production of different notions of personhood and belonging. In Ochoa Gautier's groundbreaking work, Latin America and the Caribbean emerge as a historical site where the politics of life and the politics of expression inextricably entangle the musical and the linguistic, knowledge and the sensorial.

Shout Out was born of the hope that exists when women reach out to one another. Included are critical examinations, creative nonfiction, and poetry that explore a range of responses to the injustices that women worldwide sustain in their daily lives: physical abuse, murder, rape, poverty, and psychological terror. Many of the contributors are living proof of the remarkable and inspiring work that individuals and organizations are doing to end war, rape, murder, slavery, sex trade, domestic violence, poverty, and other forms of oppression. Others chose to share their struggles, pain, and knowledge in order to educate and change the way women are maltreated. Shout Out seeks to answer many questions, among them: How do so many women survive the violence of their daily lives? Where do they find hope? How can this violence still occur? This work gives voice to women whose stories are equally important they are difficult to fathom. The goal of collecting these expressions together is to open the dialogue and acknowledge the wrongdoing, and in so doing find out how we might enact change.