The University of Arizona Press

Central American Women in Diaspora by Karina Alma and Ester E. Hernández focuses on Central American women’s voices within the growing narrative of the Central American diaspora. It provides a tapestry of testimonios—from grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and sisters—who explore what it means to be Central American women in the United States. An intervention that centers gendered experiences and challenges oppressive structures, this volume celebrates the solidarity, cultural memory, and healing found within transnational ties.

Excavating narrative memories, Thania Muñoz looks at immigrant experiences impacted by a prism of social and political factors. Across Canons examines literary allusions to a classic Latin American canon that resurface in the work of Latin American writers who live and work in the United States. The immigrant literature of Edmundo Paz Soldán, Alberto Fuguet, and Cristina Rivera Garza from the late 1990s and early 2000s provides an important glimpse into representations of Latin America’s relationship with the United States and how immigration has shaped it.

Border Afterlives begins with the undocumented individuals who die crossing the U.S.-Mexico border—deaths that are both preventable and politically produced. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic, participatory, and community-engaged research, author Gabriella Soto examines the postmortem journeys of these migrants through the fragmented infrastructure of medicolegal death investigation in the U.S. Southwest. She reveals how the state’s deterrence-based border policies not only generate death but also fail to provide adequate care for the dead.

Contentious Citizenship reshapes how we understand belonging, identity, and political participation in the context of migration. Drawing on decades of Salvadoran activism, Arely M. Zimmerman offers a powerful ethnographic account of how migrants challenge exclusionary state practices and redefine citizenship on their own terms using transnational networks and revolutionary politics that transcend borders. Zimmerman’s work honors the ingenuity and resilience of Salvadoran activists and invites readers to consider what it means to belong.

Forging a Mexican People shows how illustrated print culture helped to construct and deconstruct versions of “a people” in postrevolutionary Mexico. Through meticulous research, Pablo Zavala uncovers the ways photographers, graphic artists, writers, and activists used print culture to challenge hegemonic conceptions of state-guided narratives and forge alternative collective subjectivities. This book offers a fresh perspective on the sociopolitical landscape of postrevolutionary Mexico, revealing how cultural artifacts simultaneously crafted and reflected the people.

Life Undocumented captures the compelling stories of Latinx undocumented young adults growing up and living in two distinct sociopolitical contexts: California, which provides legal pathways into higher education for undocumented youth, and Georgia, which does not. Edelina M. Burciaga examines how undocumented young adults in these two contexts navigate the pathway to and through adulthood, and the powerful role state laws and policies play in shaping their prospects for social mobility and their sense of belonging.