The University of Arizona Press

In Indigenous Genres of the Human, scholar Gabriela Raquel Ríos considers how Latina/o/x communities engage in the ethical reclamation of indigeneity. Through case studies that include testimonios and other Indigenous storytelling practices, Ríos reveals how cultural logics of colonization continue to shape—and often constrain—understandings of indigeneity across Latin America and in the United States. Rather than reinforcing binaries defined by settler colonialism, Ríos proposes a framework that centers community knowledge and grounded practices.

Excavating narrative memories, 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. Author Thania Muñoz D. looks at immigrant experiences impacted by a prism of social and political factors, including free trade agreements, drug trafficking, political violence, massive foreign debt, and economic dependency.

Contentious Citizenship reshapes how we understand belonging, identity, and political participation in the context of migration. Drawing on decades of Salvadoran activism from the 1980s solidarity movement to the post–civil war era, 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.

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. Soto argues that these deaths should be understood as structural homicides and that the forensic neglect they face is a form of ongoing violence.

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 vis-à-vis different political and social categories.

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. The book is about 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. Edelina M. Burciaga examines how state laws and policies in California and Georgia shape the pathways to adulthood for these individuals.

For more than four generations, Salvadorans have made themselves at home in the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and have transformed the region, contributing their labor, ingenuity, and culture to the making of a thriving but highly neglected and overlooked community. In Avocado Dreams, Ana Patricia Rodríguez draws from her own positionality as a Salvadoran transplant to examine the construction of the unique Salvadoran cultural imaginary made in the greater D.C. area.

Community voices are often an underrepresented aspect of our historical and cultural knowledge of the U.S. Southwest. In meXicana Roots and Routes, editors Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez and Anita Huízar-Hernández gather established and emerging scholars to draw upon their rootedness in the U.S. Southwest and U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The meXicana contributors use personal and scholarly inquiry to discuss what it means to cultivate spaces of belonging, navigate language policies, and explore and excavate silences in various spaces, among other important themes.