Bøger i American Crossroads serien

Flamboyant zoot suit culture, with its ties to fashion, jazz and swing music, jitterbug and Lindy Hop dancing, unique patterns of speech, and even risque experimentation with gender and sexuality, captivated the country's youth in the 1940s. The Power of the Zoot is the first book to give national consideration to this famous phenomenon. Providing a new history of youth culture based on rare, in-depth interviews with former zoot-suiters, Luis Alvarez explores race, region, and the politics of culture in urban America during World War II. He argues that Mexican American and African American youths, along with many nisei and white youths, used popular culture to oppose accepted modes of youthful behavior, the dominance of white middle-class norms, and expectations from within their own communities.

"This highly enjoyable and important book is groundbreaking for its intellectual argument and methodological interventions. I deeply appreciate Charlotte Karem Albrecht's insistence on intersectionality to underline acts of transitory entrepreneurship and the approach of 'historical-grounded imagining' that explores possibilities of queerness and anxiety, as well as pleasure."--Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, coauthor of Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress "Possible Histories brings an innovative queer analytic to the history of Arab Americans, inquiring into the intimate relationships among itinerant peddlers. Uncovering the role of sexuality in racializing Arab Americans, it challenges respectability politics--the drive to prove normativity to belong. Karem Albrecht brilliantly upends reigning paradigms in Arab American history."--Evelyn Alsultany, author of Broken: The Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion "Possible Histories presents a nuanced, fresh understanding of peddling by foregrounding intimacy as a rubric through which to queer normative assumptions that have typically burdened the Arab American archive. Karem Albrecht's groundbreaking 'queer ecology of peddling' carves space for recuperating the dynamic, life-giving possibilities that thrived in peddling networks, despite the raced/gendered/sexualized anxieties competing to stamp them out. Opening up new vistas to the past, Possible Histories also beckons us to dream about the future--it is a true gift."--Amira Jarmakani, Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, San Diego State University "A deeply personal queer history that is brisk, unsettling, and brimming with insights. Puzzling through gossip, shame, and scandal, Karem Albrecht tugs upon poetry, stories, and beguiling photographs and offers an astounding kaleidoscope of Arab American women and men in the twentieth century."--Nayan Shah, author of Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes "Possible Histories is a rich and insightful contribution to queer theorizing on kinship, archives, and diaspora. In this moving tribute to the challenges of navigating the traps of recovery work with the all-too-human desires to know and to connect the past with the present, Karem Albrecht traverses the maze of memory and family with care and thoughtfulness. Just as important is the attention to transient and contingent laboring as a site of queer-becoming untethered from identity."--Jasbir Puar, Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Rutgers University

Latinos have been a significant presence in organized baseball from the beginning. This study on Latinos and professional baseball since the 1880s tells a story of the men who negotiated the color line at every turn - passing as 'Spanish' in the major leagues or seeking respect and acceptance in the Negro leagues.

"This is a phenomenal book. Archipelago of Resettlement takes seriously the implication of Indigenous calls for place-based scholarship to refugee and migration studies and it ups the ante by engaging the accountabilities such calls demand. Gandhi exemplifies the possibilities of reading 'archipelagically' across Indigenous and Asian American studies, across settler colonies, and against US militarism and empire."--Jodi A Byrd, author of The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism "Exploring with great rigor the refugee settlers' vexed relationship to Indigenous sovereignty, this strikingly original study demonstrates for us ways of knowing and connection otherwise--within, across, and beyond the incommensurable structural divides and multiple belongings. Deeply inspiring, Gandhi's archipelagic methodology elucidates compelling political possibilities for decolonial futures." --Lisa Yoneyama, author of Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes "This brilliant book interweaves archival research, site visits, and oral interviews to map and grapple with the entangled histories of Vietnamese refugee resettlement, Indigenous displacement in Guam and Palestine, and the settler colonialism of the United States and Israel. Throughout, an archipelagic epistemology of the 'nước' is poetically articulated, an inspiring vision that calls forth refugee futurity and decolonial solidarities."--Craig Santos Perez, author of Navigating CHamoru Poetry: Indigeneity, Aesthetics, and Decolonization "Once dispersed across seemingly unconnected geographies of US empire, the aesthetic and archival sands, pebbles, and stones of the refugee settler condition are brilliantly gathered herein. The result is an archipelagic imaginary at once moved by and contributing to the confluence of today's most powerful decolonial currents."--Keith Feldman, author of A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America "A thought-provoking and truly original way of 'seeing' Vietnamese diasporic resettlement. Gandhi convincingly juxtaposes two numerically small and seemingly marginal populations and in the process raises universal questions of interest to scholars in refugee studies and US empire."--Jana K. Lipman, author of In Camps: Vietnamese Refugees, Asylum Seekers, and Repatriates

"Exciting and original, this book is a significant contribution at the forefront of US history and immigration history. It examines the displacement and erasure of people of color in the nation-building project of white Americans beyond the colonial period. Using never-before-seen immigration officials' communications and correspondence, the memoirs of a physician hired on the deportation trains, employee records, train itineraries, and passenger lists, this book even opens up the experience of deportees as well as those of the middle managers and agents who made the state real."--Torrie Hester, author of Deportation: The Origins of U.S. Policy "This sprawling, beautifully written, and copiously researched book illuminates the experience of deportation across space and time. Organized into two cross-continental train journeys, Blue's account synthesizes world histories of revolution and economic exigency with the evolution of the deportation process. Important scholarship and great reading!"--Rachel Ida Buff, author of Immigration and the Political Economy of Home "This book describes one of the first--but little known--steps taken by the federal government to systematize the deportation of immigrants who violated the rules governing their lives and work in the United States. This first step illustrates how and on what grounds the criminalization and incarceration of immigrants began. I know of no other competing works. This is, I believe, the first study of deportation trains, and it's very important and original as such."--Donna Gabaccia, coauthor of Gender and International Migration: From the Slavery Era to the Global Age "The Deportation Express is one of the best books on the history of migration I have ever read. It is fascinating, powerful, important, and highly original. Examining more than the history of deportation, Ethan Blue uses the device of the deportation train's stops on its circular route around the United States to get at the history of race, state formation, immigration, citizenship, and sexuality in the Progressive Era."--Cindy Hahamovitch, author of No Man's Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor "A harrowing chronicle of the rise of the US deportation machine fired by Pullman car prison trains and telegraph wires that braided the continent, revealing the intimate distress of migrants from across the globe who sought to remain but instead were rounded up and expelled." -- Nayan Shah, author of Refusal to Eat, Stranger Intimacy, and Contagious Divides "This evocative story of deportation trains and some of the nearly one million people forced to board them in the early twentieth century provides a detailed account of the importance of the railroad for the emergence of the United States as a key player in the global capitalist economy. The insights gleaned from these analyses will be useful to all students and scholars of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and global migration." -- Tanya Golash-Boza, author of Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor, and Global Capitalism "Ethan Blue reveals how deportation infrastructures, especially the train, enabled the conjoined growth and consolidation of the deportation state and carceral state, knitting together different scales of government and connecting vast spatial expanses. As it follows the tendrils of movement and social control, The Deportation Express brings forward the histories of the state and corporate agents who made deportations possible and the immigrants ensnared in the trains' cages and deemed undesirable for their race, political beliefs, poverty, neurodiversity, disability, and more. A stirring achievement that should be required reading." --A. Naomi Paik, author of Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary and Rightlessness

Structured to meet employers' needs for low-wage farm workers, the well-known Bracero Program recruited thousands of Mexicans to perform physical labor in the United States between 1942 and 1964 in exchange for remittances sent back to Mexico. This book uncovers a previously hidden history of transnational family life.

Drawing on social and cultural history, this book shows how, despite Anglo attempts to fix racial categories through Jim Crow laws, converging migrations - particularly those of Mexicans and Creoles - complicated ideas of blackness and whiteness and introduced different understandings about race.

LGBT activism is often imagined as a self-contained struggle, inspired by but set apart from other social movements.Lavender and Redrecounts a far different story: a history of queer radicals who understood their sexual liberation as intertwined with solidarity against imperialism, war, and racism. This politics was born in the late 1960s but survived well past Stonewall, propelling a gay and lesbian left that flourished through the end of the Cold War. The gay and lesbian left found its center in the San Francisco Bay Area, a place where sexual self-determination and revolutionary internationalism converged. Across the 1970s, its activists embraced socialist and women of color feminism and crafted queer opposition to militarism and the New Right. In the Reagan years, they challenged U.S. intervention in Central America, collaborated with their peers in Nicaragua, and mentored the first direct action against AIDS. Bringing together archival research, oral histories, and vibrant images, Emily K. Hobsonrediscovers the radical queer past for a generation of activists today.

Proud to Be an Okie brings to life the influential country music scene that flourished in and around Los Angeles from the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s to the early 1970s. The first work to fully illuminate the political and cultural aspects of this intriguing story, the book takes us from Woody Guthrie's radical hillbilly show on Depression-era radio to Merle Haggard's "e;Okie from Muskogee"e; in the late 1960s. It explores how these migrant musicians and their audiences came to gain a sense of identity through music and mass media, to embrace the New Deal, and to celebrate African American and Mexican American musical influences before turning toward a more conservative outlook. What emerges is a clear picture of how important Southern California was to country music and how country music helped shape the politics and culture of Southern California and of the nation.

Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Fit to Be Citizens? demonstrates how both science and public health shaped the meaning of race in the early twentieth century. Through a careful examination of the experiences of Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles, Natalia Molina illustrates the many ways local health officials used complexly constructed concerns about public health to demean, diminish, discipline, and ultimately define racial groups. She shows how the racialization of Mexican Americans was not simply a matter of legal exclusion or labor exploitation, but rather that scientific discourses and public health practices played a key role in assigning negative racial characteristics to the group. The book skillfully moves beyond the binary oppositions that usually structure works in ethnic studies by deploying comparative and relational approaches that reveal the racialization of Mexican Americans as intimately associated with the relative historical and social positions of Asian Americans, African Americans, and whites. Its rich archival grounding provides a valuable history of public health in Los Angeles, living conditions among Mexican immigrants, and the ways in which regional racial categories influence national laws and practices. Molina's compelling study advances our understanding of the complexity of racial politics, attesting that racism is not static and that different groups can occupy different places in the racial order at different times.

Ranging from Los Angeles to Havana to the Bronx to the U.S.-Mexico border and from klezmer to hip hop to Latin rock, this groundbreaking book injects popular music into contemporary debates over American identity. Josh Kun insists that America is not a single chorus of many voices folded into one, but rather various republics of sound that represent multiple stories of racial and ethnic difference. To this end he covers a range of music and listeners to evoke the ways that popular sounds have expanded our idea of American culture and American identity. Artists as diverse as The Weavers, Cafe Tacuba, Mickey Katz, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Bessie Smith, and Ozomatli reveal that the song of America is endlessly hybrid, heterogeneous, and enriching-a source of comfort and strength for populations who have been taught that their lives do not matter. Kun melds studies of individual musicians with studies of painters such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and of writers such as Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, and Langston Hughes. There is no history of race in the Americas that is not a history of popular music, Kun claims. Inviting readers to listen closely and critically, Audiotopia forges a new understanding of sound that will stoke debates about music, race, identity, and culture for many years to come.

meXicana Encounters charts the dynamic and contradictory representation of Mexicanas and Chicanas in culture. Rosa Linda Fregoso's deft analysis of the cultural practices and symbolic forms that shape social identities takes her across a wide and varied terrain. Among the subjects she considers are the recent murders and disappearances of women in Ciudad Juarez; transborder feminist texts that deal with private, domestic forms of violence; how films like John Sayles's Lone Star re-center white masculinity; and the significance of la familia to the identity of Chicanas/os and how it can subordinate gender and sexuality to masculinity and heterosexual roles. Fregoso's self-reflexive approach to cultural politics embraces the movement for social justice and offers new insights into the ways that racial and gender differences are inscribed in cultural practices.