The recent mass shooting of 22 innocent people in El Paso by a lone White gunman looking to "Kill Mexicans" is not new. It is part of a long, bloody history of anti-Latina/o violence in the United States. Gringo Injustice brings this history to life, shedding critical light on the complex relationship between Latinas/os and the United States’ legal and judicial system. Contributors with first-hand knowledge and experience, including former law enforcement officers, ex-gang members, attorneys, and community activists, share insider perspectives on the issues facing Latinas/os and initiate a critical dialogue on this neglected topic. Essays examine the unauthorized use of deadly force by police and patterned incidents of lynching, hate crimes, gang violence, and racial profiling. The book also highlights the hyper-criminalization of barrio youth and considers wide-ranging implications from the disproportionate imprisonment of Latinas/os. Gringo Injustice provides a comprehensive and powerful look into the Latina/o community’s fraught history with law enforcement and the American judicial system. It is an essential reference for students and scholars interested in intersections between crime and communities of Color, and for use in Sociology, Latino Studies, Ethnic Studies, Chicano Studies, Criminology, and Criminal Justice.

Ordinary Injustice is the unique and riveting story of a young Latino student, Juan Rulfo, with no previous criminal record involved in a domestic violence dispute that quickly morphs into a complex case with ten felonies, multiple enhancements, a “No Bail” order, and a potential life sentence without the possibility of parole. Building from author Alfredo Mirandé’s earlier work Rascuache Lawyer, the account is told by “The Professor,” who led a pro bono rascuache legal defense team comprising the professor, a retired prosecutor, and student interns, working without a budget, office, paralegals, investigators, or support staff. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in race, gender, and criminal injustice and will appeal not only to law scholars and social scientists but to lay readers interested in ethnographic field research, Latinx communities, and racial disparities in the legal system. The case is presented as a series of letters to the author’s fictional alter-ego, Fermina Gabriel, an accomplished lawyer and singer. This narrative device allows the author to present the case as it happens, relaying the challenges and complexities as they occur and drawing the reader in. While Ordinary Injustice deals with important, complicated legal issues and questions that arise in criminal defense work and looks at the case from the time of Juan’s arrest to the preliminary hearing, indictment, pretrial motions, and attempts to obtain a negotiated plea, it is written in nontechnical and engaging language that makes law accessible to the lay reader.

Dr. Weagley tells tales of times past. Academic degrees, business experiences, a military career, a devoted wife, and four wonderful children mix with his imagination to produce saga segues rooted in truth and faith. Some of Dr. Weagleys stories are published and available: SEASCAPE, TRIBE ARPEGGIOS, WALLACE, and JED, each uniquely portraying justice and hope for the foolish, oppressed, and downtrodden. JIM is a continuation of Dr. Weagleys efforts to appreciate those who unnecessarily suffer hardships in life, as if voice for the silenced. Jim, an innocent 20th century protagonist, bounced against fates door, repeatedly. A loving family accidentally abandoned him while an infant barely capable of walking without a stagger. Rogue Apache rescued him from his plight in the 1890 Nebraska tall grass. His rescuers ushered a long march toward perdition salved by Grace administered by the Great Spirit. Jim avoided death, converted precarious situations into opportunities, and stood ultimately before a merciful God in order to receive a deserved blessing for a job well done. Time and circumstance met patience and faith in Jims life, allowing Dr. Weagley to release his latent desire to tell character stories of the strong, gallant, diligent, and the fabled survivors who thrived in the face of distinct adversities. Good and evil still reside side-by-side and only the dreamer can speculate with wonders that capture truth in the shadow shade of a Saving Grace.

Borders cut through not just places but also relationships, politics, economics, and cultures. Eric V. Meeks examines how ethno-racial categories and identities such as Indian, Mexican, and Anglo crystallized in Arizona's borderlands between 1880 and 1980. South-central Arizona is home to many ethnic groups, including Mexican Americans, Mexican immigrants, and semi-Hispanicized indigenous groups such as Yaquis and Tohono O'odham. Kinship and cultural ties between these diverse groups were altered and ethnic boundaries were deepened by the influx of Euro-Americans, the development of an industrial economy, and incorporation into the U.S. nation-state. Old ethnic and interethnic ties changed and became more difficult to sustain when Euro-Americans arrived in the region and imposed ideologies and government policies that constructed starker racial boundaries. As Arizona began to take its place in the national economy of the United States, primarily through mining and industrial agriculture, ethnic Mexican and Native American communities struggled to define their own identities. They sometimes stressed their status as the region's original inhabitants, sometimes as workers, sometimes as U.S. citizens, and sometimes as members of their own separate nations. In the process, they often challenged the racial order imposed on them by the dominant class. Appealing to broad audiences, this book links the construction of racial categories and ethnic identities to the larger process of nation-state building along the U.S.-Mexico border, and illustrates how ethnicity can both bring people together and drive them apart.

The importance of myth, symbol, and image in the Chicano movement and beyond.

In 1929, a Latino community in the borderlands city of Del Rio, Texas, established the first and perhaps only autonomous Mexican American school district in Texas history. How it did so—against a background of institutional racism, poverty, and segregation—is the story Jesús Jesse Esparza tells in Raza Schools, a history of the rise and fall of the San Felipe Independent School District from the end of World War I through the post–civil rights era. The residents of San Felipe, whose roots Esparza traces back to the nineteenth century, faced a Jim Crow society in which deep-seated discrimination extended to education, making biased curriculum, inferior facilities, and prejudiced teachers the norm. Raza Schools highlights how the people of San Felipe harnessed the mechanisms and structures of this discriminatory system to create their own educational institutions, using the courts whenever necessary to protect their autonomy. For forty-two years, the Latino community funded, maintained, and managed its own school system—until 1971, when in an attempt to address school segregation, the federal government forced the San Felipe Independent School District to consolidate with a larger neighboring, mostly white school district. Esparza describes the ensuing clashes—over curriculum, school governance, teachers’ positions, and funding—that challenged Latino autonomy. While focusing on the relationships between Latinos and whites who shared a segregated city, his work also explores the experience of African Americans who lived in Del Rio and attended schools in both districts as a segregated population. Telling the complex story of how territorial pride, race and racism, politics, economic pressures, local control, and the federal government collided in Del Rio, Raza Schools recovers a lost chapter in the history of educational civil rights—and in doing so, offers a more nuanced understanding of race relations, educational politics, and school activism in the US-Mexico borderlands.

This work by one of North America's leading educational theorists and cultural critics culminates a decade of social analyses that focuses on the political economy of schooling, Paulo Freire and literacy education, hip-hop culture, and multicultural education. Peter McLaren also examines the work of Baudrillard as well as Bourdieu's reflexive sociology.Always in McLaren's work is a profound understanding of the relationship among advanced capitalism, the politics of knowledge, and the formation of identity. One of the central themes of this volume is the relationship between the political and the pedagogical for educators, activists, artists, and other cultural workers. McLaren argues that the central project ahead in the struggle for social justice is not so much the politics of diversity as the global decentering and dismantling of whiteness. This volume also contains an interview with the author.