At the outset, Los Arabes (Arabic-speaking individuals) were peddlers, carrying a variety of wares that often included exotic items from the Holy Land. These skilled cross-cultural traders expected to strike it rich in the United States and then return to

As part of the Works Progress Administration during the Depression, two women interviewers, Lou Sage Batchen and Annette Hesch Thorp, gathered womens stories or cuentosfrom many native ancianas to glean vivid details of a way of life now long disappeared.

This award-winning text on New Mexico folklore traditions is now available in a shorter edition.

“This ingenious study . . . will transform how we conceptualize immigration, race, gender, and the histories and boundaries of Arab and Latin America” (Nadine Naber, author of Arab America). Los Angeles is home to the largest population of people of Middle Eastern origin and descent in the United States. Since the late nineteenth century, Syrian and Lebanese migration to Southern California has been intimately connected to and through Latin America. Arab Routes uncovers the stories of this Syrian American community, one both Arabized and Latinized, to reveal important cross-border and multiethnic solidarities in Syrian California. Sarah M. A. Gualtieri reconstructs the early Syrian connections through California, Texas, Mexico, and Lebanon. She reveals the Syrian interests in the defense of the Mexican American teens charged in the 1942 Sleepy Lagoon murder, in actor Danny Thomas's rise to prominence in LA’s Syrian cultural festivals, and in more recent activities of the grandchildren of immigrants to reclaim a sense of Arabness. Gualtieri reinscribes Syrians into Southern California history through her examination of powerful images and texts, augmented with interviews with descendants of immigrants. Telling the story of how Syrians helped forge a global Los Angeles, Arab Routes counters a long-held stereotype of Arabs as outsiders and underscores their longstanding place in American culture and in interethnic coalitions, past and present.

Cipriano Frederico Vigil is the most important performer of traditional Nuevomexicano folk music in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This bilingual panoramic book presents the songs that are his life’s work, spanning half a century of listening, playing, composing, and singing ritual, social, and dance music. New Mexican Folk Music includes much traditional material that has never been seen before or studied by scholars or students. Renowned as a composer, Vigil works in traditional genres such as the romance, the décima, the cuando, and corrido. Like the Mexican group Los Folkloristas with which he apprenticed in the late 1970s, his goal has been to research and master local styles, to introduce new listeners to traditional music, and to build on tradition by creating new compositions that address contemporary social themes. An audio CD accompanies this comprehensive study on the work and music of Cipriano Frederico Vigil.

In New Mexico Odyssey, Toby Smith goes on the road to find memorable people, engage them in conversation, and come away with good stories to share with us. We motor along on Route 66 the length of the state encountering towns and people who've seen better times but aren't sorry about what they did or how they did it. In Las Vegas we meet an artist working in an abandoned railroad roundhouse, while in Las Cruces we drop in an engineering students building a concrete boat for a race in the Rio Grande. Smith takes us to every part of the state and at each stop he introduces us to someone who will amuse, inform, or capture our interest and imagination. New Mexico Odyssey serves to remind us that highways are more than asphalt of concrete divided by a golden dash. They are invitations to discovery. Everyone who travels in New Mexico will find these stories entertaining and enlightening.--Cover

This bilingual panoramic book presents the songs that are the life's work of Cipriano Frederico Vigil, the most important performer of traditional Nuevomexicano folk music in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.