This collection by Teresa Palomo Acosta—poet, historian, author, and activist—spans three decades of her writing, from 1988 through 2018. The collection is divided into four parts: poems, essays, a children’s story, and plays. Each work addresses cultural, historical, political, and gender realities that she experienced from her childhood to the present. The plays, set in the Central Texas Blackland Prairies where Acosta was raised, provide a unique Latina vision of memory, identity, and experience and are a vital contribution to Chicana feminist thought. The essays focus on Acosta’s literary heroes Jovita González de Mireles, Sara Estela Ramírez, and Elena Zamora O’Shea, important writers who contributed significantly to Tejana literature and to Texas letters. The children’s story, “Colchas, Colchitas,” is based on Acosta’s most notable poem, “My Mother Pieced Quilts,” which pays homage to her mother and the many women of her generation who employed needles and thread, creating both practical and symbolic artifacts. This collection is a creative and, indeed, essential expansion of boundaries for what we think of as history, offering a unique and compelling look into the lived experiences and interior contemplations of a Texas artist well worth knowing. Readers will increase their understanding of Tejana experience in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Tejanaland promises to become an important addition to the cultural record, informing historical perspectives on the experiences of Tejana women and contributing significantly to the existing body of work from Tejana writers.

"This collection by Teresa Palomo Acosta -- poet, historian, author, and activist -- spans three decades of her writing, from 1988 through 2018. The collection is divided into four parts: poems, essays, a children's story, and plays. Each work addresses cultural, gender, historical, and political realities that she experienced from her childhood to the present. The plays, set in the Central Texas Blackland Prairies where Acosta was raised, provide a unique Latina vision of memory, identity, and experience and are a vital contribution to Chicana feminist thought. The essays focus on Acosta's literary heroes Jovita Gonzâalez Mireles, Sara Estela Ramâirez, and Elena Zamora O'Shea, important writers who contributed significantly to Tejana literature and to Texas letters. The children's story, 'Colchas, Colchitas,' is based on Acosta's most notable poem, 'My Mother Pieced Quilts,' which pays homage to her mother and the many women of her generation who employed needles and thread, creating both practical and symbolic artifacts. This collection is a creative and, indeed, essential expansion of boundaries for what we think of as history, offering a unique and compelling look into the lived experiences and interior contemplations of a Texas artist well worth knowing. Readers will increase their understanding of Tejana experience in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Tejanaland promises to become an important addition to the cultural record, informing historical perspectives on the experiences of Tejana women and contributing significantly to the existing body of work from Tejana writers. Teresa Palomo Acosta is cofounder and former vice president of the Ruthe Winegarten Memorial Foundation for Texas Women's History. She is the author of many works of fiction and poetry and is coauthor of Las Tejanas: 300 Years of History. She lives in Austin"

The “American Dream” means many things to many people, but in general it can be said that it connects the idea of freedom to the opportunity for prosperity and upward social mobility. Sandra L. Hanson and John K. White have joined together with a group of social scientists to explore the attitudes, experiences, and expectations of Latinos in their quest for the American Dream. The Latino/a American Dream asks many timely questions, including: how do Latino/as view the American Dream? Has the recent economic downturn affected their hopes of achieving the Dream? What about recent immigrants? What about Latina women? The answers to these questions and more draw on sociology, political science, and history to paint a multifaceted portrait of Latino/a opportunity in America, both real and perceived.

Winner, Texas Reference Source Award, Reference Round Table, Texas Library Association, 2003 T.R. Fehrenbach Award, Texas Historical Commission, 2004 Since the early 1700s, women of Spanish/Mexican origin or descent have played a central, if often unacknowledged, role in Texas history. Tejanas have been community builders, political and religious leaders, founders of organizations, committed trade unionists, innovative educators, astute businesswomen, experienced professionals, and highly original artists. Giving their achievements the recognition they have long deserved, this groundbreaking book is at once a general history and a celebration of Tejanas' contributions to Texas over three centuries. The authors have gathered and distilled a wide range of information to create this important resource. They offer one of the first detailed accounts of Tejanas' lives in the colonial period and from the Republic of Texas up to 1900. Drawing on the fuller documentation that exists for the twentieth century, they also examine many aspects of the modern Tejana experience, including Tejanas' contributions to education, business and the professions, faith and community, politics, and the arts. A large selection of photographs, a historical timeline, and profiles of fifty notable Tejanas complete the volume and assure its usefulness for a broad general audience, as well as for educators and historians.

Gay and lesbian themes in Latin American literature have been largely ignored. This reference fills this gap by providing more than a hundred alphabetically arranged entries for Latin American authors who have treated gay or lesbian material in their works. Each entry explores the significance of gay and lesbian themes in a particular author's writings and closes with a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. The figures included have a professed gay identity, or have written on gay or lesbian themes in either a positive or negative way, or have authored works in which a gay sensibility can be identified. The volume pays particular attention to the difficulty of ascribing North American critical perspectives to Latin American authors, and studies these authors within the larger context of Latin American culture. The book includes entries for men and women, and for authors from Latin American countries as well as Latino writers from the United States. The entries are written by roughly 60 expert contributors from Latin America, the U.S., and Europe.

For at least a century, across the United States, Mexican American athletes have actively participated in community-based, interscholastic, and professional sports. The people of the ranchos and the barrios have used sport for recreation, leisure, and community bonding. Until now, though, relatively few historians have focused on the sports participation of Latinos, including the numerically preponderant Mexican Americans. This volume gathers an important collection of such studies, arranged in rough chronological order, spanning the period from the late 1920s through the present. They survey and analyze sporting experiences and organizations, as well as their impact on communal and individual lives. Contributions spotlight diverse fields of athletic endeavor: baseball, football, soccer, boxing, track, and softball. Mexican Americans and Sports contributes to the emerging understanding of the value of sport to minority populations in communities throughout the United States. Those interested in sports history will benefit from the book's focus on under-studied Mexican American participation, and those interested in Mexican American history will welcome the insight into this aspect of the group's social history.

What was it like to be a young woman in the era depicted in The Last Picture Show? That question is answered in this memoir by Ceil Cleveland, the woman long-rumored to be the model for the Jacy Farrow character in the well-known McMurtry novel and Bogdanovich movie. Cleveland notes that as a teenager in the 1950s in the tiny Texas town of Archer City, she learned from movies how to act, walk, dress, speak, and attract or dismiss men. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR