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On March 2, 1945, five Mexican American families and their Jewish American lawyer filed a class-action lawsuit against four school districts in Orange County, California, to end the segregation of ethnic Mexican children. In a shocking decision, the court ruled in favor of plaintiffs, setting a legal and historical precedent in Mendez, et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County that shook the foundations of Jim Crow America and led to the end of de jure school segregation across the nation. Breaking Down the Walls of Segregation: Mexican American Grassroots Politics and Civil Rights in Orange County, California (Oxford UP, 2025) tells the story of how ethnic Mexicans in a relatively unknown agricultural backwater built the unprecedented movement that led to this decision. Beginning in the 1880s, David-James Gonzales details the social and economic history of Orange County, explaining how citrus capitalists, seeking increased market share and profitability, established the walls of segregation to manage ethnic Mexican family labor. By the early 1930s, ethnic Mexicans were segregated into over fifty underserved colonias and barrios. Without training or support from national civil rights organizations, they mobilized against segregation and inequality beginning in the late 1920s. Ethnic Mexican grassroots organizations proliferated throughout the county, intent on engaging in civic affairs and ending anti-Mexican discrimination and segregation. This movement, comprised of immigrants, citizens, parents, children, emerging activists, and their non-Mexican allies, paved the way for the growth of LULAC and nationwide organizing. As an essential part of the "long civil rights movement," the ethnic Mexican struggle against segregation in Orange County illustrates how minoritized groups have historically pushed US social, economic, and political institutions to live up to the nation's founding ideals. David-James Gonzales is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latino-studies

In Queer Indigenous Cinemas, scholar Gabriel S. Estrada offers an analysis of queer Indigenous media from the Americas, the Pacific, and the Caribbean. This groundbreaking work uses Indigenous directional space and sovereign mapping methods to uncover the emotional, spiritual, and cultural dimensions of queer Indigenous lives. The book's seven chapters--each one of the directions--look closely at media such as cinema and streaming videos that draw on Indigenous concepts from diverse nations such as Diné, Caxcan, Kanaka Maoli, and Nehiyawak. Gabriel S. Estrada is a Caxcan/Xicanx professor in religious studies at California State University Long Beach, where ze teaches queer spirituality, Indigenous graduate classes, and Nahuatl literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latino-studies

Ken Chitwood's Borícua Muslims: Everyday Cosmopolitanism among Puerto Rican Converts to Islam (University of Texas Press, 2025), uses rich ethnographic fieldwork across multiple cities and the digital space to capture the complex lived realities of Puerto Rican Muslims both on the island and in the United States. The study is attuned to the archipelago’s context that accents Puerto Rican Islam, such as through histories that link it to Andalusian Spain, and culture, especially through foodscapes. Puerto Rico also has a diverse Arab Muslim diasporic population, especially Palestinians. Due to this diversity of Muslim experiences, throughout the book there emerge conversations about the boundaries of Islam in relation to culture, ethnicity, and theology. At times, when these varied communities share ritual and communal space together, questions of authenticity unfold, such as over language or notions of piety. Despite moments of tension around tribalism and questions of legitimacy, we learn that often Islam for both these communities is understood through their experiences of colonialism, and so anti-colonial registers of Islam influence the solidarity building and social justice organizing that unites Puerto Rican and Palestinian Muslims. The book also has an accompanying Spotify playlist that you definitely should check out. This book will be of interest to anyone working on Islam in South America and/or North America, and Arab and Palestinian diasporic studies, and food studies. Ken Chitwood is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer with the Department for the Study of Religion at Universität Bayreuth and Affiliate of the University of Southern California's Center for Religion and Civic Culture. Shobhana Xavier is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here. She may be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latino-studies

From Aztec sun stones to satellite launches, from muralist visions to dark sky parks, Mexico's engagement with outer space is fundamental to its identity. Mexico in Space: From La Raza Cósmica to the Space Race (University of Arizona Press, 2026) offers a groundbreaking look at how the country has navigated the tensions between technological dependence and sovereign dreams. Anthropologist Anne W. Johnson reveals Mexico's unique relationship with outer space, describing Indigenous knowledge, nationalist projects, artistic visions, and community practices. Through rich ethnographic detail and historical insight, Johnson challenges the notion that space is for everyone and shows whose voices truly shape the world's cosmic futures. Johnson introduces us to satellite engineers, community astronomers, space generation youth, and artists imagining Mars, each crafting alternative cosmic futures. As space exploration increasingly becomes the domain of billionaires and superpowers, this book offers a compelling counternarrative, demonstrating how Mexican cosmic engagements suggest more just, inclusive ways of inhabiting Earth and beyond and providing vital lessons for reimagining humanity's place in the cosmos. Anne W. Johnson is a professor in the graduate program in social anthropology in the Department of Social and Political Science at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. Caleb Zakarin is the CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. He lives in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latino-studies

Forging a Mexican People: Collective Subjectivities in Postrevolutionary Print Culture, 1917–1968 (University of Arizona Press, 2026) shows how illustrated print culture helped to construct and deconstruct versions of “a people” in postrevolutionary Mexico. Through meticulous research, Dr. 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. By examining print culture, editorial practices, and related processes such as the creation, consumption, and distribution of said culture, Dr. Zavala’s research contributes to scholarship that has recently reexamined the construction of nationalism by moving away from the focus on state formation and addressing the horizontal and aesthetic dimensions in products by cultural producers from nonstate and grassroots political sectors. Dr. Zavala examines the conceptual parameters of el pueblo by analyzing El Universal Ilustrado, El Machete, the Taller de Gráfica Popular, the protest graphic art used in Mexico City’s 1968 popular student movement, and graphic art used in California’s Chicano farmworkers’ struggle. Based on in-depth archival research, the work includes primary sources that have never been digitized, offering readers unique insights into the visual manifestations of Mexico’s postrevolutionary identity and their enduring significance. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latino-studies

Detroit seemed to experience an explosive rebirth following its bankruptcy, the largest in US municipal history. It was as if the slate had been wiped clean and the color line erased in the nation’s largest Black city. Detroit Never Left explains the relation between racism and space by analyzing the ways opportunities changed in the years leading up to and following bankruptcy.Based on a variety of data, including in-depth interviews with people who identify as “Latina/o/x” in their early 20s, ethnographic observation, and media coverage, in Detroit Never Left: Black Space, White Borders, Latino Crossings (NYU Press, 2026), Dr. Nicole E. Trujillo-Pagán shows how a dialectic between empty and concrete abstractions created new opportunities for outside investment, often at the expense of residents' fortunes. She reveals space is much more than a neutral backdrop; It is continually produced through abstractions that act like bordering and crossing practices to control resources and opportunities. With broad implications for analyses of space and opportunity, Detroit Never Left tackles important contradictions in the post-bankruptcy city. For example, urban youth do not want to be moved out or isolated in their barrio. Similarly, many Detroiters feel spatial changes happen “to,” instead of “for” them. Ultimately, residents’ concerns underscored broader tensions between democratic inclusion and racialized capitalism. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latino-studies

The presence of Latinx people in the American South has long confounded the region's persistent racial binaries. In Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation (UNC Press, 2023), Cecilia Márquez uses social and cultural history methods to assess the racial logics that have shaped the Latinx experience in the region since the middle of the twentieth century. Structuring her argument around several major themes that frequently signpost the history of the South and of race relations in the United States--the rise of an increasingly mobile middle class, the civil rights movement and fight over school integration, the growth global connection of the region's economy, and political conflict over immigration--Márquez reveals how Latinx people in the South have confronted both whiteness and antiblackness, and how cultural boundaries to exclude Black people from full participation in the life of the region and nation have been essential to the construction of Latinx as a category. Anna E. Lindner (Ph.D., Communication) is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at Wayne State University. On Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latino-studies

How police abuse ignited the Chicano movement in the Southwest Brown and Blue: Mexican Americans, Law Enforcement, and Civil Rights in the Southwest, 1935-2025 (UNC Press, 2025)  offers a sweeping history of Mexican American interactions with law enforcement and the criminal justice system in the US Southwest. Looking primarily at Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas, Brown and Blue tells a complex story: Violent, often racist acts committed by police against Mexican American people sparked protests demanding reform, and criminal justice authorities sometimes responded positively to these protests with measures such as recruiting Mexican Americans into local police forces and altering training procedures at police academies.Brian D. Behnken demonstrates the central role that the struggle for police reform played in the twentieth-century Chicano movement, and the ways its relevance continues to the present. By linking social activism and law enforcement, Behnken illuminates how the policing issues of today developed and what reform remains to be done. Guest: Brian Behnken is a professor of history at Iowa State University. He specializes in African American and Mexican American history, with an emphasis on civil rights activism and comparative race relations. He has published widely within these fields and has also expanded his research focus to explore racial violence, law enforcement, popular culture, and nationalism as they relate to African American and Latino/a/x peoples. Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latino-studies

Taco (Bloomsbury, 2025) is a deep dive into the most iconic Mexican food from the perspective of a Mexico City native. In a narrative that moves from Mexico to the United States and back, Dr. Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado discusses the definition of the taco, the question of the tortilla and the taco shell, and the existence of the taco as a modern social touchstone that has been shaped by history and geography.  Challenging the idea of centrality and authenticity, in this latest addition to the Object Lessons series, Dr. Sánchez Prado shows instead that the taco is a contemporary, transcultural food that has always been subject to transformation. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latino-studies

Immigration is one of the most controversial topics in the United States―and everywhere else. Pundits, politicians, and the public usually depict immigrants either as villains who pose a threat to our economy, culture, and safety, or as victims―needy outsiders whom we must help, at our own cost if necessary. But the data clearly debunk both narratives. From jobs, investment, and innovation to cultural vitality and national security, more immigration has an overwhelmingly positive impact on everything that makes a society successful.In The Truth About Immigration: Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers (St. Martin's Press, 2024), Wharton professor Zeke Hernandez draws from nearly twenty years of research to answer all the big questions about immigration. He combines moving personal stories with rigorous research to offer an accessible, apolitical, and evidence-based look at how newcomers affect our local communities and our nation. You’ll learn about the overlooked impact of immigrants on investment and job creation; realize how much we take for granted the novel technologies, products, and businesses newcomers create; get the facts straight about perennial concerns like jobs, crime, and undocumented immigrants; and gain new perspectives on misunderstood issues such as the border, taxes, and assimilation.Hernandez turns fear into hope by proving that immigrants are essential for economically prosperous and socially vibrant nations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latino-studies

Migration between the United States and Mexico is often compared to the river that runs along the border: a "flow" of immigrants, a "flood" of documented and undocumented workers, a "dam" that has broken. Scholars, journalists, and novelists often tell this story from a south-to-north perspective, emphasizing Mexican migration to the United States, and the American response to the influx of people crossing its borders. In Caught in the Current, Irvin Ibargüen offers a Mexico-centered history of migration in the mid-twentieth century. Drawing on Mexican periodicals and archival sources, he explores how the Mexican state sought to manage US-bound migration. Ibargüen examines Mexico's efforts to blunt migration's impact on its economy, social order, and reputation, at times even aiming to restrict the flow of migrants. As a transnational history, the book highlights how Mexico's policies to moderate out-migration were contested by both the United States and migrants themselves, dooming them to fail. Ultimately, Caught in the Current reveals how both countries manipulated the border to impose control over a phenomenon that quickly escaped legal and political boundaries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latino-studies

News media and pundits too frequently perpetuate the notion that Latinos, both US-born and immigrants, are an invading force bent on destroying the American way of life. Leo R. Chavez challenges the basic tenets of this assumption and other myths of the "Latino threat," providing a critical investigation into the fears and prejudices that are used to malign an entire population. In this updated and expanded third edition of his groundbreaking book, Chavez incorporates Donald Trump's emergence in American political life, with particular focus on the US-Mexico border as a site of political theater and the further sharpening of anti-Latino and anti-immigration rhetoric in public discourse. He also includes new discussions of "anchor babies," Dreamers and DACA, Latina reproduction and white replacement theory, and the emotional and psychological effects of negative political rhetoric on those whom it targets. Through trenchant analysis, this book reexamines urgent questions about what it means to be American. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latino-studies

How can habits of racialization be affected by art, in its reception and its creation? How can a carnal aesthetics help us understand Latinx life? What if we listen to photographs? How might they undo us? Can we be undone? In Carnalities: The Art of Living in Latinidad (Duke UP, 2025), Mariana Ortega focuses on photography using a hermeneutics of love and critical phenomenology to think about and with creative practices of primarily Latinx artists. Moving from the ocular to the mouthly, Ortega opens up possibilities for being affected by art. She also shows how artists use aesthetic practices to transform themselves, the possibilities for life, and as means to refuse to forget the dead. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latino-studies

Dr. Andrea Flores’ most recent book, The Succeeders: How Immigrant Youth Are Transforming What It Means to Belong in America (University of California Press, 2021), is a detailed account of how immigrant youth in Nashville, Tennessee negotiated the stakes of academic achievement by reproducing terms of belonging while at the same time recasting what it means to belong in the United States. By focusing on a nonprofit college access program for Latino youth from which the title of the book is derived, Flores argues that Succeeders’ educational achievements were viewed “as positive moral proof against deficit constructions of Latinos while also maintaining a link to educación’s [emphasis in original] personal, cultural, and familial value” (16). The hybridity of assigning moral value to book learning while also hinging their striving to familial networks is what Flores believes to be critical to the Succeeders’ perception of self. By offering a radically different route to belonging through the vehicle of family and care, the Succeeders hoped to earn not just their own national membership, but also the membership of those near and dear. Flores conducted ethnographic research for twelve months while also serving as a volunteer for the Succeeders program of southern Nashville across four campuses for the academic year 2012 - 2013. She observed effective communication skits, field trips, organizational meetings, community service activities, musical performances, athletic games, scholarship selection committees, and graduation ceremonies to best understand the lived experiences of Succeeders within and outside of their educational institutions. Flores also conducted thirty-one semistructured interviews with Succeeders whose families were primarily from Mexican and Central America. Further, half of the interviews included undocumented youth, and students from all levels of academic achievement were selected. Strategic selecting of Succeeders allowed Flores to examine how students across a variety of academic preparations and immigrant backgrounds perceived themselves within larger conceptions of Latindidad and educational achievement. Interviews with the program’s leaders, teachers, and admissions officers revealed the internal dialogues of those most tasked with the Succeeders’ success. A robust textual archive in the form of college admissions handouts, college entrance essays, and Succeeders curricular materials were collected by the author. These mixed methods allowed Flores to provide detailed and rich accounts of how Latino youth navigated the college application process, the end of high school, and their personal lives. Jonathan Cortez is currently the 2021-2023 César Chávez Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. You can follow Jonathan on Twitter @joncortz Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latino-studies

Geographies of Relation: Diasporas and Borderlands in the Americas (U Michigan Press, 2024) offers a new lens for examining diaspora and borderlands texts and performances that considers the inseparability of race, ethnicity, and gender in imagining and enacting social change. Theresa Delgadillo crosses interdisciplinary and canonical borders to investigate the interrelationships of African-descended Latinx and mestizx peoples through an analysis of Latin American, Latinx, and African American literature, film, and performance. Not only does Delgadillo offer a rare extended analysis of Black Latinidades in Chicanx literature and theory, but she also considers over a century’s worth of literary, cinematic, and performative texts to support her argument about the significance of these cultural sites and overlaps. Chapters illuminate the significance of Toña La Negra in the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, reconsider feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa’s work in revising exclusionary Latin American ideologies of mestizaje, delve into the racial and gender frameworks Sandra Cisneros attempts to rewrite, unpack encounters between African Americans and Black Puerto Ricans in texts by James Baldwin and Marta Moreno Vega, explore the African diaspora in colonial and contemporary Peru through Daniel Alarcón’s literature and the documentary Soy Andina, and revisit the centrality of Black power in ending colonialism in Cuban narratives. Geographies of Relation demonstrates the long histories of networks and exchanges across the Americas as well as the interrelationships among Indigenous, Black, African American, mestizx, Chicanx, and Latinx peoples. It offers a compelling argument that geographies of relation are as significant as national frameworks in structuring cultural formation and change in this hemisphere. Theresa Delgadillo is a Vilas Distinguished Professor of English and Chicanx/e and Latinx/e Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is also Director of the Chicanx/e and Latinx/e Studies Program. She is a founder and editor for the online publication Latinx Talk. Shodona Kettle is a PhD candidate at the Institute of the Americas, University College London. Website here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latino-studies