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Latino Literature: An Encyclopedia for Students
Christina Soto van der Plas and Lacie Rae Buckwalter Cunningham
Offers a comprehensive overview of the most important authors, movements, genres, and historical turning points in Latino literature.
More than 60 million Latinos currently live in the United States. Yet contributions from writers who trace their heritage to the Caribbean, Central and South America, and Mexico have and continue to be overlooked by critics and general audiences alike. Latino Literature: An Encyclopedia for Students gathers the best from these authors and presents them to readers in an informed and accessible way. Intended to be a useful resource for students, this volume introduces the key figures and genres central to Latino literature. Entries are written by prominent and emerging scholars and are comprehensive in their coverage of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Different critical approaches inform and interpret the myriad complexities of Latino literary production over the last several hundred years. Finally, detailed historical and cultural accounts of Latino diasporas also enrich readers' understandings of the writings that have and continue to be influenced by changes in cultural geography, providing readers with the information they need to appreciate a body of work that will continue to flourish in and alongside Latino communities. -
Recuerdos: Historical and Personal Remembrances Relating to Alta California, 1769–1849 (2 Volume Set)
Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, Rose Marie Beebe, and Robert M. Senkewicz
A generation after the U.S. conquest of California, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo set out to write the story of the land he knew so well—a history to dispel the romantic vision quickly overtaking the state’s recent past. The five-volume history he produced, published here for the first time in English translation, is the most complete account of California before the gold rush by someone who resided in California at the time.
Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo (1807–90) grew up in Spanish California, became a leading military and political figure in Mexican California, and participated in some of the founding events of U.S. California, such as the Monterey Constitutional Convention and the first legislature. With his project, undertaken for historian and publisher Hubert Howe Bancroft, Vallejo sought to correct misrepresentations of California’s past, which dismissed as insignificant the pre–gold rush Spanish and Mexican periods—conflated into one “Mission era.”
Instead, Vallejo’s history emphasized the role of the military in the Spanish colonization of California and argued that the missionaries after Junípero Serra, with their medieval ideas, had actually retarded the development of California until secularization in the early 1830s. Culture, he contended, was of intense interest to the Californio people, as was the education of children. His accounts of Indigenous peoples, while often sympathetic, were also characteristic of his time: he and other California military leaders, Vallejo maintained, had successfully subdued “hostile” Indians and established mutually beneficial relationships with others.
Out of keeping with Bancroft’s American triumphalism, Vallejo’s monumental project was consigned to the archives. With their deft translation and commentary, Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz—authors of a companion volume on Vallejo’s work—have brought to light a remarkable perspective, often firsthand, on important events in early California history. Their efforts restore a critical chapter to the story of California and the American West.
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