Mexican American

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When Aida Hernandez was born in 1987 in Agua Prieta, Mexico, the nearby US border was little more than a worn-down fence. Eight years later, Aida’s mother took her and her siblings to live in Douglas, Arizona. By then, the border had become one of the most heavily policed sites in America. Undocumented, Aida fought to make her way. She learned English, watched Friends, and, after having a baby at 16, dreamed of teaching dance and moving with her son to New York City. But life had other plans.

She is the envy of every teenage girl in Mexico City. Her mother is a glamorous telenovela actress. Her father is the go-to voice-over talent for blockbuster films. Hers is a world of private planes, chauffeurs, paparazzi, and gossip columnists. Meet Camilla del Valle - Cammi to those who know her best. When Cammi's mom gets cast in an American television show and the family moves to LA, things change, and quickly.

Gillian Armstead-Bancroft—Pride of the East Side and once-perfect bruja, wife, and mother—is going to spend her summer getting good at being bad. The first time she left Freedom, Kansas, behind, she did it by doing everything right. This time, she’ll hide from the large Mexican American family welcoming her home and work in secret to break the curse that’s erased her magical life. Only by doing it all wrong can Gillian get herself and her two children away from the ghosts of her hometown by summer’s end.

Ximena Salomé is a gifted Mexican healer who dreams of building a family with the man she loves on the coveted land she calls home. But when Texas Rangers storm her ranch and shoot her husband dead, her dreams are burned to ashes. Vowing to honor her husband’s memory and defend her country, Ximena uses her healing skills as a nurse on the frontlines of the ravaging war.

In vivid, brilliant fiction that illuminates the dark psychology of soldiers, Jeff Shaara brings to life the familiar characters, stunning triumphs, and soul-crushing defeats of the fascinating, long-forgotten Mexican-American War.

Emerging from the ruins of Aztec civilization and from centuries of Spanish contact with indigenous people, Mexican culture followed the Spanish colonial frontier northward and put its distinctive mark on what became the southwestern United States. Shaped by their Indian and Spanish ancestors, deeply influenced by Catholicism, and often struggling to respond to political and economic precarity, Mexicans play an important role in United States society even as the dominant Anglo culture strives to assimilate them.

The essays gathered in The Early Imperial Republic move beyond the question of whether the new republic was an empire, investigating instead where, how, and why it was one. They use the category of empire to situate the early United States in the global context its contemporaries understood, drawing important connections between territorial conquests on the continent and American incursions.

"Los mexicanos tienen que convencerse de que no solamente son generadores de mano de obra", dice el autor de este ensayo político. Se trata de una mirada crítica a los mexicanos y a la forma en la que enfrentan su realidad como nación. El autor, conocido como "El Mexicano Desconocido", es un mexicano más que enfrenta a sus compatriotas "con su naturaleza mentirosa", la transformación de las familias mexicanas y los sentimientos encontrados que despierta México entre sus ciudadanos.

On the Border of a Dream is an eye-opening and uplifting memoir that tells the true story of a boy from rural Mexico who, at a young age, sets his mind to becoming a pioneering surgeon in the USA. The memoir follows Edgar Hernandez, first with his tight-knit family as an adolescent in Mexico and then as he journeys to the USA to pursue his dream.

At the age of 5, he arrived at a Greyhound bus station in California, transplanted from Mexico City into the pervasive sounds of English. Now with the ink still fresh on his Juris Doctor diploma, he looks back on the journey with the rigorous training he acquired in law school as he compellingly weaves together a vivid interpretation of the raw experiences that drove him along that journey—across his childhood experiences with violence and exclusion for being Spanish-speaking, his struggles to succeed in school despite the limits of poverty.

Gustavo Arellano has compiled the best questions about Mexican Americans from readers of his ¡Ask a Mexican!column in California's OC Weekly and uses them to explore the clichés of lowriders, busboys, and housekeepers; drunks and scoundrels; heroes and celebrities; and most important, millions upon millions of law-abiding, patriotic American citizens and their illegal-immigrant cousins who represent some $600 billion in economic power.

This tender love ballad is set deep in the jungles of Mexico and tells the story of Victoriano and Mira Bella, a young couple madly in love with "enormous proliferations of passion". Laid out in colorful, poetic text with a creative ending told in two letters - one written by Victoriano, the other written by an American artist visiting their beautiful world.

Here is a stirring fictional account of the amazing real-life story of John Riley, an Irishman who led his men to desert the American military during the Mexican-American War, as seen through the eyes of two memorable narrators. It is June 1845, and Paddy Quinn is a camp boy for the American army which is bound for Mexico. A young man with journalistic aspirations, Paddy writes letters for illiterate soldiers and learns that, like him, many are Irish, including the enigma John Riley.

Emilia and Gregorio spent their childhood following their grandmother through the mountains of central México, gathering the ingredients she used for curandera work and learning about the supernatural world. When she passes away, the siblings are left alone. So they scrape together their money and pay coyotes to smuggle them to their father in the United States. The siblings are exhausted before they even reach the border, where the coyotes seize Emilia for their own harsh ends.

Prieta is a term of endearment. When I tell people who don’t speak Spanish what prieta means—dark or the dark one—their eyes pop open and a small gasp escapes. I see the offense they feel for me sprinkled on their faces like the freckles I will never have. How do I tell them that when I heard Ita say Prieta, I felt the caress of her strong hands on the top of my head as she braided my hair?

In the heart of the Great Depression, Rancho Las Moras, like everywhere else in Texas, is gripped by the drought of the Dust Bowl, and resentment is building among white farmers against Mexican Americans. All around town, signs go up proclaiming “No Dogs or Mexicans” and “No Mexicans Allowed.” When Estrella organizes a protest against the treatment of tejanos in their town of Monteseco, Texas, her whole family becomes a target of “repatriation” efforts to send Mexicans “back to Mexico”—whether they were ever Mexican citizens or not.

A major work on the history of Mexicans in Texas and the relations between Mexicans and Anglos.

Stella is getting ready for her next big step. This year, she's a fifth grader, which means she's not only one of the big kids in her elementary school, but she'll also have to start thinking about middle school. GULP! Luckily, Stella can count on her best friends Jenny and Stanley at her side. But when she has a chance to apply for an art and science program at a magnet school, Stella realizes that her future might hold a lot of big changes.

Claudia Garcia crossed the border because her toddler, Natalia, could not hear. Leaving behind everything she knew in Mexico, Claudia recounts the terror of migrating alone with her toddler and the incredible challenges she faced advocating for her daughter’s health in the United States. When she arrived in Texas, Claudia discovered that being undocumented would mean more than just an immigration status—it would be a way of living, of mothering, and of being discarded by even those institutions we count on to care.