New Books in Latino Studies Marshall Poe

Growing Up in the Gutter: Diaspora and Comics (U Arizona Press, 2024) by Dr. Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo offers new understandings of contemporary graphic coming-of-age narratives by looking at the genre’s growth in stories by and for young BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and diasporic readers. Through a careful examination of the genre, Dr. Quintana-Vallejo analyses the complex identity formation of first- and subsequent-generation migrant protagonists in globalised rural and urban environments and dissects the implications that these diasporic formative processes have for a growing and popular genre.
While the most traditional iteration of the bildungsroman—the coming-of-age story—follows middle-class male heroes who forge their identities in a process of complex introspection, contemporary graphic coming-of-age narratives represent formative processes that fit into, resist, or even disregard narratives of socialisation under capitalism, of citizenship, and of nationhood.
Dr. Quintana-Vallejo delves into several important themes: how the coming-of-age genre can be used to study adulthood, how displacement and international or global heritage are fundamental experiences, how multi-diasporic approaches foreground lived experiences, and how queerness opens narratives of development to the study of adulthood as fundamentally diverse and nonconforming to social norms. Dr. Quintana-Vallejo shows how openness enables belonging among chosen families and, perhaps most importantly, freedom to disidentify. And, finally, how contemporary authors writing for the instruction of BIPOC children (and children otherwise affected by diaspora and displacement) use the didactic power of the coming-of-age genre, combined with the hybrid language of graphic narratives, to teach difficult topics in accessible ways.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.
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 unintended consequences of youth empowerment programs for Latino boys Educational research has long documented the politics of punishment for boys and young men of color in schools—but what about the politics of empowerment and inclusion? In Good Boys, Bad Hombres: The Racial Politics of Mentoring Latino Boys in Schools (U Minnesota Press, 2024), Michael V. Singh focuses on this aspect of youth control in schools, asking on whose terms a positive Latino manhood gets to be envisioned. Based on two years of ethnographic research in an urban school district in California, Good Boys, Bad Hombres examines Latino Male Success, a school-based mentorship program for Latino boys. Instead of attempting to shape these boys’ lives through the threat of punishment, the program aims to provide an “invitation to a respectable and productive masculinity” framed as being rooted in traditional Latinx signifiers of manhood. 
Singh argues, however, that the promotion of this aspirational form of Latino masculinity is rooted in neoliberal multiculturalism, heteropatriarchy, and anti-Blackness, and that even such empowerment programs can unintentionally reproduce attitudes that paint Latino boys as problematic and in need of control and containment. An insightful gender analysis, Good Boys, Bad Hombres sheds light on how mentorship is a reaction to the alleged crisis of Latino boys and is governed by the perceived remedies of the neoliberal state. Documenting the ways Latino men and boys resist the politics of neoliberal empowerment for new visions of justice, Singh works to deconstruct male empowerment, arguing that new narratives and practices—beyond patriarchal redemption—are necessary for a reimagining of Latino manhood in schools and beyond.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latino-studies

Serving Hispanic, Latine, and Latinx Students in Academic Libraries (Library Juice Press, 2024) is a collection of essays written by library workers that highlights academic library practices, programs, and services that support Hispanic, Latine, and Latinx students. As of 2020, there were over 500 federally designated Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) in the United States and Puerto Rico with another 300 designated as “emerging”. But this is only part of the picture; there are many more institutions of higher education with large Latinx populations that do not have this designation.
In this book, editors Sommer Browning and M. Isabel Soto-Luna bring together contributions that draw attention to the important and exciting work being done in the libraries of these community colleges and research-centered institutions. With chapters on information literacy, special collections, collection management, critical pedagogy, and many others, this is an essential book for library workers searching for new programs and fresh ways to support their Hispanic and Latine students.
Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latino-studies

Latinos have long influenced everything from electoral politics to popular culture, yet many people instinctively regard them as recent immigrants rather than a longstanding racial group. In Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism (The New Press, 2020), Laura Gómez, a leading expert on race, law, and society, illuminates the fascinating race-making, unmaking, and re-making of Latino identity that has spanned centuries, leaving a permanent imprint on how race operates in the United States today.
Pulling back the lens as the country approaches an unprecedented demographic shift (Latinos will comprise a third of the American population in a matter of decades), Gómez also reveals the nefarious roles the United States has played in Latin America—from military interventions and economic exploitation to political interference—that, taken together, have destabilized national economies to send migrants northward over the course of more than a century. It’s no coincidence that the vast majority of Latinos migrate from the places most impacted by this nation’s dirty deeds, leading Gómez to a bold call for reparations. In this audacious effort to reframe the often-confused and misrepresented discourse over the Latinx generation, Gómez provides essential context for today’s most pressing political and public debates—representation, voice, interpretation, and power—giving all of us a brilliant framework to engage cultural controversies, elections, current events, and more.
David-James Gonzales (DJ) 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. Follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latino-studies

“Wisconsin has always been my home. It’s not a place, however, where I’ve always felt at home,” (ix) declares Dr. Sergio M. González in the first two lines of his acknowledgments for his recently published book Strangers No Longer: Latino Belonging & Faith in Twentieth-Century Wisconsin (University of Illinois Press, 2024). These two sentences are the essence of the manuscript as González guides the reader through a one-hundred-year history of Latino migration, settlement, and religious life in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and surrounding rural regions. Many different nationalities that fall under the banner of the “Latino” identity have made home, work, and life in Wisconsin, but their presence was met with varying scales of hospitality – the act of welcoming “the stranger.” He writes in the Introduction, “Strangers No Longer demonstrates that relationships within hospitality interactions are in fact relations of power” (3). It is through a framework of hospitality that González structures his manuscript to show how clergy and laity accepted, to varying degrees, newly arrived Latinos in Wisconsin.
Wisconsin religious institutions have a long engagement with Latino populations. From the arrival of Mexican immigrant laborers in the 1920s who were recruited as strikebreakers, to post-war Tejano and Puerto Rican migrants who were encouraged to assimilate into eurocentric ideals of belonging, and finally to the 1980s Sanctuary Movement in which Central American asylees sought protection from state and federal immigration enforcement, each of these topics and more are covered in Strangers No Longer. González skillfully crafts a narrative where the reader witnesses the development of the relationship between Wisconsin religious institutions and various Latino communities as one moving from a relationship of paternalism in the early 20th century to one of self-determination by the late 20th century. “Wisconsin Latinos pushed churches to acknowledge that they were no longer guests in their communities, or, in the words of the organizers of a statewide conference held in Appleton in 1974, ‘strangers in our homeland’” (141). By the 21st century, González asserts, the church had become a site for Latino political consciousness and resistance for decades.
González’s methodological rigor, clear writing, and strong theoretical grounding allow the reader to understand the delicate political, racial, economic, and spiritual power relations at play for Latinos in the Midwest during the 20th century. Strangers No Longer is a valuable read for undergraduate courses in Latino history, religious history, and social movement history. Alongside his academic work, González is building out his public history projects that offer primers on the sanctuary movement, immigration history, and Latino religious life in the Midwest.
Links to Dr. Gonzalez’s publications and projects:

Strangers No Longer

Mexicans in Wisconsin

Wisconsin Latinx History Collective


PBS Wisconsin's The Look Back 

Wisconsin Historical Society's upcoming History Center


Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latino-studies

Tara López's Chuco Punk: Sonic Insurgency in El Paso (University of Texas Press, 2024), is an immersive study of the influential and predominantly Chicanx punk rock scene in El Paso, Texas. Punk rock is known for its daring subversion, and so is the West Texas city of El Paso. In Chuco Punk, Tara López dives into the rebellious sonic history of the city, drawing on more than seventy interviews with punks, as well as unarchived flyers, photos, and other punk memorabilia. 
Connecting the scene to El Paso's own history as a borderland, a site of segregation, and a city with a long lineage of cultural and musical resistance, López throws readers into the heat of backyard punx shows, the chaos of riots in derelict mechanic shops, and the thrill of skateboarding on the roofs of local middle schools. She reveals how, in this predominantly Chicanx punk rock scene, women forged their own space, sound, and community. Covering the first roots of Chuco punk in the late 1970s through the early 2000s, López moves beyond the breakout bands to shed light on how the scene influenced not only the contours of sound and El Paso but the entire topography of punk rock.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latino-studies