Product Description: The most comprehensive book on Mexican Americans describing their political ascendancy Authored by one of the most influential and highly-regarded voices of Chicano history and ethnic studies, Occupied America is the most definitive introduction to Chicano history...read more

Product Description: &> The most comprehensive book on Mexican Americans describing their political ascendancy Authored by one of the most influential and highly-regarded voices of Chicano history and ethnic studies, Occupied America is the most definitive introduction to Chicano history...read more

Product Description: The Making of Chicana/o Studies traces the philosophy and historical development of the field of Chicana/o studies from precursor movements to the Civil Rights era to today, focusing its lens on the political machinations in higher education that sought to destroy the discipline...read more

In the San Joaquin Valley cotton strike of 1933, frenzied cotton farmers murdered three strikers, intentionally starved at least nine infants, wounded dozens, and arrested more. While the story of this incident has been recounted from the perspective of both the farmers and, more recently, the Mexican workers, this is the first book to trace the origins of the Mexican workers’ activism through their common experience of migrating to the United States. Rodolfo F. Acuña explores the history of Mexican workers and their families from seventeenth-century Chihuahua to twentieth-century California, following their patterns of migration and describing the establishment of their communities in mining and agricultural regions. He shows the combined influences of racism, transborder dynamics, and events such as the Mexican Revolution and World War I in shaping the collective experience of these people as they helped to form the economic, political, and social landscapes of the American Southwest in their interactions with wealthy landowners. Acuña follows the steps of one of the murdered strikers, Pedro Subia, reconstructing the times and places in which he lived. By balancing the social and geographic trends in the Chicano population with the story of individual protest participants, Acuña shows how the strikes were in fact driven by human choices rather than the Communist ideologies to which they have been traced since the 1930s. Corridors of Migration thus uncovers the origins of twentieth-century Mexican American labor activism from its earliest roots through its first major manifestation in the San Joaquin Valley cotton strike.From one of the founding scholars of Chicano/a studies comes the culmination of three decades of dedicated research into the origins of the migrations and the labor activism that have helped to shape the economics and politics of the United States into the twenty-first century.