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A Revolution Remembered The Memoirs and Selected Correspondence of Juan N. Seguín

Editor:  Jesus F. de la Teja

Price:  $19.95

Juan Seguín deserve to be included among the familiar names in the litany of the illustrious patriots of the Texas revolution.  Appointed a captain by Stephen F. Austin, he escaped the fate of the Alamo defenders when sent out through the Mexican lines with a plea for reinforcements.  Commended for his actions at the Battle of San Jacinto, Seguín was promoted by Sam Houston to t he command of San Antonio.  He collected the ashes of the defenders of the Alamo, conducted the military burial, and delivered the funeral oration.  In large part because his prominence had earned him the enmity of some of the new Anglo American families of Texas, Seguín fled the republic for refuse in Mexico in 1842.  Seguin's memoirs, written in 1842 and first published in 1858, are his apologia for this and subsequent decisions that denigrated his reputation in Texas.  Jesus F. de la Teja has expertly edited the papers, provided an extensive biographical index, and written a new introduction for the second edition that reconsiders Seguin's significance for all Texans.  The book offers a wealth of information for serious historians and a readable and informative account for any person interested in early Texas and the influence of Mexican Texans.

Adios to the Brushlands

Author:  Arturo Longoria

Price:  $19.95 (cloth)

In an area of South Texas extending across the Rio Grande into Mexico, the land was once lush and mysterious, harboring trees, shrubs, and grasses that were home to an abundance of wildlife.  In Adios to the Brushlands native son Arturo Longoria remembers this chaparral land of his childhood.  At once a celebration of a region's nature and a call to preserve the little bit of it still left today, Adios to the Brushlands is to South Texas what Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was to the nation's wetlands or John Grave's Goodbye to a River was to the Brazos River.  Rife with the natural history of an endangered ecology and capturing as well the binational culture of the region, Adios to the Brushlands draws readers into a land as raw, beautiful, and complex as lie itself.  A unique descriptive documentary of a disappearing natural treasure, it is a slice of the new natural history that weds the details of the physical world with their significance to the human heart.  A trained biologist and one-time investigative reporter, Longoria brings his skills of observation and expression to sing the song of this vanishing habitat that once covered nearly four million acres of the Rio Grande Valley.  Longoria recalls the hours spent with Papagrande, his grandfather, and with this best friend and cousins:  hot summer days and frigid winter morning s walking through the dense underbrush, watching birds, studying reptiles, identifying plants.  Descriptions of boyhood hunting and varmint calling, and encounters with rattlesnakes and fierce pamorana ants all bring to life another time and place.  In moving but understated prose Longoria captures the wonder of the brushlands and symbolically and emotionally links its loss, through rootplows and bulldozers, to the death of his grandfather, who had introduced him to that world.  He reports as well the public policies and private actions that have reduced the brushlands to less than five percent of its former extent.  He chronicles the efforts to publicize the brushlands' destruction and to save the remaining richness for future generations.

The Alamo, Remembered Tejano Accounts and Perspectives

Author:  Timothy M. Matovina

Price:  $15.95

As Mexican soldiers fought the mostly Anglo-American colonists and volunteers at the Alamo in 1836, San Antonio's Tejano population was caught in the crossfire, both literally and symbolically.  Though their origins were in Mexico, the Tejanos had put down lasting roots in Texas and did not automatically identify with the Mexican cause.  Indeed, as the accounts in this new collection demonstrate, their strongest allegiance was to their fellow San Antonians, with whom they shared a common history and a common plight as war raged in their hometown.

Timothy M. Matovina here gathers all known Tejano accounts of the Battle of the Alamo.  These accounts consist of first reports of the battle, including Juan N. Seguin's funeral oration at the interment ceremony of the Alamo defenders, conversations with local Tejanos, unpublished petitions and depositions, and published accounts from newspapers and other sources.  This communal response to the legendary battle deepens our understanding of the formation of Mexican American consciousness and identity in San Antonio. 

The Account:  Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's Relación

An Annotated Translation by

Martin A. Favata and José B. Fernández

$12.95

The Account:  Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's Relación, edited and translated by José Fernández and Martin Favata, is a new and improved translation of Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's chronicle of his journey across a large portion of what is now the United States.  The Account is one of the earliest chronicles of Spanish penetration into North America.  His journey (1528-1536) of hardship and misfortune is one of the most remarkable in the history of the New World and contains many first descriptions of the lands and their inhabitants.  The Account, first published in Zamora, Spain, in 1542, is of inestimable value for students of history and literature, ethnographers, anthropologists and the general reader.  It is also one of the most remarkable literary documents for the style, clarity and sense of drama in the narrator's extraordinary effort to comprehend a totally new and marvelous new world.

The Account is the second literary text to be issued by a national project to reconstruct the literary history Hispanics of the United States:  Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage.  Scholars from throughout the country are engaged in a long-term search for all forms of literary expression that have been created by Hispanics from colonial to contemporary times in what has become the United States.  The project is centered at the University of Houston and will be making individual literary works and collections available regularly into the future.

The American GI Forum In Pursuit of the Dream, 1958-1983

Author:  Henry A.J. Ramos

Price:  $14.95

One of our country's most important but least known civil-rights groups for Mexican Americans, the American GI Forum was founded in 1948 in Corpus Christi, Texas, by Dr. Hector Garcia, an Army veteran.  Henry A.J. Ramos's meticulously written history traces the activities of this influential group from its stormy early days through the presidency of Ronald Reagan.  Today, the Forum numbers more than 500 chapters throughout the nation, and remains dedicated to addressing the problems of veterans, their spouses, and their families (and by extension the entire Hispanic community) by working for better education, fair political representation, and equal job opportunities.  Extensively documented and including a generous selection of photographs (including Forum leaders seen in action and with such diverse historic figures as Lyndon Johnson, the Kennedy brothers, Reagan, and Bob Dole), The American GI Forum brings lost history to life again.  It will be appreciated by anyone--man or woman, regardless of political affiliation--who looks back upon a proud Hispanic heritage and forward to the hope-filled American dream.

Anglos and Mexicans In the Making of Texas, 1836-1986

Author:  David Montejano

Price:  $19.95

Anything But Mexican Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles

Author:  Rodolfo F. Acuña

Price:  $19.95

By the year 2000, Mexicans and other Latinos will comprise fifty percent of the population of Los Angeles.  In this new book, the author of the widely praised Occupied America describes the harsh realities facing Chicanos in LA today.

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