History/B

History

Barrio Boy

Author: Ernesto Galarza

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Now in its eleventh printing, Barrio Boy has sold over 50,000 copies. It is the remarkable story of one boy's journey from a Mexican village so small its main street didn't have a name, to Sacramento, California, bustling and thriving in the early decades of the twentieth century.

The story begins in Galarza's mountain village in Mexico. When the turmoil and tensions of the Mexican Revolution begin to rumble, the family leaves their tiny village in search of safety and work in a nearby city. Subsequent moves introduce the boy to the growing turbulence of the Revolution and the uncertainties of city life. He experiences firsthand the difficulties in finding work in am strife-torn nation, in securing an education, and in keeping a close-knit family intact. By the time his family finally settles in Sacramento, young Ernesto encounters new experiences and influences that will forever shape his outlook and broaden his horizons. With vivid imagery and a rare gift for recreating a child's sense of time and place, Galarza gives an account of the early experiences of his extraordinary life that will continue to delight readers for decades to come.

Brown, Not White School Integration and the Chicano Movement in Houston

Author: Guadalupe San Miguel, Jr.

Price: $34.95 (cloth)

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Strikes, boycotts, rallies, negotiations, and litigation marked the efforts of Mexican-origin community members to achieve educational opportunity and oppose discrimination in Houston schools in the early 1970s. These responses were sparked by the effort of the Houston Independent School District to circumvent a court order for desegregation by classifying Mexican American children as "white' and integrating hem with African American children--leaving Anglos in segregated schools. Gaining legal recognition for Mexican Americans as a minority group became the only means for fighting this kind of discrimination.

The struggle for legal recognition not only reflected an upsurge in organizing within the community but also generated a shift in consciousness and identity. In Brown, Not White Guadalupe San Miguel, Jr., astutely traces the evolution of the community's political activism in education during the Chicano Movement era of the early 1970s. San Miguel also identifies the important implications of this struggle for Mexican Americans and for public education. First, he demonstrates, the political mobilization in Houston underscored the emergence of a new type of grassroots ethnic leadership committed to community empowerment and to inclusiveness of diverse ideological interests within the minority community. Second, it signaled a shift in the activist community's identity from the assimilationist "Mexican American Generation" to the rising Chicano Movement with its "nationalist" ideology. Finally, it introduced Mexican American interests into educational policy making in general and into the national desegregation struggles. in particular. This important study will engage those interested in public school policy, as well as scholars of Mexican American history and the history of desegregation in America.

Buffalo Nickel

Author: Floyd Salas

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Novelist Floyd Salas has chartered his dramatic coming of age in the conflicting shadows of two older brothers; one a drug addict and petty criminal, the other an intellectual prodigy. Through intense, passionate prose, Salas takes us through the seedy bars, boxing rings and jails of his youth as he searches for his own true identity amid the tragedies that envelope his family.

Buffalo Nickel is autobiography that reads like a well-crafted novel in its recording of the excessive human costs of drug addiction. Salas is the author of three novels hailed as "stirring," stunning" and "vivid and authentic" by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Publishers Weekly has called his work "Powerful and disturbing." Kirkus Reviews has said of Salas that he is "A natural talent of tremendous strength." What the Saturday Review stated about his Tattoo the Wicked Cross may be repeated about Buffalo Nickel: "It has the troublesome authenticity of a tragedy well rehearsed."

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