How Two Chicana Nerds Wrote Their Way Back to Oxnard

Michele Serros and I Did Everything We Could to Escape Our SoCal Hometown—Only to Find It Lived Within Us

Growing up as a Chicana nerd, I never thought I’d write a book about myself, much less about Oxnard, where I grew up. This humble city on the Southern California coast was hardly the stuff worth writing about. Or so I had been taught throughout my elementary and high school years.

But then, as an adult, I began researching the late Chicana writer Michele Serros, who also grew up in Oxnard, and who deftly—defiantly even—wrote about our shared hometown in every work she authored, and I surprised myself. Discovering Serros sent …

In San Antonio, Remembering More Than the Alamo

Innovators Are Using Digital Tools to Tell Stories of the City’s Black and Latinx History

In San Antonio, Texas, one memorial—the church-turned-fort-turned-shrine of the Alamo—dominates the landscape. At the Alamo, the artifacts, images, and captions on display tell a unified story: That martyrs died there …

The Struggle for a Latino Place in Chicago

Like Their Black Neighbors, Mexican Americans Fought for Decades to Access Restricted Housing and Urban Space

In June of 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference headed north to Chicago to lead the Chicago Freedom Movement in a series of marches …

My Brother, the Acclaimed Artist from the East L.A. Barrio

A Very Personal Chronicle of Painter Salomón Huerta’s Journey to the Whitney Biennial and Beyond

My brother, Salomón Huerta, is an internationally recognized visual artist. When I think about his rise in the art world, I can’t help but reflect on how far he came, …

How Three Texas Newspapers Manufactured Three Competing Images of Immigrants | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

How Three Texas Newspapers Manufactured Three Competing Images of Immigrants

In Depression-Era San Antonio, Polarized Portraits of Mexicans Appealed to the Biases of Readers

In August 1930, an editorial writer for the largest newspaper chain on Earth proclaimed: “THE FARMER rids his barn of rats, his hen-house of weasels … the government of the …

Ritchie Valens, Selena, and Filming the American Dream

Producer Moctesuma Esparza and Writer-Director Luis Valdez Talk About How to Tell Stories that Reflect the Reality of America Today

How can a movie with a Mexican-American theme tell the story of all America? Why aren’t there more movies that reflect the increasingly complex racial and ethnic demography of our …