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There are few places where mobility has shaped identity as widely as the American West, but some locations and populations sit at its major crossroads, maintaining control over place and mobility, labor and race. In&#160;<I>Collisions at the Crossroads, </I>Genevieve Carpio<I>&#160;</I>argues that mobility, both permission to move freely and prohibitions on movement, helped shape racial formation in the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles and the Inland Empire throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By examining policies and forces as different as historical societies, Indian boarding schools, bicycle ordinances, immigration policy, incarceration, traffic checkpoints, and Route 66 heritage, she shows how local authorities constructed a racial hierarchy by allowing some people to move freely while placing limits on the mobility of others. Highlighting the ways people of color have negotiated their place within these systems, Carpio reveals a compelling and perceptive analysis of spatial mobility through physical movement and residence.<BR /> &#160;

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Empire&rsquo;s Tracks&#160;boldly reframes the history of the transcontinental&#160;railroad from the perspectives of the Cheyenne, Lakota, and Pawnee Native American tribes, and the Chinese migrants who&#160;toiled on its path. In this meticulously researched book, Manu&#160;Karuka situates the railroad within the violent global histories of&#160;colonialism and capitalism. Through an examination of legislative,&#160;military, and business records, Karuka deftly explains the&#160;imperial&#160;foundations of U.S. political economy. Tracing the shared paths of Indigenous and Asian American histories, this multisited&#160;interdisciplinary study connects military occupation to exclusionary&#160;border policies, a linked chain spanning the heart of U.S. imperialism.&#160;This highly original and beautifully wrought book unveils how the&#160;transcontinental railroad laid the tracks of the U.S. Empire. &#160;

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A pioneer of Chicano rock, Rub&eacute;n Funkahuatl Guevara performed with Frank Zappa, Johnny Otis, Bo Diddley, Tina Turner, and Celia Cruz, though he is best known as the front man of the 1970s experimental rock band Ruben And The Jets. Here he recounts how his youthful experiences in the barrio La Veinte of Santa Monica in the 1940s prepared him for early success in music and how his triumphs and seductive brushes with stardom were met with tragedy and crushing disappointments. Brutally honest and open, <I>Confessions of a Radical Chicano Doo-Wop Singer </I>is an often hilarious and self-critical look inside the struggle of becoming an artist and a man. Recognizing racial identity as composite, contested, and complex, Guevara&mdash;an American artist of Mexican descent&mdash;embraces a Chicano identity of his own design, calling himself a Chicano &ldquo;culture sculptor&rdquo; who has worked to transform the aspirations, alienations, and indignities of the Mexican American people into an aesthetic experience that could point the way to liberation.<BR /> &#160;

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Strategies of Segregation&#160;unearths the ideological and structural architecture of enduring racial inequality within and beyond schools in Oxnard, California. In this meticulously researched narrative spanning 1903 to 1974, David G. Garc&iacute;a excavates an extensive array of archival sources to expose a separate and unequal school system and its purposeful links with racially restrictive housing covenants. He recovers powerful oral accounts of Mexican Americans and African Americans who endured disparate treatment and protested discrimination. His analysis is skillfully woven into a compelling narrative that culminates in an examination of one of the nation&rsquo;s first desegregation cases filed jointly by Mexican American and Black plaintiffs. This transdisciplinary history advances our understanding of racism and community resistance across time and place. &#160;

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&quot;This is the most comprehensive book I&rsquo;ve ever read about the use of Spanish in the U.S.&#160;Incredible research. Read it to understand our country.&#160;Spanish is, indeed, an American language.&quot;&mdash;Jorge RamosAn American Language is a tour de force that revolutionizes our understanding of U.S. history. It reveals the origins of Spanish as a language binding residents of the Southwest to the politics and culture of an expanding nation in the 1840s. As the West increasingly integrated into the United States over the following century, struggles over power, identity, and citizenship transformed the place of the Spanish language in the nation. An American Language is a history that reimagines what it means to be an American&mdash;with profound implications for our own time.

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The Life of Paper offers a wholly original and inspiring analysis of how people facing systematic social dismantling have engaged letter correspondence to remake themselves&mdash;from bodily integrity to subjectivity and collective and spiritual being. Exploring the evolution of racism and confinement in California history, this ambitious investigation disrupts common understandings of the early detention of Chinese migrants (1880s&ndash;1920s), the internment of Japanese Americans (1930s&ndash;1940s), and the mass incarceration of African Americans (1960s&ndash;present) in its meditation on modern development and imprisonment as a way of life. Situating letters within global capitalist movements, racial logics, and overlapping modes of social control, Sharon Luk demonstrates how correspondence becomes a poetic act of reinvention and a way to live for those who are incarcerated.&#160; &#160;

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The Color Line and the Assembly Line tells a new story of the impact of mass production on society. Global corporations based originally in the United States have played a part in making gender and race everywhere. Focusing on Ford Motor Company&rsquo;s rise to become the largest, richest, and most influential corporation in the world, The Color Line and the Assembly Line takes on the traditional story of Fordism. Contrary to popular thought, the assembly line was perfectly compatible with all manner of racial practice in the United States, Brazil, and South Africa. Each country&rsquo;s distinct racial hierarchies in the 1920s and 1930s informed Ford&rsquo;s often divisive labor processes. Confirming racism as an essential component in the creation of global capitalism, Elizabeth Esch also adds an important new lesson showing how local patterns gave capitalism its distinctive features.&#160;

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With a uniquely balanced combination of salty, sweet, sour, and spicy flavors, Thai food burst onto Los Angeles&rsquo;s and America&rsquo;s culinary scene in the 1980s. <I>Flavors of Empire</I> examines the rise of Thai food and the way it shaped the racial and ethnic contours of Thai American identity and community. Full of vivid oral histories and new archival material, this book explores the factors that made foodways central to the Thai American experience. Starting with American Cold War intervention in Thailand, Mark Padoongpatt traces how informal empire allowed U.S. citizens to discover Thai cuisine abroad and introduce it inside the United States. When Thais arrived in Los Angeles, they reinvented and repackaged Thai food in various ways to meet the rising popularity of the cuisine in urban and suburban spaces. Padoongpatt opens up the history and politics of Thai food for the first time, all while demonstrating how race emerges in seemingly mundane and unexpected places.

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LGBT activism is often imagined as a self-contained struggle, inspired by but set apart from other social movements.&#160;<I>Lavender and Red&#160;</I>recounts a far different story: a history of queer radicals who understood their sexual liberation as intertwined with solidarity against imperialism, war, and racism. This politics was born in the late 1960s but survived well past Stonewall, propelling a gay and lesbian left that flourished through the end of the Cold War. The gay and lesbian left found its center in the San Francisco Bay Area, a place where sexual self-determination and revolutionary internationalism converged. Across the 1970s, its activists embraced socialist and women of color feminism and crafted queer opposition to militarism and the New Right. In the Reagan years, they challenged U.S. intervention in Central America, collaborated with their peers in Nicaragua, and mentored the first direct action against AIDS. Bringing together archival research, oral histories, and vibrant images, Emily K. Hobson&#160;rediscovers the radical queer past for a generation of activists today.

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The United States currently has the largest prison population on the planet. Over the last four decades, structural unemployment, concentrated urban poverty, and mass homelessness have also become permanent features of the political economy. These developments are without historical precedent, but not without historical explanation. In this searing critique, Jordan T. Camp traces the rise of the neoliberal carceral state through a series of turning points in U.S. history including the Watts insurrection in 1965, the Detroit rebellion in 1967, the Attica uprising in 1971, the Los Angeles revolt in 1992, and events in post-Katrina New Orleans in 2005. <I>Incarcerating the Crisis</I> argues that these dramatic events coincided with the emergence of neoliberal capitalism and the state&rsquo;s attempts to crush radical social movements. Through an examination of the poetic visions of social movements&mdash;including those by James Baldwin, Marvin Gaye, June Jordan, Jos&eacute; Ram&iacute;rez, and Sunni Patterson&mdash;it also suggests that alternative outcomes have been and continue to be possible.&#160;<BR />

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