Nicholas F. Centino's Author-Curated Razabilly Playlist

A hybrid of country music and rhythm and blues, 1950s rockabilly is loud, raucous, and rebellious. Rockabilly music, recognized as one of the earliest iterations of what we now know as rock and roll, is responsible for launching the careers of musicians including Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash. Now, decades after the genre’s midcentury heyday, a vibrant scene for rockabilly musicians and fans thrives in the Latinx metropolis of Los Angeles. While the genre is dominated by white people outside Los Angeles, within greater LA, Latinas, Latinos, and Latinx peoples make up the critical mass of the Rockabilly scene.

Despite the eponymous name, LA’s contemporary Rockabilly scene embraces a broad range of roots music, including not just rockabilly but also jump blues, western swing, and others. While all the tracks cited here are excellent, the following playlist is best thought of as an audio companion to Razabilly: Transforming Sights, Sounds, and History in the Los Angeles Latina/o Rockabilly Scene rather than a “best of” compilation. As such, each track was selected to provide particular insight into the scene and the sensibilities of its Latina/o/x participants.

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“Power of the 45,” pts. 1 and 2
Big Sandy and His Fly-Rite Boys

There is no better way to kick off this playlist than with the ambassador of Southern California roots rock himself: Big Sandy. A fixture of the contemporary international Rockabilly scene for well over thirty years, Big Sandy and His Fly-Rite Boys draw on a broad family tree of musical lineages. Featured on their 2006 album, Turntable Matinee, “Power of the 45” pays homage to those lineages and legacies as enduring capsules of joy and memory shared among friends and family. Pay close attention to the band and artist names dropped as the music fades out at the end of part 2, including, among others, rockabilly legends Sleepy Labeef and pioneers of the Chicano Eastside sound Thee Midniters. Stick around after that and you will be treated to a hidden acoustic rendition of their composition “Spanish Dagger.”

“The Hippy Hippy Shake”
Chan Romero

While Richie Valens is remembered as the quintessential Latino 1950s rocker, he was only one of several Latino rock and roll musicians on the national stage in those formative years. Chan Romero, a Mexican American teenager from Montana, was recruited by Bob Keane to be Richie’s heir after Valens tragically lost his life in 1959. With their growling guitars, relative obscurity, and the cultural resonance of the lead singer, songs by Romero, especially “My Little Ruby” (1960), are tailor made for the Latina/o/x Rockabilly scene of Los Angeles. Released in 1959, Romero’s signature tune, “The Hippy Hippy Shake,” would later be covered by the Beatles in their 1963 performance on the BBC.

“Dance in the Rain”
Luis and the Wildfires

Helmed by Reb Kennedy, Wild Records has been taking the international Rockabilly scene by storm since the 2000s, introducing a global audience to young Los Angeles musicians and performers, many of whom are Latina or Latino. Raised in the San Fernando Valley, Luis Arriaga brings an unbridled energy to his music, providing a sight to behold on stage and a sound to be enveloped by on tracks such as 2010’s “Dance in the Rain.” Speaking to the broad retro tastes embraced in the Los Angeles scene, the Arriaga turns to a hypnotic post-rockabilly sound to craft an organized chaos.

“La Plaga”
Los Teen Tops

As demographics continue to shift in contemporary Los Angeles, migrants bring legacies of popular music from their nations of origin. A cover of “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” “La Plaga” (1959), by Los Teens Tops, typifies an archive of 1950s rockabilly tunes interpreted by Latin American artists in the 1960s. This soundscape formed a familiar musical terrain that appealed to first- and second-generation immigrant youth from Mexico and Central America discovering the Rockabilly scene in the 1990s and 2000s.

“‘Til the Well Runs Dry”
Wynona Carr

With a big brash sound, “Till the Well Runs Dry” is a vocal- and horn-driven number that begs listeners to dance. Given decades of solidarity and interethnic cultural exchange, it is little surprise that African American jump blues from the 1940s and 1950s dominates the playlists of many DJs in the Los Angeles Latina/o Rockabilly scene. In the 1950s Carr was signed to Specialty Records, a Los Angeles–based record label that launched the careers of musical icons including Little Richard and Sam Cooke.

“Boy with the Angel Eyes”
Vicky Tafoya and The Big Beat

Drawing on the soulful legacy of Chicano lowrider oldies, “Boy with the Angel Eyes,” like other, similar songs, is a sharp departure from the hiccupping, guitar-driven sounds of rockabilly. Nevertheless, that cultural and emotional connection keeps the Inland Empire’s Vicky Tafoya ever-present in the Los Angeles scene. Often adorned in zoot suit slacks and crowned with an elaborate 1940s hairstyle, Tafoya draws on rich elements of Chicanx cultural memory in her performances, covering fan favorites such as “Angel Baby” alongside her original material.

“How Low Do You Feel?”
Ray Campi

Substitute teacher by day, rock star by night, Ray Campi enjoyed a career that represents the longevity of the rockabilly revival in Los Angeles. An original 1950s performer, Campi was rediscovered by Ronny Weiser (Rollin’ Rock Records) in the 1970s and continued to perform rockabilly until his passing in March 2021. With its foot-stomping call-and-response structure and taunting guitar riffs, “How Low Do You Feel” (1979) is a classic of the Rollin’ Rock era of Los Angeles rockabilly.

“Rosa Maria”
Moonlight Cruisers

Epitomizing the Latina/o/x transformation of the Los Angeles Rockabilly scene in the early 2000s, the Moonlight Cruisers, Pachuco Jose y Los Diamantes, and other such bands peppered their performances with straight-ahead cumbia tunes. Cumbia, a working-class musical genre originating in Columbia and expanding to other parts of Latin America, is simply the go-to party music for many Latinas/os in the Los Angeles area. Listen closely, however, and you will hear the distinctly rockabillyesque picking of Al Martinez behind the lyrical delivery.

“Parachute”
Thee Lakesiders

Representative of possible new and divergent directions that retro-Chicanx music can take in (post-) COVID-era Los Angeles, Thee Lakesiders’ “Parachute” (2018) is a melancholic rumination invoking intense feelings of loss and yearning. The duo’s pachuco/a aesthetics synchronize with their self-conscious interpellation of cultural memory and resistance in the postindustrial landscape of LA. Available as a 45 rpm disc, their latest work, “Can’t Fool Me Twice/Show Me Love,” was released in May 2021.

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Q&A on Quinceañera Style with Rachel Valentina González

Quinceañera celebrations, which recognize a girl’s transition to young womanhood at age fifteen, are practiced in Latinx communities throughout the Americas. But in the consumer-driven United States, the ritual has evolved from a largely religious ceremony to an elaborate party where social status takes center stage. Examining the many facets of this contemporary debut experience, Quinceañera Style: Social Belonging and Latinx Consumer Identities by Rachel Valentina González reports on ethnographic fieldwork in California, Texas, the Midwest, and Mexico City to reveal a complex, compelling story. Along the way, we meet a self-identified transwoman who uses the quinceañera as an intellectual space in 

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her activist performance art. We explore the economic empowerment of women who own barrio boutiques specializing in the quinceañera’s many accessories and made-in-China gowns. And, of course, we meet teens themselves, including a vlogger whose quince-planning tips have made her an online sensation.

Disrupting assumptions, such as the belief that Latino communities in the United States can’t desire upward mobility without abandoning ethnoracial cultural legacies, Quinceañera Style also underscores the performative nature of class and the process of constructing a self in the public, digital sphere.

Give us the elevator pitch for your research and the resulting book.

Quinceañera Style explores the cultural practices of quinceañera celebrations as unexpected spectacles of luxury in Latinx communities.

How did you get interested in the subject of your book?

I never had a quinceañera, but in graduate school I was asked to present to a group of undergraduates on the significance of dress in the tradition and I realized how little research had been done. I decided I wanted to fill in those gaps.

What kind of expectations are placed on young Latinas for their quinceañeras?

It depends on who asks. Families expect young women to put a good face forward—as young women and as respectable young adults. The church wants them to manifest obedience. I think American society, however, wants Latinas to remember their place; they want to see humility and deference to assumed cultural narratives of poverty, undereducation, and social trauma. Instead, girls defy these expectations and demand to be seen.

Can you establish what you’re looking at when you say quinceañera consumer practice?

Quinceañeras are a cultural practice, but dependent on consumer practices like shopping for goods and services. I am invested in how Latina/os spend their money, and how it reflects what's valuable in their lives.

Did the regions and communities you studied differ in surprising ways?

Not really. What I found most interesting is how consumer practices, especially those circulating through deterritorial forms like internet ads and online shopping, create communities through a shared practice of consumption. While each region has its own identity, overall the styles of dresses vary because individual designers are eager to set themselves apart in a national and international versus regional fashion scene.

Briefly position your research and book in the context of other studies on quinceañeras.

My book examines US Latinx contexts of cultural production and is also interested in the church as a major framing discourse. This is not a religious history of the sacramental or even a study of ethno-racial identities, but instead is examining secular quinceañera practice through a lens of consumer citizenship.

How does your background as a folklorist make your book unique?

Being a folklorist means my primary goal is to look at the creative acts of everyday people. And in working with Latinx communities, that means that my perspective is one of examining art as a form of social resistance and place making for people who have been historically, socially, and economically marginalized in the narratives of ideal Americanness. But it also means that the primary interlocutor in this study is the practice itself—and being open to following the practice and its variations into a variety of different ideological and physical places.

Rachel Valentina González is an assistant professor of Mexican American and Latina/o studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She was a Woodrow Wilson Early Career Fellow and is the coeditor of Race and Cultural Practice in Popular Culture.

www.utexaspress.com

Q&A with Xóchitl Bada and Shannon Gleeson on Migrant Rights

Immigration policy, enforcement, and reform has dominated national discourse in the United States for many years. Vital research on trends, institutions, and policies that could be most impactful in this national discourse are often underrepresented or deliberately obfuscated for political reasons.

Scholars Xóchitl Bada and Shannon Gleeson have brought together a timely, transnational

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examination of the institutions in Mexico, Canada, and the United States that engage migrant populations in becoming agents of change for immigrant rights while holding government authorities accountable in the new book Accountability Across Borders: Migrant Rights in North America.

Collecting the diverse perspectives of scholars, labor organizers, and human-rights advocates, Accountability Across Borders is the first edited collection that connects studies of immigrant integration in host countries to accounts of transnational migrant advocacy efforts, including case studies from the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

We asked Professors Xóchitl Bada and Shannon Gleeson to answer a few questions about their research and how their findings can inform both policy makers and rights activists.

Give us the elevator pitch for your research and the resulting book.

In the last thirty years, immigrant advocacy organizations have demanded protections in various arenas, including employment, health, and education. They have used a variety of strategies that transcend the container of the nation-state as they work to hold local, national, and global bureaucracies accountable to the needs of migrant populations. But we do not yet well understand the relationship between these organizations and the countries of origin and destination whose systems of governance they are lobbying for change.

In our ongoing collaboration, we seek to analyze the advocacy practices of transnational civil society organizations so as to advance and implement protections afforded to migrants in North America. We argue that these practices are not uniform; rather, they are constituted at different scales, ranging from the local to national and the transnational. Advocacy organizations also pursue various cross-border strategies to build power beyond sovereign states. This volume examines the perspectives of a range of actors, including national and binantional bureaucracies, local consular offices, educational institutions, and a variety of civil society groups.

Taking Canada, Mexico, the United States as entry points, this edited collection includes several case studies addressing efforts to ensure Mexican migrants’ basic rights and their access to the protections those rights should afford. The contributors analyze the multiple mechanisms for accountability from governments of the countries of origin and countries of destination, in both domestic and international legislative frameworks. The chapters discuss a range of institutional arenas where migrant rights matter, such as global governance, labor rights, health-care access, schooling for indigenous migrants, and returned and undocumented immigrant youth.

How do you define migrant civil society?

We use “migrant civil society” to refer to migrant-led membership organizations and public institutions. These can include membership organizations, nongovernmental organizations, media, and other autonomous groups. Migrants organize around a variety of often overlapping identities, as workers, say, or as members of a neighborhood, a village of origin, an ethnicity, or a religion. These multiple identities and allegiances can in turn fuel civic and political leadership. In other words, the notion of a migrant civil society refers to the capacity of migrants to represent themselves rather than having advocates speak on their behalf, although they may collaborate with allies as well.

How did first the Obama administration and then the Trump administration alter the course of your research and writing?

Our efforts to bring together a group of North American scholars interested in migrant rights and accountability began in the spring of 2016, close to the beginning of Donald Trump´s presidential campaign. We had received generous funding from the Cornell University ILR School’s Pierce Memorial Fund to organize a workshop on transnational migrant advocacy, and by the time we met in December, it became clear that our work was not only relevant but urgent. By mid-December of 2016, we had secured an invitation to submit our edited collection to the UT Press, and we encouraged our collaborators to engage with current immigration policy changes as much as possible. Of course, the constant evolution of this policy field always presents immigration scholars with challenges in their research and writing. On the one hand, the current president has undoubtedly produced an unprecedented number of executive actions on immigration that make it difficult to produce up-to-date research and analysis. On the other, many of the policies that threaten immigrant communities have a deep foundation in previous Republican and Democratic administrations. So there is a continuity in many of our core themes.

Your book focuses on three areas of migration governance: education, labor, and health. Can you broadly cover your findings in these respective areas?

It is always difficult to tackle several institutional arenas of migrant rights at once, especially in more than one country. But we attempt to do so here with a focus on education, labor, and health across Mexico, Canada, and the United States.

Undocumented immigrants and returned migrants have demanded increased support for and investment in education from their countries of origin. Accordingly, Alexandra Délano discusses the new roles that Mexican consulates in the United States have played in securing rights for Mexican migrants and facilitating US protections. For example, Mexican consulates have helped facilitate the application process for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) immigration program, which opens important educational and professional opportunities. With respect to Canada, Patricia Landolt and Luin Goldring consider the importance of grassroots activists in demanding educational access for all students in Toronto, regardless of immigration status. And regarding Mexico, Mónica Jacobo finds that returned and deported Mexican youth have organized to eliminate the highly expensive and bureaucratic procedure to validate their US education and gain access to Mexico’s higher education institutions.

In a moment of significant discussions about the future of NAFTA, we find that migrant labor-rights protections may at long last be meaningfully addressed in regional trade negotiations thanks to the dedicated efforts over the past two decades by labor unions and transnational labor-advocacy organizations. While the portability of migrant labor-rights protection is far from being fully implemented in the region, the chapters by Bada and Gleeson and by Gálvez, Godoy, and Meinema find that civil society has taken an increasingly visible role in demanding accountability from public officials for guestworkers in bilateral agreements, trade negotiations, and labor enforcement initiatives.

Access to health care remains one of the most difficult challenges for migrants in the United States. The Affordable Care Act enacted during the Obama administration prohibited undocumented immigrants from acquiring federally subsidized health insurance in the newly created health markets. This kept migrants in an already overburdened system served primarily by local community health centers. The chapter by Osorio, Dávila, and Castañeda offers the first historical overview of the Binational Health Week, sponsored by Mexico´s Ministry of Health, which provides access to free preventive care for underinsured migrants. The program has existed for more than a decade and is now replicated by a dozen Latin American consulates across the United States.

How can your research contextualize immigration-based fear and racism in the United States?

Migrants workers are disproportionally represented in precarious work and face significant structural vulnerabilities, violence, and human- and labor-rights violations during their transit, settlement, and return in countries of origin, transit, and destination.

Yet for over three decades, the federal government has failed to reach a bipartisan compromise on comprehensive immigration reform. As a result, state and local governments in the United States have had to take up the slack, playing a substantial role on issues ranging from enforcement to benefits and services. In 2017 alone, states enacted 206 laws on all sides of issues ranging from so-called sanctuary policies to refugee resettlement, education/civics, and in-state tuition.

In this context, immigrant civil society plays a significant role in enacting and implementing local immigrant policies. Our research documents how migrant civil society organizations engage civic and political institutions in countries of origin and destination to demand better enforcement and implementation of Mexican migrant rights across borders. These groups also serve as cultural brokers that help immigrants navigate local bureaucracies and help advocate for the rights of migrants in—sometimes welcoming, sometimes hostile—destination communities.

Can you highlight major gaps or inconsistencies in immigration policy and enforcement that your findings reveal?

In the United States, Mexican migrants make up nearly a third of all immigrants and more than half of the undocumented population, estimated at 11 million. Even so, “lawfully present” Mexican immigrants vastly outnumber the undocumented. In fact, the estimate of Mexican migrants living in the United States without authorization declined from 6.9 million in 2007 to 5.8 million in 2014. Many undocumented immigrants have resided in the United States for more than a decade; the typical unauthorized immigrant has lived there for a median of fifteen years. A variety of factors have led to this decline, including Mexico’s changing demography and decreasing fertility rates, improved conditions in Mexico’s labor market, higher levels of education, dramatic increases in the costs of crossing the border, the Great Recession of 2007, and decreasing family remittances that could finance new border crossings. However, family remittances to Mexico were at historic new highs between 2016 and 2018, possibly because of President Trump’s anti-immigrant measures and his threat to tax family remittances.

Nevertheless, Mexican migrants have been a major target for immigration enforcement actions under Clinton, Bush, and Obama, and even more systematically and brazenly under the Trump administration. More migrants from Mexico were deported in fiscal year 2018 than from any other country: 141,045 of 252,405 removals (56%), not including voluntary returns. President Trump even declared a national emergency at the border by falsely claiming that the Democratic Party is leading an assault on the United States by inciting large flows of people from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador to cross Mexico and continue to the United States. Although total apprehensions at the southern border by Customs and Border Protection (CPB) reached 521,090 in fiscal year 2018, CBP had apprehended a total of 569,237 people in 2014, during the Obama administration. In fact, the United States has for decades increased border militarization in an attempt to stem the northward flow that began before US borders were even drawn. The Trump administration’s current policy of separating families in detention is a further manifestation of this state violence, given that there are literally now thousands of children lost as a consequence to this punitive measure, which many international scholars agree is a violation of human rights. Conversely, the children held in detention have also reported a range of abuses, including sexual assault, an alarming reality for which the administration has yet to be held accountable.

Restrictive immigration policies and harshly punitive deportation measures have been accompanied by ill-informed public perceptions about what contributions migrants make. Mexican migrants embody a narrative about Latino migrants in the United States that is at once contradictory and reductive. They are frequently held up to be hard-working people, a criminal threat, a drain on the welfare state, a cultural stain on democracy, and resistant to assimilation. These perceptions are further fueled by Trump’s racist rhetoric, coupled with a series of repressive measures that include a vast expansion of the groups prioritized for deportation, arrests of subjects at places previously considered safe, a plan to hire 15,000 more immigration agents, a broad ban on refugees and even on basic travel for migrants from several majority-Muslim countries, and the creation of a Victims of Immigrant Crime Enforcement Office.

The United States is facing these difficult conversations around immigration while simultaneously grappling with declining fertility rates and population decline. By 1980, eighteen of the twenty-five most populous cities in 1950 had lost residents. Of the twenty-five largest cities in 1980s, seventeen gained residents over the subsequent thirty years, largely because of a rapid increase in the Latino population. Of the twenty-five largest US cities, twelve have populations that are more than one-quarter Hispanic; Latinos make up over one-third the population in eight of those, and they constitute the majority in two. In other words, Latinos, and especially Mexicans, are a part of the fabric of US society. The continued inaction on immigration reform and the absence of inclusive local policies toward immigrants is therefore of serious consequence.

Could you establish an approach to your book for both policy makers and rights activists? How can readers best utilize the research-based tools for improvement that you present?

Our book offers a multidisciplinary institutional analysis of migrant rights through a cross-sectoral, multisited, and multiscalar lens. We highlight the cross-border relations between government actors and civil society, across a variety of policy arenas, including global labor regulation, public education, health care, and criminal justice. Given our limited regional focus, we have knowingly overlooked several sectors and binational relations, such as sustainable trade and rural development, environmental justice, development and violence-induced internal displacement, and voting-rights coalitions. To fill this gap, policy makers, scholars, and migrant rights activists should pay more attention to variations across specific policy arenas at local, state or provincial, federal, and transnational scales.

For example, the experiences of traditional destination countries like the United States and Canada are not likely to mirror those of other destinations that lack the same bureaucratic capacity for immigration enforcement and migrant integration, such as Mexico. The Mexican government’s failure to offer immediate access to public education (a result of byzantine bureaucratic obstacles) to thousands of Mexican American children caught in the US deportation regime illustrates the urgent need to interrogate such policies affecting returned migrants. Conversely, the Mexican government’s unwillingness to offer even minimal access to basic health care and other resources to thousands of Central Americans waiting their turn in temporary shelters to request asylum to the United States on the Mexican side of the border is equally shameful. It is unclear whether states closer to the border have fared any better than those in central and southern Mexico.

We also know surprisingly little about the educational outcomes of US-born Mexican American children who return to Mexico and continue their education in public schools that have no programs dedicated to integrating students whose first language is English or other nonindigenous languages. Studying these and other outcomes will become increasingly important under Trump-era immigration enforcement policies in the United States.

President Trump’s anti-immigrant rethoric and policies have already stranded thousands of migrants in Mexican border states. These groups may hold out hope for a new administration in 2020 that is more sympathethic to those fleeing criminal violence from state and nonstate actors alike. Thus far, Mexico has only begrudgingly accepted its new role as a transit country and has agreed to receive Central Americans while they wait their turn to request asylum.

However, those immigrants may decide to stay in Mexico, taking advantage of the positive rethoric of a recently inaugurated center-left government. Mexico, a country with a foreign-born population of 1.2 million (0.99% of the total population)—the vast majority coming from the United States (899,311)—will likely be forced to incorporate a large group of Central Americans with little precedent for doing so on a large scale. While Trump’s famous campaign promise of a border wall is only partially funded 2.5 years into his presidency, his declaration of a national emergency already faces multiple lawsuits in several state courts. Further, the xenophobia and racism coming out of the White House and targeted at Latinos and immigrants fuel anxiety and amplify uncertainty among migrants and would-be migrants alike.

Our volume admittedly focuses on primarily positive examples of collaboration. Further work should continue to examine more contested efforts to enforce rights across borders, especially in varied federalist contexts such as Canada, where provinces have more control over certain policies—such as collective bargaining—that impact migrants. Moving forward, we will continue to examine consular advocacy on behalf of migrant worker rights across traditional and new migrant destinations in the United States. Our findings also lay the groundwork for future research in other areas of policymaking (beyond immigration) that implicate state-society collaborations and contestations.

Xóchitl Bada is an associate professor of Latin American and Latino studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Mexican Hometown Associations in Chicagoacán: From Local to Transnational Civic Engagement and a coeditor of two forthcoming works: New Migration Patterns in the Americas: Challenges for the 21st Century and Handbook of Latin American Sociology.

Shannon Gleeson is an associate professor of labor relations, law, and history at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. She is the author of Precarious Claims: The Promise and Failure of Workplace Protections in the United States and Conflicting Commitments: The Politics of Enforcing Immigrant Worker Rights in San Jose and Houston. She also coedited Building Citizenship from Below: Precarity, Migration, and Agency and The Nation and Its Peoples: Citizens, Denizens, Migrants.

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Announcing a New Series—Latinx: The Future is Now

Latinx: The Future Is Now is a new interdisciplinary series devoted to the evolving field of Latina/o/x studies, including Central American, Afro-Latinx, and Asian-Latinx studies. Situated at the nexus of cultural, performance, historical, food, environmental, and textual studies, the series will focus on ways in which the racial, cultural, and social formations of historical Latinx communities can engage and enhance scholarship across geographies and nationalities. The series editors invite projects that consider the multiple queer and gender-fluid possibilities that are embodied in the “x”; projects that have a feminist critique of patriarchy at the center of their intellectual work; projects that deploy a relational approach to ethnic and national groups; and projects that address the overlapping dynamics of gender, race, sexual, and national identities.

Submissions or queries may be directed to the series editors, Nicole Guidotti-Hernandez, nicole.m.guidotti-hernandez@emory.edu and Lorgia Garcia-Peña, garciapena@fas.harvard.edu in addition to Senior Acquisitions Editor, Kerry Webb, kwebb@utpress.utexas.edu.

Forthcoming books in the series will be listed here as they are published: https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/series/latinx-future-now.

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Dr. Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández is Professor in the Department of English at Emory University. She is an expert in Borderlands History after 1846, Transnational Feminist Methodologies, Latinx Studies, and Popular Culture and Immigration. As a public intellectual, Dr. Guidotti-Hernández has written numerous articles for the feminist magazine Ms. and the feminist blog The Feminist Wire, covering such topics as immigration, reproductive rights, and the Dream act. She also sits on the national advisory council for the Ms. and is currently on the national advisory council for Freedom University in Athens, Georgia.

Dr. Lorgia Garcia-Peña is the Roy G. Clouse Associate Professor of Latinx Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of  award-winning book The Borders of Dominicanidad and the co-founder of Freedom University Georgia, a modern-day freedom school created to support undocumented students.  

www.utexaspress.com

Scavenger Hunt at the 2018 Texas Book Festival

This weekend, the University of Texas Press and many of our authors will enjoy the 23rd annual Texas Book Festival on the Capitol grounds in downtown Austin and environs.

The 2018 Texas Book Festival will be extra exciting this year because we have partnered with other Texas university presses and scholarly publishers for a scavenger hunt! Enter to win a big box of books from each participating publisher (listed below), plus discounts and more!

• University of Texas Press (Tent #3, Booth #304 / 305)
• Texas State Historical Association (Tent #5)
• Texas Tech University Press (Booth # 300 / 301)
• Trinity University Press (Tent #3, Booth #320)
• Texas Christian University Press (Tent #5)
• University of North Texas Press (Tent #5)
• Texas A&M University Press (Tent #5)
• Texas Review Press (Tent #5)

How It Works

Stop by the booth of any of the participating publishers to pick up your scavenger hunt worksheet. Make your way to all of the booths on the form, obtaining a stamp at each one. To gain additional entries to the contest, share your book festival experience on social media, tagging a scholarly publisher above and using the hashtag #TurnItUP. When you have collected all of your stamps and filled out the worksheet, turn it in at the University of Texas Press booth (#304 / 305) to submit your entry for a chance to win! 

Winners will be selected and notified on Monday, October 29th by 5pm.

Mark your calendar for University Press Week 2018—November 12th to November 17th—in celebration of the many ways university presses amplify the voices of scholars and communities, hosted by the Association of University Presses. The theme is #TurnItUP, which was selected to celebrate the work of the scholarly publishing community to find, publish, and amplify subjects, authors, and stories that might otherwise be overlooked by the book publishing community.

The University of Texas Press will be selling great Texas reads at booths #304 and #305 in the exhibitor tents along Colorado Street. We'll have tons of titles for sale at a great discount, so please stop by. There are a lot of wonderful authors in attendance this year, so we’ve distilled our authors' appearances into a single UT Press schedule (browse the full schedule here):

Saturday

2:00 PM - 2:45 PM

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An Oral History of Houston Rap

Author: Lance Scott Walker

Location: The Contemporary Austin-Jones Center (700 Congress Avenue)
Booksigning: 3 PM Adult Signing Tent on Congress Avenue

Lance Scott Walker and photographer Peter Beste relate stories and images from a decade spent documenting Houston’s rap scene. Through interviews and photographs with the rappers, DJs, producers, promoters, record label owners, and locations, they show us how Bayou City rap music got its distinctive character.

Follow Lance Scott Walker online: @lanceswalker | Website 

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3:30 PM - 4:15 PM

From the Heavens to the Hill Country: Photos of Texas, Presented by Texas Highways

Author: Kenny Braun and Jay B. Sauceda

Location: The Contemporary Austin-Jones Center (700 Congress Avenue)

Moderator: Brian Sweaney
Booksigning: 4:30 PM Adult Signing Tent on Congress Avenue

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From high above in the seat of a Cessna and down below in a cypress swamp, photographers Jay B. Sauceda (A Mile Above Texas) and Kenny Braun (As Far As You Can See) have journeyed through Texas to document fantastic new takes on our cherished Lone Star State. Join them for a slideshow of the beautiful Texas country, presented by Texas Highways magazine.

Follow Jay B. Sauceda online: @jaybsauceda | Website 

Follow Kenny Braun online: @KennyBraunPhoto | Website 

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3:30 PM - 4:15 PM

Texas BBQ, Small Town to Downtown

Authors: Wyatt McSpadden

Moderator: David Courtney

Location: Central Market Cooking Tent Congress and 11th Street

Booksigning: 4:30 PM in Adult Signing Tent, Congress Avenue

Let’s talk Texas barbecue! Photographer Wyatt McSpadden shares crave-inducing images of the barbecue universe in almost every corner of Texas. He’s joined by Franklin Barbecue’s Aaron Franklin to talk about our favorite food—Texas BBQ.

3:30 PM - 4:15 PM

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Writing About Music

Authors: Amy Gentry and Jessica Hopper

Moderator: Kayleigh Hughes

Location: Capitol Extension Room E2.014

Booksigning: 4:30PM in Adult Signing Tent, Congress Avenue

Writers, music lovers, and critics Amy Gentry (Tori Amos’s Boys for Pele) and Jessica Hopper (Night Moves) pay homage to the forces and songs that shaped them, from Tori Amos’s iconic album Boys for Pele to the clubs and streets of Chicago’s youthful nightlife.

Sunday

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11:00 AM - 11:45 AM

On Story: The Golden Ages of Television

Authors: Maya Perez and Barbara Morgan
Moderator: Jennifer Stayton

Location: Capitol Extension Room E2.010, 1100 Congress Avenue

Booksigning: Adult Signing Tent, Congress Avenue

Based on the popular PBS-affiliated television series, Maya Perez and Wendy Calhoun share On Story: The Golden Ages of Television, a collection of insights from several decades of interviews with some of TV's best creators and writers, including Issa Rae, Garry Shandling, Noah Hawley, and many others. Moderated by Jennifer Stayton.

12:00 PM - 12:45 PM

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Tracking Texas Water

Author: Seamus McGraw

Moderator: Asher Price

Location: Texas Tent, Congress and 8th Street

Booksigning: Adult Signing Tent, Congress Avenue

Water, and the lack thereof, has shaped Texas agriculture, environment, and culture indelibly. Join authors Hugh Fitzsimmons (A Rock Between Rivers) and Seamus McGraw (A Thirsty Land) as they discuss the impact of water on the past, present, and future of Texas. Our shared reliance on water makes this a timely, and timeless, conversation.

1:00 PM - 1:45 PM

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Making History: The Civil Rights Movement In Texas

Author: Virginia Cumberbatch, Leslie Blair, Judge Harriet Murphy

Moderator: Doyin Oyeniyi
Location: Texas Tent (Congress and 8th Street)

Booksigning: 2 PM, Adult Signing Tent on Congress Avenue

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The story of the civil rights movement in Texas is complex, momentous and highly relevant to discussions today. Harriet Murphy, the state’s first female African American judge and author of There All Honor Lies, sits down with Virginia Cumberbatch and Leslie Blair, chroniclers of the history of integration at the University of Texas in As We Saw It, to discuss the activism, effort and courage that moved equality forward in Texas.

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3:00 PM - 3:45 PM

Beyoncé in Formation: Remixing Black Feminism
Author: Omise’eke Tinsley

Location: Capitol Extension Room E2.010 (1100 Congress Avenue)

Booksigning: 4 PM Adult Signing Tent on Congress Avenue

Beyoncé's blockbuster album and video Lemonade became an instant soundtrack for vital new-millennium narratives about race, gender and sexuality. Professor Tinsley, who made headlines with her undergraduate course “Beyoncé Feminism, Rihanna Womanism," discusses how Beyoncé models feminism and femme-inism and how Lemonade created space for non-ciswomen to explore their own identity and feminism.

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3:00 PM - 3:45 PM

Chicana Movidas: Activism and Feminism in a New Era

Authors: Martha Cotera

Location: Latinx Lit Tent 804 Congress Avenue

Booksigning: 4 PM Adult Signing Tent on Congress Avenue

A groundbreaking new anthology brings together generations of Chicana scholars and activists to offer the first wide-ranging account of women’s organizing, activism, and leadership in the Chicano Movement. Join contributors Martha Cotera and Brenda Sendejo for a look at the intellectual and political legacies of early Chicana feminism.

www.utexaspress.com