UT Press at the 2020 Texas Book Festival

Starting Friday, November 6, the University of Texas Press and many of our authors will go virtual to celebrate the 25th annual Texas Book Festival. We are so sad to not be experiencing this vital literary event in person, but now more than ever, we must support our authors, booksellers, and book-loving organizations by showing up and buying books!
We have gathered our authors into the schedule below, but you can view and plan your full Texas Book Festival schedule here: https://www.texasbookfestival.org/2020-festival-schedule/

Unlike the in-person fest, you won’t need to wear out your soles dashing between concurrent sessions in the tents and Capitol building—none of the panels this year are simultaneous! Our authors will be featured during the adult sessions held November 6–15, so we encourage you to go ahead and signup for your Crowdcast account, RSVP to sessions, and mark your calendars to soak in all these discussions and demonstrations from the comfort of your home.

Saturday, November 7

2 PM - 2:45 PM
José Ralat
Tacos and Coffee: The Origins of—and Controversies Behind—Our Favorite Foods

Kick off your virtual Texas Book Fest experience by grabbing a taco and afternoon coffee from your favorite local spot, and then enjoy this conversation! In their new books, Texas Monthly taco editor José R. Ralat (American Tacos) and food-history researcher and journalist Augustine Sedgewick (Coffeeland) follow the histories of the taco and the coffee bean across time and space, revealing valuable insights about culture and power along the way. Register here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/xu0be779/register

Sunday, November 8

11 AM - 11:45 AM
Kathy Valentine
Lit Crawl Brunch with Typewriter Tarot with Cecily Sailer

Ready for a mystic message or perhaps some cosmic rescue? Audience members at this session will be invited to submit a question on the creative process to ask the Tarot for this innovative town hall. Kathy Valentine will join Typewriter Tarot founder Cecily Sailer for a Tarot-led discussion of her memoir All I Ever Wanted. Thank you to partners Desert Door Sotol and Rambler Sparkling Water, supporting community through storytelling! The first 200 people who register for Literary Death Match or Typewriter Tarot will have the option to pick up a Desert Door Camp Mocha kit and other goodies on Saturday, November 7, from 12 PM to 5 PM. Location details will be shared with the first 200 registrants. Register here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/ytcb9txn/register

Wednesday, November 11

10 AM - 10:45 AM
Jam Sanitchat
Thai Fresh: A Cooking Demonstration

Jam Sanitchat has been cooking since age five, so it’s no surprise that her restaurant and learning center, Thai Fresh, is a South Austin staple. But flavor is only part of the equation. From her days cooking for friends at UT to the relationships she’s built with local growers and producers, Sanitchat knows cooking is all about connection. Experience the magic for yourself with a cooking demonstration from her new cookbook, Thai Fresh: Beloved Recipes from a South Austin Icon. Register here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/zo2hwxz5/register

5:30 PM
Don Carleton and Cynthia Orozco
MLK Jr., Malcolm X, and Adela Sloss-Vento: The Civil Rights Movement in Photos

In their new biographies, Peniel E. Joseph (The Sword and the Shield) and Cynthia Orozco (Agent of Change) share illuminating portraits of leaders who altered the course of the Civil Rights Movement both in Texas and nationwide—a movement captured in part in photos collected by Don Carleton (Struggle for Justice: Four Decades of Civil Rights Photography), the executive director of the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. Register here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/ikh5791m/register

We highly recommend the podcast "Race and Democracy" from Dr. Peniel Joseph, the Founding Director of the UT Center for the Study of Race and Democracy and Professor of History. Dr. Joseph discusses issues of race, democracy, public policy, and social justice with expert guests and questions who is America? Where have we been, where do we want to go, and how can we get there? Tune in wherever you listen to podcast to learn about American history, race and democracy, and the outlook for the future.

Struggle for Justice celebrates the legacy of the photographers who helped galvanize public support for the civil rights movement, often at great personal risk. Don Carleton is executive director of the Briscoe Center for American History and J. R. Parten Chair in the Archives of American History at the University of Texas at Austin.

Agent of Change is the first comprehensive biography of a formidable civil rights activist and feminist whose grassroots organizing in Texas made her an influential voice in the fight for equal rights for Mexican Americans. Cynthia Orozco is a professor of history and humanities at Eastern New Mexico University, Ruidoso. She is the author of No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement.

4 PM - 4:45 PMJessica Luther and Kavitha A. Davidson
Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back

Sports journalists Jessica Luther and Kavitha A. Davidson (Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back) discuss sports and sports fandom both on and off the fields, courts, and diamonds—from racism to drugs, domestic violence, and CTE. Register here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/jwl857ul/register

Thursday, November 12

1:15 PM - 2 PM
Kathy Valentine
Life in Music: New Memoirs from Musicians Chris Frantz and Kathy Valentine

In their poignant, candid new memoirs, Go-Go’s bassist Kathy Valentine (All I Ever Wanted) and Chris Frantz of the Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club (Remain in Love) share the stories behind the songs and discuss their journeys in life and music. Register here:

https://www.crowdcast.io/e/gl65ua6c/register

Sunday, November 15

11 AM - 11:45 AM
José Ralat and Texas Monthly editors and writers
A Texas Monthly Brunch (A Lit Crawl Event)

This roundtable of editors and writers from the National Magazine of Texas hosts a delectable wrap-up of the Festival. Register here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/tstqvxq9

www.utexaspress.com

Q&A with Cynthia Orozco about Mexican American Civil Rights Activist Adela Sloss-Vento

The essayist Adela Sloss-Vento (1901–1998) was a powerhouse of activism in South Texas’s Lower Rio Grande Valley throughout the Mexican American civil rights movement beginning in 1920 and the subsequent Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. At last

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presenting the full story of Sloss-Vento’s achievements, Agent of Change revives a forgotten history of a major female Latina leader. 

Cynthia E. Orozco's Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist is the first comprehensive biography of a formidable civil rights activist and feminist whose grassroots organizing in Texas made her an influential voice in the fight for equal rights for Mexican Americans.

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

Adela Sloss-Vento was one of the most important Latina civil rights activists of the twentieth century. Her life spanned the rise of the Mexican American civil rights movement before 1960 and the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. She operated independently in predominantly male environments: civil rights activism; politics; and, as an essayist, public-affairs journalism. Even though she lacked a college education, lived in rural South Texas, was married with two children, and worked as a jail matron, she left an unprecedented array of writings in English and Spanish. She even wrote the presidents of the United States and Mexico offering advice. She was unique.

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

I met Adela Sloss-Vento in 1978, when she was seventy-five and I was college sophomore conducting research on the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the oldest and most important Latino civil rights organization in the nation. She had written a book on Alonso Perales, its founder and her co-activist. Sloss-Vento helped me by sharing her archives, which dated back to 1927. At the time, she did not mention the central role she herself had played in the Mexican American civil rights movement and even the Chicano movement. Thirty-three years later, I saw some of her writings in the Perales archive and realized how important she had been.

What lessons can activists learn from Adela Sloss-Vento’s work in grassroots organizing in Texas?

While Sloss-Vento’s efforts toward racial desegregation, women’s rights, labor justice, and immigrant rights did not result in any change in state or federal legislation, she provided a voice for all these interests during the era of Jim Crow/Juan Crow and before the feminist movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. With every op-ed, letter to the editor, or letter to an official, she made a political statement—a statement few other Mexican American women were making. Her tenacity is most impressive.

How did Sloss-Vento advance her progressive views rhetorically and how was her voice unique and impactful?

Sloss-Vento never studied government, social sciences, or literature at a university; as a public intellectual, she appealed to morality and Christianity. She believed in democracy and justice, even criticizing European fascism during World War II and calling for true pan-Americanism for Latinos and Latin America.

In what ways did some of the long-forgotten archives you consulted in your research challenge outdated scholarly trends?

There is not enough research on “organic” public intellectuals, those who never received college degrees. Before the internet, to be a public intellectual activist meant really having something valuable to say and saying it repeatedly. Sloss-Vento reminds us that sometimes we are surprised by those whom society underestimates—in this case, Mexican American women.

Cynthia E. Orozco is a professor of history and humanities at Eastern New Mexico University, Ruidoso. She is the author of No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement and coeditor of Mexican Americans in Texas History.

www.utexaspress.com

Stephanie Sauer on Evoking the Royal Chicano Air Force

How do you write a history of a group that has been written out of history? Employing a creative mix of real and fictive events, objects, and people that subverts assumptions about the archiving and display of historical artifacts, Stephanie Sauer's innovative new book The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force both documents and evokes an arts collective that played a significant role in the Chicano movement.

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The RCAF started as the elusive Rebel Chicano Art Front that, through an understandable mix-up with the Royal Canadian Air Force, became the Royal Chicano Air Force, a group renowned for its fleet of adobe airplanes, its ongoing subversive performance stance, and its key role as poster makers for the United Farm Workers Union during the height of the Chicano civil rights movement. Reimagining herself as a fictional archaeologist named 'La Stef', Stephanie Sauer documents the plight of the RCAF, suspending historical realities and leaping through epochs and between conversations with various historical figures, both dead and alive, to offer readers an intimate experience of RCAF history.

A cofounding editor of A Bolha Editora, a bookshop and publisher in Rio de Janeiro, and executive editor of Copilot Press, Stephanie Sauer is an interdisciplinary text-based artist and visiting lecturer at the San Francisco Art Institute. We talked to her about her approach to this project and how institutions should embed experiential learning, i.e.: "embodied knowledge," into pedagogical approaches.

What informed your approach to how you presented this archive, which is described in the introduction as your “deeply personal, biased, and shared witnessing”? 

Before I conceived of what is now The Accidental Archives, I spent a year writing what I had been expected to write. That is, I wrote a history of the Royal Chicano Air Force as I encountered it in the 21st Century. It was a story one would expect to read. It was a story I had read many times before. I was in Chicago then, a microcosm of a United States obsessed with its divisions, and found myself answering to the expectations of readers who wanted me to translate Chicanismo for them, to act as a type of mediator whose task it was to create a didactic, easily digestible history. This way of writing bored me, and I found it deeply problematic. I saw myself as facilitator to a kind of colonial fantasy that pitted me as an objective, rational (read: white, anthropological) narrator of an RCAF documentary. I didn’t want to perpetuate such ideas of otherness, so I threw out that entire manuscript and started fresh from three scraps, the very first notes I’d written.

Inaugural Flight of LaRuca 2012. With permission of use of Los Files © Juanishi V. Orosco.
Courtesy of Juanishi V. Orosco.

What Dr. Diaz noted in her introduction as “deeply personal, biased, and shared witnessing” is, for me, the richest way to present any history. Rooted in feminist practices of testimonio, embodied knowledge, “disruptive excess,” and collective witnessing, I found it vital to foreground the multiplicity of voices and their contradictions, the tactile ephemera, and the biases. Otherwise, when one tries to smooth over these elements in favor of a clean, linear narrative, the tremendous violence of silencing distorts the humanity of those making history. It is this type of silencing that alienates us from our own power to impart change. I wanted to offer an alternative. I wanted to upend the so-called logic of traditional, Western, male-centered historiography and imagine what a new kind of archive might include. 

'We Could Not Fail' In the News

Once We Could Not Fail left the launchpad, so to speak, it hasn't slowed down. Authors

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Richard Paul and Steven Moss have appeared on NPR's Morning Edition, PRI's Science Friday, BBC World News, as well as many NPR affiliates across the country. The book has garnered praise from the New York Times Book Review, Esquire, Booklist, and Library Journal. We're so proud of all this much-deserved attention that we've gathered all the media the book has earned so far. 

The story of We Could Not Fail: The First African Americans in the Space Program begins with an incredible three-month period leading up to the integration of NASA during the height of the civil rights era. Check out the timeline below to get a sense of how much changed for humanity in such a short amount of time.

Media Coverage

• Esquire, 6 Books to Read This May "Even history and space program buffs should find insight in We Could Not Fail's fresh look at a well-treaded era."

• Review in New York Times Book Review "Surprising and insightful."—Laura Helmuth

• Library Journal, starred review "Vital and of interest to all Americans, from history and space buffs to students, researchers, and casual readers."

Interviews

• On BBC World News
• NPR’s Morning Edition
• With NASA Administrator Charles Bolden on WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi Show
• PRI's Science Friday

Reading LBJ's Civil Rights Legacy

This week, President Obama, former presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter, and an impressive roster of speakers will visit Austin, TX, for a Civil Rights Summit hosted by the LBJ Presidential Library. 

This three-day event marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, passed by Lyndon Baines Johnson in a crucial step toward the realization of America's promise to its people. We're so proud that the University of Texas at Austin is affiliated with this summit, and would like to showcase some vital UT Press titles for understanding LBJ's legacy, the civil rights movement in Texas, and the complicated nature of our ongoing struggle for equality.

View the live stream of the entire Summit at civilrightssummit.org, follow The LBJ Foundation on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, and when the summit ends, keep the conversation going with these books.

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Freedom Is Not Enough

The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Texas
By William S. Clayson

The first in-depth examination of Lyndon Johnson's Office of Economic Opportunity and its role in the rise and fall of postwar liberalism in the Lone Star State. William S. Clayson traces the rise and fall of postwar liberalism in the Lone Star State against a backdrop of dissent among Chicano militants and black nationalists who rejected Johnson's brand of liberalism.

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Around the World with LBJ

My Wild Ride as Air Force One Pilot, White House Aide, and Personal Confidant
By Brigadier General James U. Cross, USAF (retired), with Denise Gamino and Gary Rice

LBJ’s personal pilot—one of the few to fly Air Force One and simultaneously hold a full-time job in the White House—offers vivid recollections of the thirty-sixth president.

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A Political Education

A Washington Memoir
By Harry McPherson

This insider's view of Washington in the 1950s and 1960s, of the tumultuous presidency of Lyndon Johnson, and of the conflicts and factions of the president's staff has become a political classic since its original publication in 1972. In this reissue, Harry McPherson adds a new preface in which he reflects on changes in Washington since the Johnson era and on the lessons Bill Clinton could learn from the presidency of Lyndon Johnson.

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The Gay Place
By Billy Lee Brammer
Introduction by Don Graham

A classic piece of Texas literature featuring three interlocking stories about a fictional Texas governor based on LBJ.

"An American classic in which a Johnsonian figure named Arthur 'Goddam' Fenstemaker strides through the pages, large, earthy, intelligent, threatening, working it seemed more often on the side of the angels than against them." —Gore Vidal