10 Academic Books on Display at La Feria
On September 21, 2024, The Latinx Project will host La Feria: Print Media Fair, a spotlight on zines, media, and other works by Latinx creators. As part of the event, TLP will also showcase more than 60 recent academic books on a range of topics, including activism, border politics, identity formation, and art.
Ahead of the event, we interviewed a few of the featured authors to learn more about what inspired their texts.
La Feria: Print Media Fair will take place on September 21, 2024, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The event will close with a reception to celebrate the launch of Intervenxions Vol. 3. RSVP here. For a list of all of the books (and corresponding promo codes) that TLP will showcase at La Feria, check out this spreadsheet.
The Cybernetic Border Drones, Technology, and Intrusion by Iván Chaar López
Courtesy of Duke University Press
Publish date: March 2024
Publisher: Duke University Press
Briefly describe your book.
The Cybernetic Border shows how U.S. borders, since the mid-20th century, are more than walls or fences; they are regimes of datafication and racialization. Where actors have sought to treat "the border" as some neutral or technical matter, the book documents how racial imaginaries not only endure but also shape and are shaped by information and communication infrastructures.
What inspired you to write this book?
I came across a news article from The Guardian early on during my PhD that spoke about how Predator B drones were used to police the U.S.–Mexico border. Attentive to work—especially the kinds of actions necessary in the making and maintenance of things just as much as the relations enacted through these actions—I knew immediately that I needed to study how this happened and what kind of work drones were meant to perform.
The project brought together work by scholars across Latino studies (Jason De León, Rachel St. John, Alex Stern, Anthony Mora, and Jonathan Xavier Inda), digital studies (Wendy Chun, Simone Browne, Lisa Nakamura, Neda Atanasoski, Kalindi Vora, and John Cheney-Lippold), science & technology studies (Gabrielle Hecht, Lucy Suchman, Paul Edwards, Bruno Latour, and Tarleton Gillespie), and the anthropology of bureaucracy and archives (Josiah Heyman, Ann Laura Stoler, and Kristen Weld).
Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease by Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús
Courtesy of Duke University Press
Publish date: August 2024
Publisher: Duke University Press
Briefly describe your book.
Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease uncovers the dangerous and fabricated diagnosis of "excited delirium syndrome," which has been used to justify police violence, particularly against Black and Latine men.
Through in-depth ethnographic research and historical analysis, the book demonstrates how this pseudoscientific term—neither recognized by credible medical institutions nor backed by legitimate science—has been employed to absolve law enforcement of accountability in numerous deaths. I trace how cases like George Floyd and Elijah McClain’s have been medicalized to obscure police brutality under the guise of medical failure.
My work also delves into the roots of "excited delirium syndrome" and its connection to racial eugenics, showing how it was first conceived by Charles Wetli, a Miami medical examiner, who also criminalized Afro-Cuban religions. This book exposes the broader system of racial control at play, where both Black people and Afro-Latine spiritual practices are pathologized and criminalized, revealing the complicity of medical and legal institutions in perpetuating racial violence.
What Inspired you to write this book?
The inspiration for Excited Delirium came from my research on the criminalization of Santería in the United States, where I engaged in ethnographic fieldwork with police officers and the Afro-Latine communities they targeted. During this research, I came across the term "excited delirium syndrome," a diagnosis unfamiliar to many but used to justify deaths in police custody. This discovery led me down a deep rabbit hole of research, where I was shocked to find the term's origins linked to the same eugenics-rooted beliefs that demonized Afro-Latine religions.
Learning how this diagnosis was fabricated and deployed as a tool of racial control, I felt compelled to uncover its history and to expose the ways in which it has been weaponized to erase the brutal realities of police violence, particularly against Black and brown people. Through this work, I aim to challenge the narratives that medicalize state violence and contribute to systemic racial oppression.
A Kiss Across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and US Latinidad by Richard T. Rodríguez
Duke University Press
Publish date: September 2022
Publisher: Duke University Press
Briefly describe your book.
A Kiss Across the Ocean explores the relationship between British post-punk musicians and their Latinx audiences in the United States since the 1980s. Melding memoir with cultural criticism, the book spotlights a host of influential bands and performers whose music and styles hold significant sway on generations of fans enthused by their matchlessly pleasurable and political reverberations.
What inspired you to write this book?
I was inspired to write the book given how the music I adored as a teenager was also embraced by countless Latinx fans of my generation across the United States and Latin America. Younger, recent generations of fans similarly moved by this music additionally motivated me to explore the timelessness of British punk and post-punk sounds and aesthetics.
Lastly, I was intent on showing the multi-directionality of popular music, highlighting, in particular, the way British singers and bands were just as influenced by Latinx culture as much as Latinx fans were taken by their musical and stylistic output.
Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History by Elizabeth Ferrer
University of Washington Press
Publish date: January 2021
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Briefly describe your book.
Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History is the first major study of Latinx photographers, profiling figures active from the 19th century until the present day. Their powerful, innovative, work touches on themes of family, identity, protest, and the border, as well as on the experiences of immigration and marginalization common to Latinx people. Yet, these artists have largely been excluded from the documented history of photography. This book is meant to rectify those omissions and to create a parallel history of photography in the United States.
What inspired you to write this book?
My inspiration, simply, was knowing of the near complete omission of Latinx photographers from museum collections and exhibitions, art history curricula, and the documented history of American photography. My aim was to create a resource that could be used by students, photographers, museums, and the general audience for photography.
Making Never-Never Land: Race and Law in the Creation of Puerto Rico by Mónica A. Jiménez
The University of North Carolina Press
Publish date: June 2024
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Briefly describe your book.
Making Never-Never Land is a legal and political history of Puerto Rico that argues that while the archipelago finds itself in the exceptional position of being a 21st-century colony, its path there was not exceptional. That path was paved by the legal and political decisions that the US Supreme Court and Congress made in prior encounters with Native and Black Americans.
To fully understand the challenges that Puerto Rico faces today, we must first understand the path that led us here and that begins in the 19th century when a young United States Supreme Court handed down its first opinions with respect to Native Americans.
What inspired you to write this book?
I wanted to write a book that dealt seriously with the role that race has played in the creation of Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States. And also to really consider how the law has led to the untenable situation that Puerto Ricans live in the archipelago. The past decade has laid bare just how illogical the archipelago’s relationship with the United States is, and race and law loom large in that dynamic.
Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation by Cecilia Marquez
The University of North Carolina Press
Publish date: September 2023
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Briefly describe your book.
Making the Latino South retells the history of Latinos from the perspective of the U.S. South. Moving from 1940–2010, Making the Latino South shows how Latinos navigated Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, transformations in the Southern economy, and the first wave of anti-immigrant legislation in the South.
It charts how, over the second half of the twentieth century, non-Black Latinos went from being “provisionally white” in the 1940s to “illegal aliens” in the 2010s.
What inspired you to write this book?
I wanted to tell a story that mattered to the large and growing population of Latinos in the U.S. South. Despite having been in the South for decades, Latinos are still seen as “newcomers” to the region. This book offers Latinos a history that explains why being Latino in the South is different than being Latino anywhere else in the country.
I also wanted to write a book that demanded that Latino Studies take the South seriously as a site for studying the history and future of Latinos in the United States. The stories of Latinos in the South suggest we still have a lot to learn about how history and region shape the experiences of this diverse population.
NYU Press
Publish date: May 2020
Publisher: NYU Press
Briefly describe your book.
This book documents a social movement led by women of color for the right to bodily autonomy, including bearing children, terminating pregnancies, raising children in sustainable environments, and choosing one’s gender identity.
For over 30 years this movement has worked on behalf of the most structurally vulnerable women of color—those with low incomes, the undocumented, youth, members of the LGBTQ+ community, especially trans folks. This movement frames its work in human rights and intersectionality, and strategically engages in grassroots organizing, culture shift work, and policy advocacy.
What inspired you to write this book?
I was inspired to write about this movement because their critically important work often goes unnoticed. They work with young women and men all over the country and have had impressive wins.
Playful Protest: The Political Work of Joy in Latinx Media by Kristie Soares
Playful Protest: The Political Work of Joy in Latinx Media by Kristie Soares
Publish date: September 2023
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Briefly describe your book.
Playful Protest takes seriously the role of joy in Latinx life. It looks at the last 60 years of Cuban and Puerto Rican culture produced in the U.S. mainland, to argue that engaging with joy is central to Latinx social and political struggle.
What inspired you to write this book?
I am always laughing and always dancing, especially when I'm enraged at the vast inequities faced by my people, queer and trans people of color. Joy is central to my activism. This book explores how I came to have this outlook, by rooting my own experience in over 60 years of Latinx theorizing about joy.
Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality by Tanya Katerí Hernández
Beacon Press
Publish date: August 2023
Publisher: Beacon Press
Briefly describe your book.
Racial Innocence excavates the otherwise silenced voices of the Afro-Latino and African-American victims of Latino anti-Blackness from the case files of discrimination charges with the first comprehensive national analysis of Latino anti-Blackness and what it means for the pursuit of racial equality.
The book’s narratives show examples where Latino workplace supervisors deny both Afro-Latinos and Blacks access to promotions and wage increases; Latino homeowners turn away Black prospective tenants and home purchasers; Latino restaurant workers block Black customers from entry and refuse to serve them; Latino students bully and harass Black students; Latino educators belittle Black students; Latino police officers assault and kill Blacks; and, most heinously, Latinos who join violent white supremacist organizations and harm Blacks.
What inspired you to write this book?
As an Afro-Latina, I have had the unfortunate “privilege” to be privy to the seeming schizophrenia of Latino racial attitudes, whereby assertions of being a racially mixed population immune to racism coexist with very problematic anti-Black attitudes. When I started to observe how judges and juries presented with discrimination lawsuits were confused by allegations of Latino anti-Black racism, I was inspired to bring my life experiences to bear in the analysis of the cases.
Ready Player Juan: Latinx Masculinities and Stereotypes in Video Games by Carlos Gabriel Kelly González
The University of Arizona Press
Publish date: November 2023
Publisher: The University of Arizona Press
Briefly describe your book.
Ready Player Juan critically engages some of the biggest and longest-standing media stereotypes surrounding Latine masculinities and how they are constructed in video games. As a foundational text, this book invites Latines to see ourselves and our stories in video games by utilizing our embodied experiences to create new ways of seeing and theoretical approaches, such as Digital Mestizaje, where cultures collide in digital spaces to shift player perspectives.
RPJ follows an Anzaldúan influence through weaving together my personal experiences from the borderlands, Latina feminist scholarship, and video game narratives to challenge game studies and game makers to think more deeply about how Latines (the largest ethnic group to play video games) both play and inhabit our screens.
What inspired you to write this book?
The two-fold absence of complex Latine characters in video game stories and Latine Game Studies scholarship motivated me to write this book. I had to introspect on my life as a borderlands Chicane to create new ways of seeing so that Latines can begin to see ourselves and our experiences in video games regardless of whether we are present.