As I mentioned at the beginning of this year, I continue to find ways to add new book genres and writing styles to LibroMobile's bookshelves. One of my favorite pastimes is critiquing academic books. I enjoy vetting the title's diversity, affordability, accessibility, and, frankly, their writing style and relatability to folks outside the ivory towers. I identify as a critic who examines the intersections in race, language, and people of color (POC) experiences in the arts, history, institutions, and society. My publications contribute in ways that problematize the structural inequities that Mexican, Mexican-American, and Spanish speakers are subjected to as immigrants and minoritized residents in urban communities. My journalistic publications also confront the lack of POC in academia and art institutions.
In 2024, I had the privilege to pop up as a book vendor on various campuses in Southern California. I visited California State University, Dominguez Hills, Irvine Valley College, Fullerton College, and most recently, the University of California, Los Angeles. Yet, the scholars themselves made a great impression and convinced me to open the book. As a visiting scholar of creative writing in the Chicana/o Studies Department at California State University, Fullerton, I get emails from academic presses sharing new releases. As an avid reader and writer in the community, I often find new publications in my DMs and mailboxes from like-minded folks. This is all to say my TBR pile is mounted high, but more times than not, I don't read academic-based books in their entirety. If I end up critiquing the research methods or writing style more than praising it in the first 20 pages, I usually put it aside. Some may get added to LibroMobile's shelves, some may be added to our free book collections, and a few may get recycled. I am a tough critic of academic books. As we all should be, given that they create the foundation of knowledge at institutions across our wary nation.
Here are 10 I recommend to some extent:
Chicana Liberation For All
@ CSU Dominguez Hills, September 19, 2024
$31.20 Paperback
"Chicana Liberation reveals the remarkable range of political beliefs and life experiences behind a new activism and feminism shaped by Mexican American women. Marisela R. Chávez uses a wealth of untapped oral histories to reveal the diverse ways activist Mexican American women in Los Angeles claimed their own voices and space while seeking to leverage power. As she shows, Chicanas across generations challenged societal traditions that at first assumed their place on the sidelines and then assigned them second-class status within political structures built on their work."
Critique: If I were to judge a book by its beautiful cover (a somewhat affordable one), I would expect to see it everywhere. Especially since this one openly critiques the misogyny in the Chicano Movement! However, like many other community-focused texts, the author and the book promotions rarely make it out to the commoner streets. AND the distributor charges small bookstores a credit card fee (hence the increased price on bookshop). Sadly, this will lead it to stay mostly in the hands of academics — the book is really supposed to be $26.
Calling All The Beyoncé Fans
via a FB post by Dr. Alexis McGee (a grad school amiga)
$34.95 Paperback
"From Blues to Beyoncé (by Alexis McGee) amplifies Black women's ongoing public assertions of resistance, agency, and hope across different media from the nineteenth century to today. By examining recordings, music videos, autobiographical writings, and speeches, Alexis McGee explores how figures such as Ida B. Wells, Billie Holiday, Ruth Brown, Queen Latifah, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Janelle Monáe, and more mobilize sound to challenge anti-Black discourses and extend social justice pedagogies."
Critique: This is another engaging book cover, but when this title came out and gained social media momentum, it was priced at $99! Unfortunately, the price scares most of us scholars outside of the institute to forget about it entirely — the paperback is cheaper. BUT the writing is good, and the topic makes it easy to follow!
For the Profes & Parents Thinking Bilingual Ed
@ UCLA, November 19, 2024
$48.30 Paperback (another increased price due to distributor gouging)
"In this provocative book, Laura C. Chávez-Moreno urges readers to rethink race, to reconceptualize Latinx as a racialized group, and to pay attention to how schools construct Latinidad (a concept about Latinx experience and identity) in relation to Blackness, Indigeneity, Asianness, and Whiteness. The work explores, as an example, how Spanish-English bilingual education programs engage in race-making work. It also illuminates how schools can offer ambitious teachings to raise their students' critical consciousness about race and racialization."
Critique: The price, the price, the price is out of our reach! The writing style is definitely academic. BUT the content is important — especially for parents who are thinking about or subscribing to bilingual education. (We have some extra copies from the event, so if you are a bilingual parent or teacher in OC, come in, buy another new book, and we will gift you one of these!)
Mujeres Making History
@ Fullerton College, March 19, 2024
$36.74 Paperback (another increased price due to distributor gouging)
"Founded in 1997, Mujeres de Maiz (MdM) is an Indigenous Xicana-led spiritual artivist organization and movement by and for women and feminists of color. Chronicling its quarter-century-long herstory, this collection weaves together diverse stories with attention to their larger sociopolitical contexts. The book crosses conventional genre boundaries through the inclusion of poetry, visual art, testimonios, and essays. Contributors fuse stories of celebration, love, and spirit-work with an incisive critique of interlocking oppressions, both intimate and structural, encouraging movement toward 'a world where many worlds fit.'"
Critique: Another empowering book cover! My only criticism is again the price and that I would like to see an event focused on OC contributors within the community. I had the pleasure to witness these phenomenal women at Fullerton College and CSU Fullerton, featuring long-time LibroMobile member Marilynn Montano. It would be great for our gente off-campus to see them, too.
More Than Black History, It's A Fight for Affirmative Action
@ CSU, Dominguez Hills, May 7, 2024
$39.95 Hardcover
"Black Woman on Board explores how Claudia Hampton methodically 'played the game of boardsmanship,' using the soft power she cultivated amongst her peers to remove barriers that might have impeded the implementation and expansion of affirmative action policies and programs. In illuminating the ways that Hampton transformed the CSU as the 'affirmative action trustee,' this remarkable book makes an important contribution to the history of higher education and the historiography of Black women's educational leadership in the post-Civil Rights era."
Critique: The writing style leans towards the academy, as does the price. BUT the content will keep you turning the hardcover's pages — and deserves all of our attention! Again, we need this conversation in the community. I wish more scholars and their publicists would see us as valuable audience members.
Finally, A Writer's Guide We Need
via my profe email from Bloomsbury Academic, Spring 2024
$37.89 Paperback (another increased price due to distributor gouging)
"This book explores experimentation within both traditional writing genres and 'post-genre' modes such as hybrid texts, non-creative writing, textual materiality, creative re-purposing, performance, and new media technologies. Experimental Writing gives you the toolkit of techniques and skills to confidently engage with forms previously perceived as intimidating so that you can reinvigorate your craft. In addition, the book includes sections on new approaches to the workshop model, emphasis on community and collaboration, and institutional critique. These chapters will provide you with a 'big picture' perspective and the motivation to question the templates you work within, giving you the where-with-all to shape your own ideals for writing, no matter what their stylistic choices."
Critique: For a writer's guide, this one is overpriced for all. I have a feeling most professors will assign chapters rather than the text as a result of the cost. However, this guide is a must — if not for its focus on experimental writing, then for its innovative inclusion of diverse writers and new media technologies. Maybe go in with a writing group to pay for it collectively, or ask me to share mine!
Real Gente Editors Curating A 'Literary Terrain of California'
via FB DM from Romeo Guzman (a fellow community-based scholar)
$35 Hardcover
"Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California explores California through twenty-five essays that look beyond the clichés of the 'California Dream,' portraying a state that is deviant and recalcitrant, proud and humble, joyful and communal. It is a California that reclaims the beauty of the unwanted, the quotidian, and the out-of-place. Constantly in search of 'the spirit of a place' Writing the Golden State pries into the themes of familial genealogy, migration, land and housing, and national belonging and identity. Collectively, the essays demonstrate how individuals and towns have weathered some of the social, political, and economic changes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries."
Critique: I won't hate on the price, because it's a $35 dollar vibrant hard cover and even cheaper on bookshop. BUT I will say, as a Chicana from Orange County, we are forgotten once again. For some reason, people don't realize OC is 60% people of color and we have a lot more writers in the region than academics and journalists. I am happy to see our LMAC advisory board member, Jenise Miller, representing her LA and Black-Panamanian roots, though!
Digital Humanities As Ethnic Studies
via a FB post by contributor Dr. Gabriela Baeza Ventura (a DH mentor and fellow Chingona)
$34.95 Paperback (releases this month directly from the publisher)
"Crossing Digital Fronteras is about liberatory possibilities and digital technologies in the classroom. The book centers critical Latinx Digital Humanities (DH) to illustrate the ways college faculty and Latinx students harness digital tools to engage in "messy" yet essential active learning and knowledge production in Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) and Latinx Studies courses. This book definitively inserts Latinx Digital Humanities into broader conversations about best practices at HSIs, on the one hand, and digital humanities and social justice, on the other. Most importantly, it provides practical examples of innovative, rehumanizing digital pedagogies that give students the liberatory learning they deserve."
Critique: I criticize Latinx scholarship almost as much as I criticize academic texts because often Latinx scholars impose the same white hierarchical standards most of us POC criticize of the academy. Although the following flaws don't define the book, I did find moments of erasure in history, at times omitting women of color, and in some of the chapters it seemed the writers forgot they no longer have to speak towards the white gaze. However, I won't harp on the price for this one. The paperback is a lot cheaper and comes out this month — it's well worth it for all my fellow community-based DHers out there!
West Coast Hip Hop & Latinidad
via a text message from Dr. Jonathan E. Calvillo (a fellow community-based scholar)
$45.94 (another increased price due to distributor gouging)
"Building his narrative around interviews and oral histories, Jonathan E. Calvillo explores how incoming migrants, local-born Latines, and other minoritized populations joined Black Americans in the 1980s to build early underground sites of Hip Hop innovation, contributing to the genre's global expansion. In the Time of Sky-Rhyming details how Hip Hop's deep impact on Latines was based in part on the inequality, marginalization, and injustice that many Latines of this era faced - themes which were addressed in the movement. During this period, Central American refugees were settling in the urban corridors of the region, young Chicanos were coming of age in the post-civil rights era, Caribbean migrants moved from East to West, South American immigrants were finding their place, and Latines were interacting with Black Americans and other minoritized populations such as ethnic Samoans, Filipinos, and Koreans."
Critique: Calvillo is one of my favorite academic writers — but I would've never known that if I had not read a review of The Saints of Santa Ana by Gabriel San Román. It was then I picked up the book and realized Calvillo is the most readable academic I know. His writing style remains consistent in his new title, In the Time of Sky-Rhyming, it's just a shame the price is not desirable to most Hip Hop lovers outside of the institution. BUT he will be signing his books at our VIP Holiday Shopping Party on Monday, Dec. 23 10-6pm, swing by!
Intersecting Archives & Creative Writing
@ ACRL Rare Books & Manuscripts Section Conference in Orange County, June 25-28, 2024
$17.95 Paperback
"Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments recovers these women's radical aspirations and insurgent desires."
Critique: This is my latest book crush! I'm excited to read work by an academic intersecting archives and creative writing. BUT it shouldn't be treated any different than creative writers who do this as a career without the tenure-track position. Lately, academics are coopting terms like "social justice," "storytelling," and "community" to innovate their research methods — yet, equitable practices don't quite reach daily creative writers with and without MFAs and PhDs.
LibroMobile has hundreds of new and used (in-person only) ethnic studies and social justice titles, I know you'll find the right one to learn from, and maybe even critique a few!
Sarah Rafael García is an award-winning Chicana author and multimedia artist, community educator, curator, and digital archivist raised in Santa Ana, California. She has over 15 years of experience as an Arts Leader and is founder of Barrio Writers, LibroMobile, and Crear Studio — all art programs initiated as a response to build cultural relevance and equity for BIPOC folks in Orange County.
To shop for these titles and support LibroMobile, visit our bookshop link here!
Starting January 2025, #OffThePage is featuring Sarah Rafael Garcia as our quarterly columnist. Our Arts & Culture column was initially founded by local journalist Gabriel San Román in May 2020. Since then we have collaboratively featured over 30 stories and paid nearly 12 contributors from our community. Unfortunately, we have to move away from paid publications to book exchanges, but we do hope to pay writers for their words in the near future. Pitch Sarah a story or email us for more information!
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