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This prison memoir vividly recounts a life of abuse, crime, and incarceration, and reveals the harrowing reality inside America’s broken prison system. When Ernie López was a boy selling newspapers in Depression-era Los Angeles, he would face beatings from his father for not bringing home enough money. When the beatings became unbearable, López took to petty stealing to make up the difference. By thirteen, he was stealing cars, a practice that landed him in California’s harshest juvenile reformatory. So began his cycle of crime and incarceration. López spent decades in some of America’s most notorious prisons, including four and a half years on death row for a murder he insists he did not commit. To Alcatraz, Death Row, and Back is the story of a man who refused to be broken by his abusive father, or by America’s abusive criminal justice system. While López admits “I’ve been no angel,” his insider’s account of life in Alcatraz and San Quentin graphically reveals the violence, arbitrary punishment, and unending monotony that give rise to gang cultures within the prisons and practically insure that parolees will commit far worse crimes when they return to the streets.
Death affects all aspects of life, it touches our emotions and influences our identity. Presenting a kaleidoscope of informative views of death, dying and human response, this book reveals how different disciplines contribute to understanding the theme of death. Drawing together new and established scholars, this is the first book among the studies of emotion that focuses on issues surrounding death, and the first among death studies which focuses on the issue of emotion. Themes explored include: themes of grief in the ties that bind the living and the dead, funerals, public memorials and the art of consolation, obituaries and issues of war and death-row, use of the internet in dying and grieving, what people do with cremated remains, new rituals of spiritual care in medical contexts, themes bounded and expressed through music, and more.
This collection by death-row prisoners, playwrights, poets, activists, and literary scholars provides literary perspectives on the subject of the death penalty.
ALCATRAZ UNCHAINED is a provocative insight rarely captured as fi rsthand experiences are shared by three of ‘The Rock’s’ actual prisoners. Ride an emotional roller coaster from grim tales of despair to fond stories of antics, and then transition into a beautiful refl ection of life’s accounts for one little girl who fondly called the Island, “Home.” Explore the history of Alcatraz Island from a profoundly different perspective.
In this rich and insightful collection of essays, leading anthropologist Ghassan Hage brings together academics across political science, philosophy, anthropology and sociology for an examination into the experience of waiting. What is it to wait? What do we wait for? And how is waiting connected to the social worlds in which we live? From Beckett's darkly comic play Waiting for Godot, to the perpetual waiting of refugees to return home or to moments of intense anticipation such as falling in love or the birth of a baby, there are many ways in which we wait. This compelling collection of essays suggests that this experience is among the essential conditions that make us human and connect us to others.
For the first time, this book presents the distinguished, prolific, and highly experimental writer Juan Felipe Herrera. This wide-ranging collection of essays by leading experts offers critical approaches on Herrera, who transcends ethnic and mainstream poetics. It expertly demonstrates Herrera’s versatility, resourcefulness, innovations, and infinite creativity. As a poet Herrera has had an enormous impact within and beyond Chicano poetics. He embodies much of the advancements and innovations found in American and Latin American poetry from the early l970s to the present. His writings have no limits or boundaries, indulging in the quotidian as well as the overarching topics of his era at different periods of his life. Both Herrera and his work are far from being unidimensional. His poetics are eclectic, incessantly diverse, transnational, unorthodox, and distinctive. Reading Herrera is an act of having to rearrange your perceptions about things, events, historical or intra-historical happenings, and people. The essays in this work delve deeply into Juan Felipe Herrera’s oeuvre and provide critical perspectives on his body of work. They include discussion of Chicanx indigeneity, social justice, environmental imaginaries, Herrera’s knack for challenging theory and poetics, transborder experiences, transgeneric constructions, and children’s and young adult literature. This book includes an extensive interview with the poet and a voluminous bibliography on everything by, about, and on the author. The chapters in this book offer a deep dive into the life and work of an internationally beloved poet who, along with serving as the poet laureate of California and the U.S. poet laureate, creates work that fosters a deep understanding of and appreciation for people’s humanity. Contributors Trevor Boffone Marina Bernardo-Flórez Manuel de Jesús Hernández-G. Whitney DeVos Michael Dowdy Osiris Aníbal Gómez Carmen González Ramos Cristina Herrera María Herrera-Sobek Francisco A. Lomelí Tom Lutz Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez Marzia Milazzo Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger Rafael Pérez-Torres Renato Rosaldo Donaldo W. Urioste Luis Alberto Urrea Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez
This wide-ranging collection brings together an eclectic group of scholars to reflect upon the transnational configurations of the field of American studies and how these have affected its localizations, epistemological perspectives, ecological imaginaries, and politics of translation. The volume elaborates on the causes of the transnational paradigm shift in American studies and describes the material changes that this new paradigm has effected during the past two decades. The contributors hail from a variety of postcolonial, transoceanic, hemispheric, and post-national positions and sensibilities, enabling them to theorize a "crossroads of cultures" explanation of transnational American studies that moves beyond the multicultural studies model. Offering a rich and rewarding mix of essays and case studies, this collection will satisfy a broad range of students and scholars.
This Companion provides a comprehensive introduction to the literature of the American West, one of the most vibrant and diverse literary traditions.
A bighearted dystopian novel about the corrosive effects of fear and the redemptive power of love. With soaring literary prose and the tense pacing of a thriller, the first-time novelist Peyton Marshall imagines a grim and startling future. At the end of the twenty-first century—in a transformed America—the sons of convicted felons are tested for a set of genetic markers. Boys who test positive become compulsory wards of the state—removed from their homes and raised on "Goodhouse" campuses, where they learn to reform their darkest thoughts and impulses. Goodhouse is a savage place—part prison, part boarding school—and now a radical religious group, the Holy Redeemer's Church of Purity, is intent on destroying each campus and purifying every child with fire. We see all this through the eyes of James, a transfer student who watched as the radicals set fire to his old Goodhouse and killed nearly everyone he'd ever known. In addition to adjusting to a new campus with new rules, James now has to contend with Bethany, a brilliant, medically fragile girl who wants to save him, and with her father, the school's sinister director of medical studies. Soon, however, James realizes that the biggest threat might already be there, inside the fortified walls of Goodhouse itself.Partly based on the true story of the nineteenth-century Preston School of Industry, Goodhouse explores questions of identity and free will—and what it means to test the limits of human endurance.
Focusing on the often unrecognized role race plays in expressions of Chicano culture, Mestizaje is a provocative exploration of the volatility and mutability of racial identities. In this important moment in Chicano studies, Rafael Pérez-Torres reveals how the concepts and realities of race, historical memory, the body, and community have both constrained and opened possibilities for forging new and potentially liberating multiracial identities. Informed by a broad-ranging theoretical investigation of identity politics and race and incorporating feminist and queer critiques, Pérez-Torres skillfully analyzes Chicano cultural production. Contextualizing the history of mestizaje, he shows how the concept of mixed race has been used to engage issues of hybridity and voice and examines the dynamics that make mestizo and mestiza identities resistant to, as well as affirmative of, dominant forms of power. He also addresses the role that mestizaje has played in expressive culture, including the hip-hop music of Cypress Hill and the vibrancy of Chicano poster art. Turning to issues of mestizaje in literary creation, Pérez-Torres offers critical readings of the works of Emma Pérez, Gil Cuadros, and Sandra Cisneros, among others. This book concludes with a consideration of the role that the mestizo body plays as a site of elusive or displaced knowledge. Moving beyond the oppositions—nationalism versus assimilation, men versus women, Texans versus Californians—that have characterized much of Chicano studies, Mestizaje synthesizes and assesses twenty-five years of pathbreaking thinking to make a case for the core components, sensibilities, and concerns of the discipline. Rafael Pérez-Torres is professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is author of Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins, coauthor of To Alcatraz, Death Row, and Back: Memories of an East LA Outlaw, and coeditor of The Chicano Studies Reader: An Anthology of Aztlán, 1970–2000.