The Center publishes the University of Houston Series in Mexican American Studies with a focus on the social sciences, including history. Interested scholars can submit their manuscripts to the Director of the U of H Center for Mexican American Studies for consideration. Priority consideration in descending order is given to manuscripts dealing with Houston, the state of Texas and the southwest.

Chicana/o Struggles for Education: Activisim in the Community

Dr. Guadalupe San Miguel

Much of the history of Mexican American educational reform efforts has focused on campaigns to eliminate discrimination in public schools. However, as historian Guadalupe San Miguel demonstrates in Chicana/o Struggles for Education: Activisim in the Community, the story is much broader and more varied than that.

War Along the Border: The Mexican Revolution and its Impact Upon Tejano Communities

 Dr. Arnoldo De León

In 1910 Francisco Madero, in exile in San Antonio, Texas, launched a revolution that changed the face of Mexico. The conflict also unleashed violence and instigated political actions that kept that nation unsettled for more than a decade. As in other major uprisings around the world, the revolution’s effects were not contained within the borders of the embattled country. Indeed, the Mexican Revolution touched communities on the Texas side of the Rio Grande from Brownsville to El Paso. Fleeing refugees swelled the populations of South Texas towns and villages and introduced nationalist activity as exiles and refugees sought to extend moral, financial, and even military aid to those they supported in Mexico. Raiders from Mexico clashed with Texas ranchers over livestock and property, and bystanders as well as partisans died in the conflict. One hundred years later, Mexico celebrated the memory of the revolution, and scholars in Mexico and the United States sought to understand the effects of the violence on their own communities.

Cemeteries of Ambivalent Desire

Marie Theresa Hernández, Ph.D.

Growing up as the daughter of a funeral director in Fort Bend County, Texas, Marie Theresa Hernández was a frequent visitor to the San Isidro Cemetery, a burial place for Latino workers at the Imperial Sugar Company, based in nearby Sugar Land. During these years she acquired from her father and mother a sense of what it was like to live as an ethnic minority in Jim Crow Texas. Therefore, returning to the cemetery as an ethnographer offered Hernández a welcome opportunity to begin piecing together a narrative of the lives and struggles of the Mexican American community that formed her heritage.

Texas A&M University Press Consortium

Musica Tejana

Manuel Peña, Ph.D.

Texas-Mexican music, or musica tejana, is not one single music but several musical and musico-literary genres, ensembles, and their styles, encompassing the corrido, cancion, and what author Manuel Peña calls the corrido–cancion.

Brown, Not White

Guadalupe San Miguel, Ph.D.

Strikes, boycotts, rallies, negotiations and litigation marked the efforts of the Mexican origin community to oppose the discrimination in Houston schools in the early 1970’s. San Miguel identifies the important implications of this struggle for Mexican Americans and for public education.

Ethnicity in the Sunbelt

Arnoldo De Leon

A century after the first wave of Hispanic settlement in Houston, the city has come to be known as the “Hispanic Mecca of Texas.” Arnoldo De Leon’s classic study of Hispanic Houston, now updated to cover recent developments and a decade of additional scholarship, showcases the urban experience for Sunbelt Mexican Americans.

Urban-Speak: Poetry of the City

Ed. Sarah Cortez, M.A., M.S.

“...a new batch of Houston [student] writers explore life in poems that are gritty, throbbing, stubbornly triumphant creations that come from living in the nation’s fourth largest city.” - Collegium: the Magazine of the University of Houston, Spring 2002 The poetry in Urban Speak was composed by students who were enrolled in the “Latino Visions of the City” course.

Mexican American Odyssey

Thomas H. Kreneck, Ph.D.

In Mexican American Odyssey, Thomas H. Kreneck not only traces the influential life of Houston entrepreneur and civic leader Felix Tijerina as an individual but illustrates how Tijerina reflected many trends in Mexican American development during the decades he lived, years that were crucial for the Hispanic community today.