Miroslava Chavez-Garcia | University of California, Santa Barbara (original) (raw)

Books by Miroslava Chavez-Garcia

This book brings together the most influential and widely known writings of Vicki L. Ruiz, a lead... more This book brings together the most influential and widely known writings of Vicki L. Ruiz, a leading voice in the fields of Chicana/o, Latina/o, women’s, and labor history.

For nearly forty years, Ruiz has produced scholarship that has provided the foundation for a rich and nuanced understanding of the ways in which Chicanas and Latinas negotiate the structures impinging on their everyday lives. From challenging familial, patriarchal cultural norms, building interethnic social networks in the neighborhood and workplace, organizing labor unions, to fighting gender and racial discrimination in the courts, at work, the schools, and the streets, Ruiz’s studies have examined the countless struggles, roadblocks, and victories Chicanas and Latinas have faced in the twentieth century and beyond. The articles in this book are organized chronologically to reflect the evolution of Ruiz’s intellectual contributions as well as her commitment to integrating feminist history, theory, and methodology, and show how she has generously offered insights, reflections, and humor in helping us define and shape who we are as mujeres, Chicanas, Latinas, scholars, teachers, and mentors.

With its narrative flow and engaging prose, Ruiz’s scholarship connects with academic and public audiences and this collection fulfills a much-needed demand in the teaching of women’s, Chicana/o, and Latina/o history.

Influential Essays by Vicki L. Ruiz Edited by Miroslava Chávez-García This book brings together t... more Influential Essays by Vicki L. Ruiz Edited by Miroslava Chávez-García This book brings together the most influential and widely known writings of Vicki L. Ruiz. For nearly forty years, Ruiz has produced scholarship that has provided the foundation for a rich and nuanced understanding of the ways in which Chicanas and Latinas negotiate the structures impinging on their everyday lives. The articles reflect the evolution of Ruiz's intellectual contributions as well as her commitment to integrating feminist history, theory, and methodology, and show how she has generously offered insights, reflections, and humor in helping us define and shape who we are. It fulfills a much-needed demand in the teaching of women's, Chicana/o, Latina/o, and labor history.

This is the cover only. Below is the full text to the book, available by chapters. You can also d... more This is the cover only. Below is the full text to the book, available by chapters. You can also download the book at J-Stor. Again, via chapters.

(Full Text of the Book is Found Here) Drawing upon a personal collection of more than 300 lette... more (Full Text of the Book is Found Here)
Drawing upon a personal collection of more than 300 letters exchanged between her parents and other family members across the U.S.-Mexico border, Miroslava Chávez-García recreates and gives meaning to the hope, fear, and longing migrants experienced in their everyday lives both "here" and "there" (aqui y alla). As private sources of communication hidden from public consumption and historical research, the letters provide a rare glimpse into the deeply emotional, personal, and social lives of ordinary Mexican men and women as recorded in their immediate, first-hand accounts. Chávez-García demonstrates not only how migrants struggled to maintain their sense of humanity in el norte but also how those remaining at home made sense of their changing identities in response to the loss of loved ones who sometimes left for weeks, months, or years at a time, or simply never returned.

With this richly detailed account, ranging from the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s to the emergence of Silicon Valley in the late 1960s, Chávez-García opens a new window onto the social, economic, political, and cultural developments of the day and recovers the human agency of much maligned migrants in our society today.

Miroslava Chávez-García is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Southern California Quarterly, 2019

International Migration Review, 2019

Western Historical Quarterly, 2019

Papers by Miroslava Chavez-Garcia

This special issue of Pacific Historical Review, "Gender and Intimacy across the U.S.-Mexico Bord... more This special issue of Pacific Historical Review, "Gender and Intimacy across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands," is guest edited by Miroslava Chávez-García and Verónica Castillo-Muñoz. The articles in the collection reflect the primacy of gender and intimacy as tools of analysis in recovering the experiences of women of Spanish-Mexican and Mexican origin in the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century borderlands. As the authors demonstrate, using gender and intimacy, along with race, ethnicity, class, and culture, allow for the recovery of women's personal and family lives and how they intersected with the economic, political, and social transformations of the region. The result is nuanced understandings of how women negotiated and resisted state-based, patriarchal ideologies and practices that sought to limit their lives and those of their families. The special issue includes a preface from Marc S. Rodriguez, this introduction, and articles by

Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method Engaging with Sources, 2021

Southern California Quarterly, 2019

The television sitcom The Brady Bunch (1969-1974) and its subsequent reruns presented upper-middl... more The television sitcom The Brady Bunch (1969-1974) and its subsequent reruns presented upper-middle-class whiteness and a version of idealized family life as normative. Its underrepresentation of racial, ethnic, and class differences did more than serve as a form of escapism for young Latina/o television watchers-it impacted their sense of identity and self-esteem, their attitudes toward their own parents, and their own later modes of parenting, as the author's personal experience illustrates. At the same time, the series' few episodes that did depict minority characters encouraged stereotyping that influenced the larger population. A content and visual analysis of episodes of The Brady Bunch confirms the sitcom's repeated themes of gender and sexuality and its near absence of focus on differences of race, ethnicity, and class.

In, Routledge Handbook of Chicana/o Studies, eds. Denise Segura, Francisco Lomelí, Elyette Benjamin-Labarthe. New York: Routledge International Handbooks, 2018.

Chicana history is a vibrant field of study with scholars from across the disciplines working to ... more Chicana history is a vibrant field of study with scholars from across the disciplines working to recover and reinterpret the histories of Mexican and Mexican American women in the United States. Chicana history was not always so popular. Initially, when Chicano history emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the wake of the Chicano movement, the Mexican American civil rights movement, scholars-most of them men-virtually ignored Mexican American women in general and issues of gender and sexuality in particular. When they did study women, they portrayed them primarily as producers (laborers) and reproducers (mothers) within the context of the household and family unit. In contrast, Chicana writers, activists, and feminists, both in and outside the academy, took up the task of recovering women's untold histories and did so collectively and creatively. It is these women to whom we owe a great debt for laying the foundations for the study of Mexican American women. The writing of Chicana history, as Maylei Blackwell argues (2011), has not been confined by disciplinary boundaries. Today, as in the past, the field is diverse in its application of theoretical frameworks, methodological approaches, and source materials as well as in its focus and themes. Its interdisciplinarity, in turn, has worked to recast and expand male-centered, Chicano history, leading to renewed vibrancy and innovation in the field. This essay explores the genealogy of Chicana history, paying attention to the early influences of its development, namely, the rise of social and political movements and women-centered fields of studies. The article then probes the role of queer Chicanas in articulating an alternative approach to Chicana history. In doing so, they worked to complicate our understanding of Mexican American women's experiences, including social movements. The essay then examines the

This essay provides an introduction to publishing in the humanities for junior scholars at the s... more This essay provides an introduction to publishing in the humanities for junior scholars at the start of their careers and beyond. It reflects on how our relation- ships to publishing change along our career paths. Indeed, while the focus on publications is significant during our junior years and continues after tenure, the pressure feels more intense and the possibility of publishing for promotion to full professor seems more elusive at the same time. The author confesses her own struggle in writing a second book. Transcending that hurdle—from associate to full—is, arguably, the most difficult challenge for most academics, particularly for women of colour, whose numbers remain abysmal at the rank of full professor. The essay provides a number of insights and strategies, taken from the author’s experiences, discussions with other academics, and research, for successful publish- ing and promotion in the academy.

In, The Chicana/o Education Pipeline: History, Institutional Critique, and Resistance, 23-47, eds. Michaela J. L. Mares-Tamayo and Daniel G. Solorzano. Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Research Center, UCLA., 2018

Miroslava Chávez-García is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Southern California Quarterly, 2019

International Migration Review, 2019

Western Historical Quarterly, 2019

Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method Engaging with Sources, 2021

Southern California Quarterly, 2019

In, Routledge Handbook of Chicana/o Studies, eds. Denise Segura, Francisco Lomelí, Elyette Benjamin-Labarthe. New York: Routledge International Handbooks, 2018.

Drawing on a cache of letters written between Jose Chavez Esparza and Maria Concepcion “Conchita”... more Drawing on a cache of letters written between Jose Chavez Esparza and Maria Concepcion “Conchita” Alvarado in the 1960s, this article explores the world of a male migrant farm- worker seeking love and companionship. It argues that, more than beasts of burden in the agricultural capitalist machine, migrants such as Jose sought fulfillment economically, emotionally, personally, romantically, and sexually.

Momentum: An Occasional Newsletter Celebrating Huntington Milestones, 2019

Huntington Frontiers, 2018

Pacific Historical Review (PHR), 85 (February 2016): 151-52.

Journal of Women’s History Vol. 31, Issue 4 (Winter 2019): 146-153.

Review Essay: “Child Welfare,” Katherine S. Bullard, Civilizing the Child: Discourses of Race, Na... more Review Essay: “Child Welfare,” Katherine S. Bullard, Civilizing the Child: Discourses of Race, Nation, and Child Welfare in America. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014; Molly Ladd-Taylor, Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2017; and, Catherine E. Rymph. Raising Government Children: A History of Foster Care and the American Welfare State. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

Theoretical Criminology (May 31, 2018), 1-3.

In Bulletin of Spanish Studies (June 2017): 30-31.

North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. XCIV (January 2017): 104-106.

City of Inmates charts the rise of mass incarceration in the modern metropolis of Los Angeles, wh... more City of Inmates charts the rise of mass incarceration in the modern metropolis of Los Angeles, which today boasts the largest population of imprisoned people found in any city across the United States. As Lytle Hernández argues, at the core of this history of incarceration or, what she calls “human caging,” is settler colonialism. A tool of conquest and colonization dating to the eighteenth century, settler colonialism focuses on eliminating or disappearing expendable racialized, or otherwise deviant, peoples from the landscape to make room for more deserving (read: white) colonists.

A sweeping overview of the evolution of juvenile justice in the United States, Feld's The Evoluti... more A sweeping overview of the evolution of juvenile justice in the United States, Feld's The Evolution of the Juvenile Court reflects years of research and writing. By no means limited to the juvenile court or juvenile justice, as the title might imply, Feld's study examines closely and deftly the influence of the social and political context as well as ideologies about race, class, gender, age, and crime and how they have shaped and reshaped the nature of the court across the 20th century. As he demonstrates, beliefs about childhood, crime control, race, class, and gender are socially constructed and operate through political processes, which ultimately hurt poor children and especially poor children of color, who are more disenfranchised today than in past generations. To Feld, the root causes of delinquency that land youths in the juvenile justice system are childhood poverty and the attendant circumstances of growing up without the basic necessities to become a healthy, educated, and active member of society. Though childhood poverty is on the decline since the post-recession peak of 18 percent in 2012, today's rate of 15.6 percent remains too high, especially when you examine children of color whose rates are triple or more than that of their white peers. For school-age children , poverty impacts grades, attendance, nutrition, and achievement. In the long term, it influences earnings and mortality as well. We must, Feld argues, attend to such structural inequalities and rethink the competence and culpability of young people, particularly those who end up in the juvenile justice system. As developmental psychology and neuroscience research has shown, young people are not fully capable of making decisions as are adults. To account for that, Feld calls for a " youth discount " at all levels of the juvenile justice system. Feld opens his study by asking the reader to consider how we think about children and crime control; how ideas about race, gender, and class affect how we think about children and crime; and, how those beliefs have changed over time. To Feld, the answers are often less than satisfying, especially as they have impacted African American youths who have felt the brunt of criminalizing in the juvenile justice system. To track the experience of