Central American Studies Publications

 

 

Marc Zimmerman
Goodbye to Political Economy in Central American Cultural Studies?
Searching for a Method.
Beau Bassin, Mauritius. Editorial Académica Española. 2017.

 

Radical changes in Central America point to a new political era, and the area’s participation in a “new world [dis]order” involving new processes and new theoretical frames to understand them. Neo-liberal economic policies, persistent socio-political and natural crises, and new issues regarding politics and power in relation gender and ethnic identities, have come to the fore. Now the question of how to study Central American societies has become focused on what were once considered "superstructural" questions, as cultural studies has moved to central stage in an effort to conceptualize and resolve controversial issues crucial to future developments. This book highlights Marc Zimmerman’s take on these matters. Placing developments in Central American cultural studies in relation to previous efforts, Zimmerman then seeks to outline regional history, culture and literature in relation to broader questions. All this leads to a critique pointing to why so many now risk their lives to leave and live elsewhere. The text explores the role of culture and literature in the overall historical process. 

Available free of cost as .pdf with bcc. of email recommending the book for a library purchase.

For a Spanish language sample, visit javeriana.edu

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Juan Mora-Torres, Francisco Piña & Marc Zimmerman, eds.
La cosecha amarga/ The Bitter Harvest: El norte de Centro-América y los centro-americanos en El Norte desde los tiempos insurreccionales a la coyuntura actual/ Northern Central America and Central Americans in El Norte from Insurrectional Times to the Current Conjuncture.
CD vol. Chicago: El BeiSMan and LACASA Chicago 2015.

 

Disillusion, Ungovernability and Transnational Violence affecting Central American Refugees, the Effects of the Mara Trucha, the role of women, resistance in the Honduran Coup, the role of writers and artists. Striking art work, gripping stories and poems, key interviews, videos, film, etc.  in this volume featuring Sergio Ramírez, José Luis Rocha, Mario Bencastro, Carolina Rivera, and other key writers, including the editors.

 

La desilusión, ingobernabilidad y violencia transnacional que afectan a los niños de la frontera y otros refugiados centroamericanos, los efectos de la Mara Trucha y los narcos, el papel de las mujeres, de los escritores y artistas, la resistencia anti-golpista hondureña son capturados a través de ensayos, entrevistas, relatos y testimonios, pinturas y fotografías cuentos y poemas. Con Sergio Ramírez y Oscar Martínez, José Luis Rocha, Mario Bencastro, Manlio Argueta, Carolina Rivera, y otros escritores destacados.

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Oscar Estrada
Honduras: Crónicas de un pueblo golpeado

Un libro a la vez de crónica y testimonio que relata día por día el Golpe de Estado de 2009 / A Honduran novelist’s brilliant day-by-day account of the Honduran golpe de estado of 2009.

Co-published by Casasola y LACASA, 2010

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Cuando en la madrugada del 28 de junio me llamaron para informarme del Golpe --- que estaba en ejecución, yo no lo podía creer. Como todos en el país, pensaba que los golpes de estados eran acciones desesperadas del pasado, creía que había un mínimo de interés en los grupos de poder de fortalecer y preservar la institucionalidad por la que la sociedad había trabajado más de 30 años. – Frente a la presidencial se está agrupando la gente –me dijeron–, este golpe lo vamos a revertir. Tomé mi cámara de vídeo y me fui a la Presidencial, para tomar notas, para vivir ese acontecimiento inédito en nuestra historia. Así nació este libro. Originalmente estas crónicas fueron publicadas por los canales electrónicos: Facebook, hablahonduras.com, redes de correo electrónico y reproducidas en Ingles en Quotha.net y otros blogs. La idea era romper el cerco mediático que desde los medios hondureños se había impuesto e informar al mundo de lo que en Honduras estaba pasando. Estas son crónicas escritas, en su mayoría, hechas desde la calle y al calor de los acontecimientos. Rescatarlas es hacerle un homenaje a todos los hombres y mujeres, los mártires que vi caer, en el transcurso de esos días.

 

 

José Luis Rocha Gómez
Provocation and Protest: The Student Movement in Nicaragua’s Uprising Foreword by Helena Poniatowska; Afterword by Marc Zimmerman.
LACASA Chicago, 2020

 

A study of the student movement as a key part of the demonstrations against the government of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo in 2018, this book explores the causes and possible future repercussions of the uprising in national and regional contexts. The book reveals the willingness of university students to imagine and fight for a new and different Nicaragua without the Achilles’ heels of social movements of the past. Rocha shows us why the student mobilizations happened, how they demand a cultural change toward a more open, just, and sustainable society; and how they reflect cultural changes that are already happening and that no government can hope to completely control. Whether changes come with or without blood, Rocha argues, 'the decision for change has already been made.”

 

 

 

U.S. & Chicago Latino/a Publications

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Marc Zimmerman
Defending Their Own in the Cold. The Cultural Turns of U.S. Puerto Ricans.
Champaign. U. of Illinois Press, 2011 (Paperback edition 2020).
 

Defending Their Own in the Cold: The Cultural Turns of U.S. Puerto Ricans explores U.S. Puerto Rican culture in past and recent contexts. The book presents East Coast, Midwest, and Chicago cultural production while exploring Puerto Rican musical, film, artistic, and literary performance. Working within the theoretical frame of cultural, postcolonial, and diasporic studies, Marc Zimmerman relates the experience of Puerto Ricans to that of Chicanos and Cuban Americans, showing how even supposedly mainstream U.S. Puerto Ricans participate in a performative culture that embodies elements of possible cultural "Ricanstruction."

 

To illustrate how Puerto Ricans have survived and created new identities and relations out of their colonized and diasporic circumstances Defending Their Own in the Cold examines various dimensions of U.S. Puerto Rican artistic life, including relations with other ethnic groups and resistance to colonialism and cultural assimilation. … Zimmerman offers his own "semi-outsider" point of reference as a Jewish American Latin Americanist who grew up near New York City, matured in California, went on to work with and teach Latinos in the Midwest, and eventually married a woman from a Puerto Rican family with island and U.S. roots.

 

For a more detailed description and reviews, visit https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=c036460

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“Defendiendo lo suyo en el frío”: Artistas Boricuas de Chicago.”

Followup to book, visual presentation for Cuba. Casa de las Américas. Latinos en los E.E.U.U.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InADTcvr4e4

Written version in La Jirbilla.

http://www.lajiribilla.cu/articulo/defendiendo-lo-suyo-en-el-frio-artistas-puertorriquenos-en-chicago

 

Marc Zimmerman, ed.
The Mexican Experience in Chicago: Memories from the Early Years and Echoes in Our Time.
LACASA Chicago, 2018

 

This book plots the history of Mexican Chicago and the development of Chicago Mexican and Latino studies. Essays about Chicago Latinos and Mexicans set the stage for a telling interview of Luis Leal, an iconic pioneer of Mexican and Chicano literature, and longtime Chicago resident, evoking key dimensions of the city’s Mexican life. Next comes a compilation of comments made by and about early Chicago Mexicans as found in the first studies of this population. A final essay shows how the study of Chicago Mexicans from Guanajuato, can offer new insights affecting our overall view of Chicago’s Mexican population. Taken together, these materials, sum up and enrich past work, but also anticipate, corroborate and at times challenge research that has been developing in recent years. The materials are a valuable contribution to the new wave of Chicago Latino and Mexican studies. 

 

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Antonio Delgado, edited with Marc Zimmerman
Taking Off in the City: Mexicans from Hull House and Pilsen Areas in Chicago’s Near West Side, 1910-1960
LACASA Chicago, 2020

 

Taking Off in the City is the earliest book-length study of Mexican Chicago and its most important settlement area written by a member of that community. Delgado traces the arrival of Mexican immigrants to the city’s Jane Addams Hull House area; he portrays how that community developed and how the establishment of the U. of Illinois at Chicago pushed Mexicans south toward the 18th Street Pilsen area, where they formed the political, commercial, and artistic world which would later emerge. The result is a compelling study of the dynamic evolution of Chicago Mexicans and the contributions they made in spite of the tribulations they faced. Today, we may see Delgado’s effort as one of the first to highlight the importance of  this population to the history and future of Chicago, Latino/as and the U.S.

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Read a review at ElBeiSMan.

 

   

José Gamaliel González
Bringing Aztlán to Mexican Chicago: My Life, My Work, My Art
Introduced and edited by Marc Zimmerman

Urbana. U. of Illinois Press, 2010

 

Bringing Aztlán to Mexican Chicago is the autobiography of Jóse Gamaliel González, an impassioned artist willing to risk all for the empowerment of his marginalized and oppressed community. Through recollections emerging in a series of interviews conducted over a period of six years by his friend Marc Zimmerman, González looks back on his life and his role in developing Mexican, Chicano, and Latino art as a fundamental dimension of the city he came to call home. Born near Monterey, Mexico, and raised in a steel mill town in northwest Indiana, González studied art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame. Settling in Chicago, he founded two major art groups: El Movimiento Artístico Chicano (MARCH) in the 1970s and Mi Raza Arts Consortium (MIRA) in the 1980s. With numerous illustrations, this book portrays González's all-but-forgotten community advocacy, his commitments and conflicts, as well as his long struggle to bring quality arts programming to the city. By turns dramatic and humorous, his narrative also covers his bouts of illness, his relationships with other artists and arts promoters, and his place within city and barrio politics.

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For a more detailed description and reviews, visit

https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/23eqn8dd9780252035388.html

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Jennifer Palton, ed. “A Youtube Interview: The Autobiography of José Gamaliel González,” 8/10. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A67zfeK81p8  KPFT.

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Marc Zimmerman, ed.

José Gamaliel González. Documenting the Work of a Chicago Mexican Artist and Activist.
CD format, Chicago: LACASA, 2011

 

Book in CD format packaged in a DVD box.
All intros and other materials avaiable as voiceovers. All artwork in color uploaded in color. Sequel to Jose Gamaliel González, Bringing Aztlán to Mexican Chicago, ed. by Marc Zimmerman, published by U. of Illinois Press, with artworks, newspaper articles, letters, etc. fully documenting this man and his times in Chicagoland's Mexican communities.

 

 

 

 

 

Aaron Kerlow

El gran circo chico de nuestro mundito: Escritos y dibujos / The Great Little Circus of our Small World: Writings and Drawings
Bilingual vol. intro. and ed. by Marc Zimmerman
Global Casa & LACASA Chicago, 2015

 

A great circus brought down by a midget’s jealous love; a parrot who memorizes secret formulae and is destroyed in a madness that all but ends the world; a man whose  one-side disease of hyper-sensitivity sours his family ties and life; three women who survive their gangster husbands and then de-criminalize their assests; a trapeze artist-thief and his true love enthralled in sixty years of erotic acrobatics; and a special history of a circus-like, globalized world—along with a wide selection of drawings of fanciful figures and faces, and more.  All this  by a dedicated doctor who served Chicago’s Latino poor for years.  Born in Mexico in 1933, Aaron Kerlow was well known for his playful charm, for his love of Latin American culture  and his love of life. After Kerlow’s sudden death in 2006, and in consultation with Kerlow’s daughter and son, Marc Zimmerman decided to coordinate a bi-lingual volume of his friend’s writings and drawings .  The result is a volume featuring Kerlow’s creativity, fanciful wit and strong opinions as well his playful visual imagination.

 

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John Pitman Weber and Marc Zimmerman, ed. 2017.
A Guerrero Named Guerrero: Taller than a Tall Mural.
A CD dedicated to the memory of José Guerrero (1938-2015), A Texas Chicano Worker, Teacher, Tour Guide, Muralist and Printmaker in Mexican Chicago.

LACASA Chicago, 2017

 

José Guerrero arrived in Chicago from Texas in the mid-1960s and took a factory job as he honed his cartooning skills and then launched his career as a muralist. Guerrero was known for his radical politics.  But, he was also known for his gentle and mischievous sense of humor, his warm solidarity with his fellow artists, and his humility.  This CD presents photos of Guerrero’s principal mural and print contributions; it includes extended interviews with and about the artist on his mural and graphic work, his political views and his overall career.  The CD also includes several articles about Guerrero and a portfolio honoring him with prints by various Pilsen artists.  The CD marks a major tribute to Guerrero, a treasure for all those interested in Chicago Latino art.

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A fine first novel by a Friend of LACASA 

 

Marisabel Martín Córdova

Entre Parentesis

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"Si hay una manera de caracterizar pertinentemente esta novela, es calificarla como excéntrica. Saharah, su protagonista, se encuentra en constante transformación, a raíz de la vorágine de sucesos que le toca vivir. Su desplazamiento vital del centro urbano al margen suburbano le concede un carácter nomádico liminal. Del mismo modo, la escritura se convierte en el detonante de su imperiosa y necesaria metamorfosis. Marisabel Martín Córdova ha concebido una arriesgada y fascinante novela, través la cual el lector se adentra en los vertiginosos vericuetos de la existencia humana. Entre paréntesis es una novela madura cuyos códigos estructurales conforman las enardecidas aristas de su excentricidad." 

Alberto Martínez Márquez
Docente y Director de Tesis en la Universidad del Sagrado Corazón.
Director departamental y UPR-Aguadilla. Poeta

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"En esta primera entrega, Marisabel Martín Córdova se planta en terrenos inéditos dentro de la literatura puertorriqueña, rompiendo con ciertos paradigmas silenciosos que han reinado en nuestra manera de escribir(nos). He aquí una novela que cartografía la crisis de una mujer escritora, parte del magisterio boricua, del área oeste, que recién descubre una noticia misteriosa que hamaquea sus cimientos, Entre paréntesis encarna la famosa frase de Kate Millet, “Lo personal es político”, pues su protagonista, Saharah propone de forma magistral la metáfora del cuerpo-país, del cuerpo-patria y, a través de juegos metaliterarios, expone los resultados del saqueo de dicho cuerpo, los límites físicos, mentales y emocionales a los que se empuja esta mujer-isla, que lejos de ser imagen de la fragilidad es catedra de la soberanía."

Ángela M Valentín Rodríguez

Estudió PhD Literatura de Puerto Rico y el Caribe en Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe. Poeta y profesora de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, Mayagüez

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