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Nonfiction. Hunger of Memory is the story of Mexican-American Richard Rodriguez, who begins his schooling in Sacramento, California, knowing just 50 words of English, and concludes his university studies in the stately quiet of the reading room of the British Museum. Here is the poignant journey of a “minority student” who pays the cost of his social assimilation and academic success with a painful alienation — from his past, his parents, his culture — and so describes the high price of “making it” in middle-class America. Provocative in its positions on affirmative action and bilingual education, Hunger of Memory is a powerful political statement, a profound study of the importance of language ... and the moving, intimate portrait of a boy struggling to become a man. |
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Management in Two Cultures: Bridging the Gap between U.S. and Mexican Managers
by Eva, S. Kras
Average Customer Rating 
Publisher: Intercultural Press
Pub. Date: February 1995
ISBN-13: 9781877864322 |
| Nonfiction. Much has been written on the economic dimensions of U.S.-Mexican business relations but little on the more subtle and sensitive cultural issues involved. Eva Kras confronts the problems that arise out of the cultural differences between U.S. and Mexican managers. Since the publication of the first edition of this book in 1989, the Maquiladoras have increased in number, the NAFTA agreement was ratified, and business practices have changed and evolved in response. Kras has expanded her analysis of these developments and their meaning for interaction between U.S. and Mexican managers. This practical handbook is based on extensive interviews with Mexican and U.S. managers. Kras compares the critical areas of a managerial setting in which the values and behaviors of the two cultures differ and offers specific recommendations on how to ameliorate the disparities between them. |
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Out of the Barrio: Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation
by Linda Chavez
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Publisher: Perseus Publishing
Pub. Date: October 1992
ISBN-13: 978-0465054312 |
| Nonfiction. Hispanic Americans are not an impoverished minority group on the fast track to the permanent underclass, despite all the rhetoric to this effect coming from the victimization industry. To the contrary, they are an upwardly mobile group in pursuit of the American dream. Like immigrants in the past, they simply need time to adapt to their new home. In this brilliant analysis, Linda Chavez conclusively shows that the main obstacle to their progress is not racism or nativism among the native-born but misguided public policies such as bilingual education that inhibit Hispanics from entering the mainstream. |
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The Americano Dream: How Latinos Can Achieve Success in Business and in Life
by Lionel Sosa
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Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
Pub. Date: February 1998
ISBN-13: 978-0525943099 |
| Nonfiction. Lionel Sosa's extraordinary achievements in advertising have made his San Antonio-based firm the leading consultant to Anglo corporations looking to break into the multicultural market. Now he turns the tables, showing Latinos how to market themselves to a wider base of American business cultures. Sosa draws on his own experiences as well as those of other successful Latino politicians, entertainers, sports stars, and business people to illustrate the obstacles that Latinos must overcome and the power of their heritage. By showing in detail how Latinos can compete and win in American society, The Americano Dream is unique in the marketplace, and will quickly become the business bible for a new generation of Latino entrepreneurs. |
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Barefoot Heart: Stories of Migrant Child
by lva Trevino Hart
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Publisher: Bilingual Review/Press
Pub. Date: May 1999
ISBN-13: 9780927534819
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| Nonfiction. This account is not an ordinary memoir of triumph over adversity. Instead, Hart eloquently reveals the harsh toll that poverty and discrimination took on her family--in sharply etched portraits of Ama, Hart's worn-out mother who clearly loved her daughter but was too exhausted to show it; of her brother Rudy, who refused to sit at the back of the bus because he was a Mexican; and of her teenage sisters, who struggled to keep their dignity in the muddy fields. She recalls many painful incidents in school and with childhood friends that stemmed from being Mexican in a small white Texas town. At 17, she drove her father back to Mexico to visit his family; she recalls how he suddenly changed into a happy man who felt at home with his land, his language and his people. This is a beautifully written debut from a writer to watch. (Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information) |
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Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail
by Ruben Martinez
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Publisher: Picador
Pub. Date: September 2002
ISBN-13: 9780312421236 |
| Nonfiction. The U.S.-Mexican border is one of the most permeable boundaries in the world, breached daily by Mexicans in search of work. Yet the migrant gambit is perilous. Thousands die crossing the line and those who reach "the other side" are branded illegals, undocumented and unprotected. In Crossing Over, Ruben Martinez puts a human face on the phenomenon, following an extended Mexican family with the grim distinction of having lost three sons in a tragic border incident. He charts the migrants' progress from their small south-Mexican town through the harrowing underground railroad. He reveals the effects of immigration on the family left behind and offers a powerful portrait of migrant culture. Far from joining the melting pot, Martinez argues, the migrants--as many as seven million in the U.S.--are spawning a new culture that will alter both countries as Latin America and the U.S. come increasingly to resemble each other. |
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Mexicans and Americans: Cracking the Cultural Code
by Ned Crouch
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Publisher: Intercultural Press
Pub. Date: June 2004
ISBN-13: 9781857883428 |
| Nonfiction. In Mexicans & Americans, international businessman Ned Crouch explains how cultural bias affects the way Americans get along with Mexicans, why Mexican people behave the way they do, and how people from both cultures can work together more effectively. His in-depth analysis explains cultural attitudes toward work and describes how businesspeople can apply the lessons of cultural anthropologists to the real world. Using anecdotes from his own personal experiences during his many years of working in Mexico, as well as the stories he has gathered from numerous informative interviews and conversations, Crouch cracks the cultural code of Mexico by describing how the Mexican culture works and how Mexicans and their differences with Americans can be better understood. (Copyright © 2004 Soundview Executive Book Summaries) |
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Good Neighbors: Communicating with the Mexicans
by John C. Condon
Average Customer Rating 
Publisher: Intercultural Press
Pub. Date: November 1997
ISBN-13: 9781877864537 |
| Nonfiction. John C. Condon examines how Mexicans and Americans perceive themselves and each other and how their behavior, based on these perceptions, often leads to cross-cultural misunderstanding. Condon is a master at getting beneath the cultural skin of a people. In simple, direct language he shows us what makes Mexicans tick in a way that enables us to understand and appreciate the differences. Particularly valuable is a set of guidelines for those who work with Mexicans. |
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Good Neighbors Family Installments: Memories of Growing up Hispanic
by Edward Rivera
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Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
Pub. Date: August 1983
ISBN-13: 9780140067262 |
| Fiction. Edward Rivera’s Family Installments: Memories of Growing Up Hispanic belongs to a growing body of multicultural literature in the United States. The novel describes the interaction between a mostly monolingual Anglophonic community and a Puerto Rican, Spanish-speaking one. More important, by revealing the fragility of the presumed centrality of their own culture, it teaches Anglophonic monolingual readers to become self-conscience about their difference from the other culture represented in the text. By seeing themselves against the background of Puerto Rican-American culture, Anglophonic readers glimpse their own alterity, their own potential for marginality. (Marta Sánchez) |
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Go Translation Nation: Defining a new American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States
by Hector Tobar
Average Customer Rating
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
Pub. Date: April 2006
ISBN-13: 9781594481765 |
| Nonfiction. The author begins on familiar terrain, in his native Los Angeles, with his family's story, along with that of two brothers of Mexican origin with very different interpretations of Americanismo, or American identity as seen through a Latin American lens-one headed for U.S. citizenship and the other for the wrong side of the law and the south side of the border. But this is just a jumping-off point. Soon we are in Dalton, Georgia, the most Spanish-speaking town in the Deep South, and in Rupert, Idaho, where the most popular radio DJ is known as "El Chupacabras." By the end of the book, we have traveled from the geographical extremes into the heartland, exploring the familiar complexities of Cuban Miami and the brand-new ones of a busy Omaha INSstation. Sophisticated, provocative, and deeply human, Translation Nation uncovers the ways that Hispanic Americans are forging new identities, redefining the experience of the American immigrant, and reinventing the American community. It is a book that rises, brilliantly, to meet one of the most profound shifts in American identity. |
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