During World War II, unprecedented employment avenues opened up for women and minorities in U.S. defense industries at the same time that massive population shifts and the war challenged Americans to rethink notions of race. At this extraordinary historical moment, Mexican American women found new means to exercise control over their lives in the home, workplace, and nation. In From Coveralls to Zoot Suits, Elizabeth R. Escobedo explores how, as war...

"From living literary legend Ana Castillo's groundbreaking collection explores the secrets that are kept within households, the behaviors borne of patriarchal privilege, and the women they impact the most"--

The summer after Ana's high school graduation is a turning point in her life. She has to decide whether to go to college and experience life, or stay home, get married and work at her sister's struggling garment factory.

Narrates the first- generation Mexican American girl, tracking the experiences of cultural displacement, the inheritance of generational trauma, sexist and racist violence, sexual assault, economic struggle, and institutional racism and sexism that disproportionately punishes brown girls in crisis. Narrated by a speaker in mourning marked as an at- risk juvenile, psychologically troubled, an offender, expelled and sent to alternative school for adolescents...

"Guapo pobrecito her grandmother calls him. The 'poor handsome man.' Professor Jeremiah Post, the poor handsome man, is in fact standing in the way of Alejandra 'Alex' Torres turning Loretta's, her grandmother's bar, into a viable business. The hot brainiac who sleeps in one of the upstairs tenant rooms already has all of her Mexican American family's admiration; she won't let him have the bar and building she needs to resurrect her career, too. Alex...

In the summer heat of a small Arizona border town, sparks fly for three generations of women. 17-year-old Blanca discovers romance for the first time with the new bad boy in town. Lolita, her mother, had hit a dry spell until the husband of one of her customers husband pays her a visit. Blanca's grandmother, Doña Genoveva enlists her gardener Don Pedro to give her driving lessons and learns about more than cars in the process.

Inspired by their good-natured rivalry, career-oriented best friends Julia Juarez and Ime Benevides have never let anything come between them. Then enters Julia's new coworker, Ilario, who pulls both women's heartstrings, disrupts their friendship, and brings Julia's career to the brink of disaster. Looking for support, Julia turns to her other friends: Concepción, a party-obsessed dance instructor; Nina, a timid but shrewd seamstress who's not...