Search

The product of six years of reflection and documentation, Vital Signs takes us on a walk through one of California's largest cities: San Bernardino--generally presented in the media as a center of urban blight and high crime. In this passionate collaboration, poet Juan Delgado and photographer Thomas McGovern celebrate the working-class Latino communities of the Inland Empire and the intensity of their stories. Pairing Delgado's piercing poems with McGovern's photos of hand-painted signs and murals, Vital Signs preserves the narrative and visual culture of the urban landscape and reveals a community rich in emotion and vernacular art.

The whispers of buried lives. The silence of a growing resistance. The stigma of poverty. In haunting images, Juan Delgado explores the boundaries we cross daily. These poems deal honestly with the realities of urban life, whether dramatizing the effects of drive-by shootings, unfolding a labor protest that "spreads across the city like a prayer," or summoning a ghostlike immigrant damned to retrace his journey across the border. Daily and historical struggles are elevated to the level of myth. Yet, amid these poems there are images of life and love: a girl leaving hickeys rich as chocolate, a boy pledging to rescue his mother from poverty, a man studying the desert ground for tracks signaling immigrants in distress. Delgado is unflinching in showing us the harshness surrounding the lives he cherishes, and with resonant details and lyrical language he urges us to examine those lives-and ultimately our own. A Rush of Hands is a spellbinding book that will captivate both the ear and the heart.

EL CAMPO dramatizes the lives of Mexican farm workers and their families, using two art forms with roots in folk tradition. Lyrical poems (in English) narrate moving stories about the sorrows, joys, and native beliefs of hardworking people; and images rendered in bold colors of these same people, painted in an heroic style reminiscent of the great muralist Diego Rivera. EL CAMPO deals with complex issues that can both strengthen or weaken families. 16 color illustrations.

This title was first published in 2000: This text deals with two intertwined dimensions of multicultural citizenship of the European Union. It studies the theoretical debate over how best to reconcile multiculturalism, citizenship and the need for collective identity at the European Union (EU) level by comparing EU citizenship with cultural citizenship and multicultural studies in the United States. In addition to this, through the study of EU documents, the author contends that there exists such a thing as policies of multicultural citizenship at the European Union level. He then goes on to analyze their key aspects, such as the pursuit of symbolic forms of multiculturalism and the arguments to support affirmative action policies for women. The text also examines the steps taken by certain EU institutions towards creating European identity and improving awareness of citizenship and cultural heritage, while meeting the test of subsidiarity. The author concludes that there are competing discourses in EU institutions concerning the best model for EU citizenship. Among other concepts, they construe multiculturalism and transnationalism as contested and sometimes opposing interpretations of citizenship. The text goes on to reveal a lack of substantive connection between EU citizenship and identity in the European Union, as well as the artificiality of EU attempts to build it anew. It concludes that a plurality of cultural constructions of EU citizenship, within the wider framework of liberal culturalism, may be a viable model of EU citizenship.