Border Texts: Writing Fiction From Northern Mexico
Núria Vilanova
$22.00 | 2007
isbn:1-879691-86-5
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Núria Vilanova's new book is about borders and texts . . .

It studies the relationship between the Mexico-U.S. border and some of the fiction produced in the area. What are the different presences of the border within these texts? Is the border so powerful as to permeate the aesthetics and literary discourse of such texts? Can the multidimensional space of the border be determinant in the making of fiction? After a review of border dynamics within the Mexico-U.S. context, with a look at border and Chicano studies, Border Texts explores the fiction of Jesús Gardea and Luis Humberto Crosthwaite. 

Latin Americanist Núria Vilanova has devoted much of her research to the Mexico-U.S. border from a cultural and literary perspective. After completing her Ph.D. at Liverpool University (1993), Vilanova established herself as an authority on Peruvian literature. She has taught in several universities in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. She is the author of The Impact of Social Change upon Literature: Social Change and Literature in Peru (1970-1990)  (1998)."

Arturo Aldama
Ethnic Studies
University of Colorado

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Fluxus: The History of an Attitude is based on the author's exhaustive archival research tracking the physical remains of this fascinating interdisciplinary and international arts movement that began in the 1960s. Smith, in his "introduction," says, "Fluxus was once called 'the most radical and experimental art movement of the sixties,' but for anyone seeking to learn more about the historical nature of Fluxus and its conceptual framework it might more readily seem to be just plain frustrating rather than radical. This is in part the case because Fluxus is historically complex and philosophically difficult to define. This very ambiguity, however, is an aspect of its radicality. Fluxus is both an attitude towards art-making and culture that is not historically limited, and a specific historical group. As an attitude, Fluxus is part of a larger conceptual development that is a significant, although often overlooked, current of the twentieth-century Western avant-garde. This attitude is in part traceable to the network of interrelated ideas about culture, politics, and society explored earlier in the twentieth century by the Futurists, the Dadaists, and the Surrealists. Some of these same ideas were later explored after World War II by artists associated with groups such as Letterism, International Situationism, Nouveau Realisme, and Fluxus itself." Also, Smith claims the Fluxus is still very much alive today and that "Fluxus is by nature anti-reductivist, for it does not seek the illumination of some end or fact but celebrates participation in a non-hierarchal density of experience. In this way Fluxus does not refer to a style or even a procedure as such but to the presence of a totality of social activities. Fluxus seeks to shift from traditional utilitarian-based proscriptions to an open-ended, less evaluative participation in the processes themselves." The book is provided with a comprehensive bibliography and index. 

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This is the first book-length scholarly treatment in English of the Brazilian poet Glauco Mattoso's work, some of which was written during Brazil's most recent dictatorship (1964-85). Steven Butterman highlights Mattoso's themes of homosexuality, fetishism, and symbolic sadomasochism within a context of a comparative examination of transgressive literature in the Western canon (Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Verlaine et al) with particular emphasis on Luso-Brazilian literature from the Middle Ages to the present.

New U.S poems by Jan Lee Ande, Chris Buckley, Philip Dacey. Ann Fisher-Wirth, Linda Pastan, Charles Harper Webb, and many others | International poems in translation from Mexico, Italy, Spain, China, Columbia, France, Germany, Costa Rica, Italy, and Japan | A special feature celebrating the legacy of William Matthews | The remarkable art of Millicent Tomkins...and much, much, more. 

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ISBN: 1-879691-71-X
2004 | Paper: 340 pp.
80 plates | 60 color | 20 black & white | $25

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This exciting new memoir charts the remarkable life of Dr. Charles W. Hostler: hawking newspapers on San Francisco cable-cars; prowling Westwood as a UCLA undergraduate; road warrior for the California Highway Patrol; flyboy for the U.S. Army Air Corps, East Coast secret agent-trainee in the OSS (the precursor to the CIA); and colleague to real world "James Bonds" in England's MI6. All of these serving as mere pitstops in a singular odyssey that culminates with Hostler's appointment as U.S. Ambassador to Bahrain (1989-1993) and his doings during the Persian Gulf War. Hostler's memoir is lavishly illustrated with eighty selections from the author's extensive archive of photographs.

HOSTLER LAUDED BY CHIRAC AND BUSH AT INTERNATIONAL D-DAY CEREMONY!

ISBN: 1-879691-67-1
2003 | Paper: 84 pp.
48 plates in black & white | $20

ISBN: 1-879691-67-1
2003 | Paper: 84 pp.
48 plates in black & white | $20

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Working the Stone is a unique work made up of text and images that takes as its focus an abandoned New England limestone quarry. Placed in an extended chronology of the area's archaeology going back 350 million years, Metcalf's and Saradoff's work moves into an orchestrated oral history of the quarry told by people who remember how the enterprise was set up and run. Waves of immigrants from Germany, Ireland, Poland, and Italy occupied villages in the area and worked at the quarry and plant, which was eventually acquired by U.S. Gypsum. Mechanization of the work processes replaced men and their laboriously gained expertise. Farnams then became a ghost town, and only recently has the area begun to experience a revival brought about by young professionals eager to return to the land. The story of the plant, quarry, and its people over the generations grows out of a complex weave of lyrical prose, oral histories, drawings, documents, and historical and contemporary photographs all unified in a testament to the enduring human spirit.

click the image for a high resolution reproduction of the special wraparound cover | cover design by Guillermo Nericcio García for memogr@phics designcasa.

A bilingual publication of 19 essays describing current trends and challenges in Tecate, Baja California. 
Pp. 576. 
US$18.00. 
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Italian poetry and Experimental poetry by one of Italy's most noted and innovative writers
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This volume includes the complete journals of Juan Crespí in Spanish and English. Este tomo incluye los diarios completos de Juan Crespí en español y ingles.

This work makes available for the first time the complete journals of Juan Crespí, the Franciscan friar who accompanied the first expeditions that established Spanish presence in Alta California. Beginning at the northern edge of the mission frontier of Baja California, the 1769 expedition trekked overland some three hundred miles to establish San Diego. From there, Crespí and the contingent of military personnel and Indian auxiliaries traveled northward on to Monterey and back again. Crespí journals provide the first detailed observations about the new land of Alta California and its peoples. This book is an essential source for the history of Spanish occupation of Alta California and the native Americans inhabiting the land.

This volume, which is the result of some forty years of research by Alan K. Brown, brings together what Crespí wrote in its entirety. All other printed and manuscript versions were censored, heavily edited, condensed, and excerpted by Serra, Palou, and othersalterations that dropped out critical detail and valuable information. This edition makes all other printed versions of Crespí's journals obsolete.

Brown has stitched together the complete journals from different manuscript versions in archives in Europe and the Americas. They are presented by the editor in the original Spanish with detailed annotations and comparisons of alternate versions of sections of the text. As well, Brown provides a new English translation of the full texts.

The work includes an extensive introduction by Alan K. Brown that in itself is a valuable contribution to the history of the period and gives a detailed and realistic vision of the life of Crespí. The volume also contains detailed explanatory notes, an index of sites, a general index, and a list of references.

What the experts say:

"Thanks to the erudition and detective work of Alan K. Brown and the high scholarly standards of SDSU Press, we no longer have to depend on a flawed version of this essential account of the founding of Spanish California. This is the definitive edition, in English AND Spanish.

"This work will be an integral part of any collection of basic California historical materials. Researchers in related fields such as anthropology, historical geography, and ethnobotany, along with history buffs and mission aficionados will seize upon it as a Îmust read itemâ and it becomes an instant Îmust possessâ title for any California library reference collection. Alan K. Brown deserves immense credit for his monumental research, editing, and analytical effort that produced this volume.

"Alan K. Brown has provided historians, scholars, and researchers with a tremendous gift. His monumental and authoritative translation of Crespí's complete journals will quickly become an indispensable work for all who study the history of California. The introduction to Brown's work is, in and of itself, a masterful piece of research and writing. The extensive and thorough footnotes attest to Brown's careful attention to detail and desire to include the latest scholarship in his work. Brown's translations from the original Spanish texts are superbly done. They remain faithful to the Spanish but are "reader-friendly." Having the Spanish version of the original journals available in the text for comparison purposes greatly increases the value of Brown's contribution to researchers.

For a review of this volume by bajacalifornia.org, click here

This volume is the fourth in the SCERP Monograph Series. It analyzes how the demographic, economic, infrastructure, and environmental characteristics of the border region have changed from the period prior to the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement to 2000. 

ISBN-0-925613-35-5
© 2002
Pp. 110. US$10.00. Shipping $3.00. 

This is the third volume in the SCERP Monograph series. It comprises the papers and deliberations presented at Border Institute II, which upon the discussions during the first Border Institute. Further, the work explores the challenge of reinventing the economy to provide a solid base for achieving development, providing necessary environmental infrastructure, and enhancing quality of life in the border communities.
 

ISBN-0-925613-34-7
© 2002
Pp. 258
US$10.00 plus shipping, handling & applicable taxes
 

Edited by Paul Ganster
ISBN 0925613-32-0
2001
paper, 432pp
US$12.50 plus shipping, handling, and applicable taxes
 

Cooperation, Environment, and Sustainability in Border Regions is based on papers presented late in 1999 at the San Diego, California meeting of the Border Regions in Transition (BRIT) group. An international network of border specialists, the BRIT group has also convened in Berlin (1994), Joensuu on the Finnish-Russian border (1997), and in Chandigarh, India, near the Indian-Pakistani border (2000). Key themes of this volume are transborder cooperation, border environmental concerns, and issues of sustainable development in border regions, including the U.S.-Mexican border region, European border regions, the Baltic region, Russian-Finnish border areas, and Asian border regions. Also included are essays on methodological and theoretical approaches to border research.
 

Produced as a cooperative publication of Ballena Press and the Institute for the Regional Studies of the Californias, this book provides a richly detailed ethnography, native toponyms, kin terms, ancient enmities, and traditional material culture of work that has been obscured for over 50 years. It is useful both as a primary source and a compendium of information on the Tiapi/Diegueño communities of Northern Baja California. An accompanying map circa 1950 aids the reader in locating the ethnography in a historical and geographical setting.
A cooperative publication of IRSC, SDSU Press and Ballena Press.

ISBN 0-87919-144-9
$39.95 hardback
$27.50 paper
2001

For information on other RELATED publications, visit the  IRSC web site.
 

Edited by Paul Ganster
ISBN 0-925613-28-2
2000
paper, 168 pp
US$10.00 plus shipping, handling & applicable taxes

The U.S.-Mexican Border Environment: A Road Map to a Sustainable 2020 brings together background papers and ancillary materials prepared for the Border Institute I, held in December 1998. The briefing papers, as presented at Border Institute I and then revised, lay out basic information and analysis about the population, economy, environment, and governance of the border region. They provide the context for discussions of the environmental sustainability of the region over the next twenty years or so. The purpose of Border Institute I was to encourage stakeholders in the region and elsewhere to redirect their focus from immediate and urgent current border environmental issues to the steps that must be taken soon if the region is to arrive at 2020 with a healthy and sustainable environment.  SCERP, and its partners in Border Institute I--the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Border Trade Alliance--will convene additional meetings approximately every year to continue the discussion on key aspects of the environmental sustainability of the border region. Each of these institutes will produce a volume for the SCERP Monograph Series.
 

This bilingual book of 42 black and white photographs and an interpretive essay with two maps provides a view of Tijuana in 1964. It is a time in the city that many people remember, but many never knew. The book portrays Tijuana when it was still a small city of 235,000, with a clearly defined center.  Since that time, rapid population growth, industrialization, and urban sprawl have created the huge and complex city we know today. Tijuana in 1964 was a dual city, with one part oriented toward tourism activities and life north of the border. The other part was a totally Mexican city, with economic, social, and cultural activities oriented toward national life. Tijuana 1964 effectively depicts this dualism. Click on the ancient camera to your right to see a selection of plates from this volume.
 

This bilingual Atlas integrates U.S. and Mexican data to provide a harmonized view of the binational strip of land that serves as an interface between San Diego and Tijuana. The Atlas includes 15 full-color thematic maps of the San Diego-Tijuana border region and 35 black-and-white photographs. Detailed thematic essays by experts provide context and commentary for understanding the maps. Essay topics include: land use, planned land use, water, sewage, transportation infrastructure, population, employment, public facilities, vegetation and land cover, topography and hydrography, and others. The Atlas was produced through the collaboration of San Diego State University's Institute for Regional Studies of the Californias, The SDSU Department of Geography, the Municipal Planning Institute of Tijuana (IMPlan), the City of San Diego, the San Diego Association of Governments and San Diego State University Press.
 

This is a large "casebook" of materials related to the life and work of Raymond Federman. A French Jew and Holocaust survivor, one of the world's leading Beckett scholars, and the author of over twenty books of fiction, poetry, and criticism, Federman has also been one of postmoderism's most radical liteary innovators and most influential theoreticians. Federman A to X-X-X-X is the first major critical study devoted to his work to appear in America. Assembled by editors Larry McCaffery, Thomas Hartl, and Doug Rice, the volume unfolds as a series of several hundred alphabetically arranged entries in double columns forming an elaborate mock-encyclopedia of the sort Borges or Nabokov might have imagined. These entries include over a hundred representative stories, novel excerpts, essays, poems, and letters by Federman, many of which are previously unpublished, and hundreds of other entries by authors, critics, editors, and correspondents analyzing, criticizing, or often collaborating with Federman's works. Also included are individual entries on authors, artists, and books that influenced Federman, samples from a wide range of fiction, poetry, and criticism that illuminate his writing, a comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources, as well as a generous selection of photographs, drawings, reproductions of paintings, documents, manuscript pages, and other visual materials. Among entries are a number of unpublished essays and commentaries about Federman's work commissioned specifically for this volume by well-known critics and translators including Brian McHale, Richard Martin, Ronald Sukenick, Geoffrey Green, and many others.  Click opposite on the number "10" for a review of this recent FEDERMAN volume.

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Modernism Since Postmodernism: Essays on Intermedia completed Dick Higgins' critical trilogy that began with A Dialectic of Centuries: Notes Towards a Theory of the New Arts and continued with his Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of Intermedia. A fluxperson, artist, poet, composer and scholar of intermedia, Higgins also authored Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature among numerous other works. He died in October of 1998.

Of course kitsch can be fun. Already 125 years ago, Rimbaud recognized this when, in the second section of A Season in Hell, he speaks of liking dumb paintings, door panels, stage sets, backdrops for acrobats, street signs, old-time literature and such-like. Who doesn't?... "Kitschspeak" is the term I use...for the fashionable kitsch language about the arts, sometimes delightful for a while, as with Jacques Derrida, for instance, but ultimately locked so closely into fashion and the world of second-rate and derivative art that it is all but impossible to use with major work and thus destined to pass into academia or oblivion once its novelty has passed....There are, of course, many schools of postmodernism--and they are just that, schools--but for a preliminary discussion there is no need to identify all of them. However, it can be argued that most of them are of two sorts: pop-academic, in which the professors cite each other to build up a lattice of assumptions into a polemic that may or may not have any correspondence with the realities of the arts that lie outside what is known in their trade as "the discussion." The academic trades are known collectively among participants in such discussions as "the profession," much as prostitutes refer to "the  life."

Dick Higgins from the Foreword to Modernism Since Postmodernism

The author of this book spent almost ten years teaching in some of New York State's harshest maximum-security prisons. Vernooykill Creek is a sensitive and profound cry of moral outrage against the penalization of America, especially of America's less advantaged citizens. Matlin's personal essay takes the long view, placing our current prison crisis in a historical context. According to critic Noam Chomsky, ". . . It's a really impressive piece of work, which captures with wrenching vividness the torture we inflict on others, and ultimately on ourselves. . ." Howard Zinn writes that "Vernooykill Creek is an eloquent and powerful rumination on his experience teaching in prison. It goes beyond his personal story to put into sharp and disturbing perspective the larger problem, so cruelly handled in our society, of crime and punishment." Richard Stratton, the former Editor-in-Chief and publisher of Prison Life magazine adds: "David Matlin spent nearly a decade as a teacher in some of New York State's toughest maximum-security penitentiaries. The experience moved him to compose this devastating essay. Matlin writes with insight and passion as he diagnoses a hideous malady plaguing America, the imprisonment boom, the warehousing of a whole generation of young African American and Latino men in our nation's violent and retribution-oriented prisons that threatens to destroy the very foundations of our culture." David Matlin's first novel, How the Night is Divided, was nominated for The National Book Critics Circle Award in 1993.
 

This volume is a collection of essays on issues affecting the political, economic, social, and cultural significance of international borders. It is an undertaking that is particularly timely due to global events that are so rapidly changing our understanding of international relations. The contributors to this book share basic research and practical interests in deepening understanding of the multifarious and often contradictory processes that condition human interaction across international borders. Published jointly by San Diego State University Press and The Institute for Regional Studies of the Californias.
 

San Diego State University: A History in Word and Image, by Raymond Starr, is the first and only comprehensive history of the largest campus in the California State University system. Originally conceived as a history through photographs by the late John Adams, whose generosity has made possible this publication, the work expanded to become a full-fledged history of the University. Separate chapters cover the founding of the institution in the 1890s in downtown San Diego, subsequent transfer to its Park Avenue site, then later relocation to Montezuma Mesa. Special attention is given to student life, athletics, the growth of academic programs, and how the institution was affected by world events such as World War I and World War II. We are able to see the growth of the school from its beginnings as a teachers college (or "normal" school) to its current status as a major public comprehensive university with an internationally respected faculty, vital research institutes, increasingly significant academic ties to Mexico and the Pacific Rim, and joint doctoral programs. San Diego State University: A History in Word and Image underscores the centrality of the University both to the local community and as a key player in national and international intellectual debates.
 

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