New Books in Politics and Polemics

Latinos have long influenced everything from electoral politics to popular culture, yet many people instinctively regard them as recent immigrants rather than a longstanding racial group. In Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism (The New Press, 2020), Laura Gómez, a leading expert on race, law, and society, illuminates the fascinating race-making, unmaking, and re-making of Latino identity that has spanned centuries, leaving a permanent imprint on how race operates in the United States today.

Pulling back the lens as the country approaches an unprecedented demographic shift (Latinos will comprise a third of the American population in a matter of decades), Gómez also reveals the nefarious roles the United States has played in Latin America—from military interventions and economic exploitation to political interference—that, taken together, have destabilized national economies to send migrants northward over the course of more than a century. It’s no coincidence that the vast majority of Latinos migrate from the places most impacted by this nation’s dirty deeds, leading Gómez to a bold call for reparations. In this audacious effort to reframe the often-confused and misrepresented discourse over the Latinx generation, Gómez provides essential context for today’s most pressing political and public debates—representation, voice, interpretation, and power—giving all of us a brilliant framework to engage cultural controversies, elections, current events, and more.

David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements. Follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD.

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A stirring, comprehensive look at the state of women in the workforce--why women's progress has stalled, how our economy fosters unproductive competition, and how we can fix the system that holds women back.

In an era of supposed great equality, women are still falling behind in the workplace. Even with more women in the workforce than in decades past, wage gaps continue to increase. It is the most educated women who have fallen the furthest behind. Blue-collar women hold the most insecure and badly paid jobs in our economy. And even as we celebrate high-profile representation--women on the board of Fortune 500 companies and our first female vice president--women have limited recourse when they experience harassment and discrimination.

Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy (Simon & Schuster, 2023) explains that the system that governs our economy--a winner-take-all economy--is the root cause of these myriad problems. The WTA economy self-selects for aggressive, cutthroat business tactics, which creates a feedback loop that sidelines women. The authors, three legal scholars, call this feedback loop "the triple bind" if women don't compete on the same terms as men, they lose; if women do compete on the same terms as men, they're punished more harshly for their sharp elbows or actual misdeeds; and when women see that they can't win on the same terms as men, they take themselves out of the game (if they haven't been pushed out already). With odds like these stacked against them, it's no wonder women feel like, no matter how hard they work, they can't get ahead.

Fair Shake is not a "fix the woman" book; it's a "fix the system" book. It not only diagnoses the problem of what's wrong with the modern economy, but shows how, with awareness and collective action, we can build a truly just economy for all.

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In Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life (Duke University Press, 2024), Margaret Price intervenes in the competitive, productivity-focused realm of academia by sharing the everyday experiences of disabled academics. Drawing on more than three hundred interviews and survey responses, Price demonstrates that individual accommodations--the primary way universities address accessibility--actually impede access rather than enhance it. She argues that the pains and injustices encountered by academia's disabled workers result in their living and working in realities different from nondisabled colleagues: a unique experience of space, time, and being that Price theorizes as "crip spacetime." She explores how disability factors into the exclusionary practices found in universities, with multiply marginalized academics facing the greatest harms. Highlighting the knowledge that disabled academics already possess about how to achieve sustainable forms of access, Price boldly calls for the university to move away from individualized models of accommodation and toward a new system of collective accountability and care.

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Today I talked to Josh Fernandez about his new memoir The Hands That Crafted the Bomb: The Making of a Lifelong Antifascist (PM Press, 2024).

Josh Fernandez is a community college professor in Northern California who finds himself under investigation for “soliciting students for potentially dangerous activities” after starting an antifascist club on campus.

As Fernandez spends the year defending his job, he reflects on a life lived in protest of the status quo, swept up in chaos and rage, from his childhood in Boston dealing with a mentally ill father and a new family to a move to Davis, California, where, in the basement shows of the early ’90s, Nazi boneheads proliferated the music scene, looking for heads to crack. His crew’s first attempts at an antifascist group fall short when a member dies in a knife fight.

A born antiauthoritarian, filled with an untamable rage, Fernandez rails against the system and aggressively chooses the path of most resistance. This leads to long spates of living in his car, strung out on drugs, and robbing the whiteboys coming home from the clubs at night. He eventually realizes that his rage needs an outlet and finds relief for his existential dread in the form of running. And fighting Nazis. Fernandez cobbles together a life for himself as a writing professor, a facilitator of a self-defense collective, a boots-on-the-ground participant in Antifa work, and a proud father of two children he unapologetically raises to question authority.

Josh Fernandez is an antiracist organizer, a father, a runner, a fighter, an English professor, and a writer whose stories have appeared in Spin, the Sacramento Bee, the Hard Times, and several alternative news weeklies. He lives in Sacramento, CA.

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Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman's book What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice (St. Martin's Press, 2024) presents a modern argument, grounded in philosophy and cultural criticism, about childbearing ambivalence and how to overcome it.

Becoming a parent, once the expected outcome of adulthood, is increasingly viewed as a potential threat to the most basic goals and aspirations of modern life. We seek self-fulfillment; we want to liberate women to find meaning and self-worth outside the home; and we wish to protect the planet from the ravages of climate change. Weighing the pros and cons of having children, Millennials and Zoomers are finding it increasingly difficult to judge in its favor.

With lucid argument and passionate prose, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman offer the guidance necessary to move beyond uncertainty. The decision whether or not to have children, they argue, is not just a women’s issue but a basic human one. And at a time when climate change worries threaten the very legitimacy of human reproduction, Berg and Wiseman conclude that neither our personal nor collective failures ought to prevent us from embracing the fundamental goodness of human life—not only in the present but, in choosing to have children, in the future.

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