The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Theories of Representation and Difference)

"The Decolonial Imaginary is a smart, challenging book that disrupts a great deal of what we think we know... it will certainly be read seriously in Chicano/a studies." ―Women's Review of Books
Emma Pérez discusses the historical methodology which has created Chicano history and argues that the historical narrative has often omitted gender. She poses a theory which rejects the colonizer’s methodological assumptions and examines new tools for uncovering the hidden voices of Chicanas who have been relegated to silence.

History

Pérez, Emma

Americas

Indiana University Press

"The Decolonial Imaginary is a smart, challenging book that disrupts a great deal of what we think we know... it will certainly be read seriously in Chicano/a studies." —Women's Review of BooksEmma Pérez discusses the historical methodology which has created Chicano history and argues that the historical narrative has often omitted gender. She poses a theory which rejects the colonizer’s methodological assumptions and examines new tools for uncovering the hidden voices of Chicanas who have been relegated to silence.

Runner-up, Best Historical Fiction in English, Latino Book Awards Competition, 2010
This literary adventure takes place in nineteenth-century Texas and follows the story of a Tejana lesbian cowgirl after the fall of the Alamo. Micaela Campos, the central character, witnesses the violence against Mexicans, African Americans, and indigenous peoples after the infamous battles of the Alamo and of San Jacinto, both in 1836. Resisting an easy opposition between good versus evil and brown versus white characters, the novel also features Micaela's Mexican-Anglo cousin who assists and hinders her progress. Micaela's travels give us a new portrayal of the American West, populated by people of mixed races who are vexed by the collision of cultures and politics. Ultimately, Micaela's journey and her romance with a black/American Indian woman teach her that there are no easy solutions to the injustices that birthed the Texas Republic.
This novel is an intervention in queer history and fiction with its love story between two women of color in mid-nineteenth-century Texas. Pérez also shows how a colonial past still haunts our nation's imagination. The battles of the Alamo and San Jacinto offered freedom and liberty to Texans, but what is often erased from the story is that common people who were Mexican, Indian, and Black did not necessarily benefit from the influx of so many Anglo immigrants to Texas. The social themes and identity issues that Pérez explores—political climate, debates over immigration, and historical revision of the American West—are current today.

Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory: A Novel (Chicana Matters Series)

Literature & Fiction

United States

University of Texas Press

Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory: A Novel (Chicana Matters)

"You will never know how it feels to have brown skin and a Mexican name. You will never know what it is like to watch your mother struggle with white words." In this collection of prose pieces, author and scholar Emma Pérez explores the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality. A Chicanx queer lesbian "who honors my mother and her plight within patriarchal institutions" that limit women's choices and opportunities, Pérez writes about issues-including sexual politics and power relations between Anglo and Hispanic men-that have impacted her Tejano family for generations. A historian by training, her work aims to decolonize the Southwest by uncovering voices from the past that validate multiple experiences.Essays reveal the influence of Gloria Anzaldúa's scholarship; recount the controversy surrounding artist Alma López's digital print, "Our Lady," in which the Virgin of Guadalupe appears in a provocative bikini; and evaluate interviews with 25 LGBTQ people in the El Paso/Ciudad Juárez area to expose life on the border as a queer of color. This collection also includes short fiction and an epistolary love poem to the first feminist of the Americas, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, or in this case, Sor Juanx. Bringing together the work of a noted Chicanx writer and academic, this volume reinforces the body of work by LGBTQ people of color dealing with racism and sexism, conquest and colonization, power and privilege, all with a particular emphasis on the Southwest borderlands.

Queering the Border: Essays

Arte Publico Pr

Electra Campos has kept her life cleanly divided. By week she tends to her academic duties and her students. Weekends she frequents the Down Under, a Chelsea sex club for women. When her spiteful ex Isabel Cortez issues yet another petty threat, she brushes it offuntil she finds Capital College’s dean in a pool of his own blood. At first, NYPD Detective Carolina Quinn seems concerned only in Electra’s details of finding the body. Then the interest grows intensely professionaland personal. Why would the police think Electra had a motive for murder? She had no personal interaction with Dean Johnson. But his wife was no stranger to the Down Under, and Detective Quinn is extremely curious about every detail of Electra’s other life. A Bella After Dark erotic, romantic mystery!

Electra's Complex (Bella After Dark)

Bella Books

Fiction. LGBT Studies. Latino/Latina Studies. GULF DREAMS is the story of a Chicana who comes of age in a racist, rural Texas town. Through memory, the protagonist reexamines her unresolved obsessive love for a young woman, her best friend since childhood. "A powerful, gripping, and disturbing story of passion and betrayal, survival and vengeance, compulsion and resilience, told in arresting images and fragmented, dreamlike narrative"—Teresa de Lauretis, professor of History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz. "This amalgam of life history, creative nonfiction, psychoanalytic treatise and fictionalized memoirs is a welcome addition to queer literature"—Gloria Anzaldua, author of BORDERLANDS.

Gulf Dreams

Aunt Lute Books

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Books by Pérez, Emma

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Pérez, Emma. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Theories of Representation and Difference)

The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Theories of Representation and Difference)

Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory: A Novel (Chicana Matters Series)

Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory: A Novel (Chicana Matters)

Queering the Border: Essays

Electra's Complex (Bella After Dark)

Gulf Dreams