Poet Roberto Tejada uses lyrical poems to explore and give a voice to the troubles of global citizenship, US–Mexico relations, Latino identity, and the political emotion of queer sexualities. His collection provides a holistic ground-level view of pivotal world events from the mid 1990s to a more recent present.
Tejada’s innovative work dramatically widens the scope of Latina/o literature, showing us exactly what it can accomplish. The poems move very much like a three-act play, in which the first act is one of origins; the second, a staging of desire; and the third, a symbiosis. These acts magnify one another when unified. Each poem within the collection positions itself within the avant-garde, in which the artful use of language aims to dazzle, surprise, and enliven. The poems dance by, preserving a tension between hurry and delay, momentum and stasis, and every line is like a newly launched firecracker, sending out startling patterns of spark and flare.
Tejada’s exuberant language stretches the limits of selfhood and the way it is represented in poetry. He illuminates the tangled webs that are woven when identities are linked to sexuality, nationality, privilege, and temporality. The concerns and obsessions voiced here turn the construction of desire on its head, forcing us to ask ourselves what is worthy of our attentions.

Full Foreground (Camino del Sol)

Literature & Fiction

Tejada, Roberto

Poetry

University of Arizona Press

National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment

In National Camera, Roberto Tejada offers a comprehensive study of Mexican photography from the early twentieth century to today, demonstrating how images have shaped identities in Mexico, the United States, and in the borderlands where the two nations and cultures intersect—a place Tejada calls the shared image environment. The “problem” of photography in Mexico, Tejada shows, reveals cross-cultural episodes that are rife with contradictions, especially in the complex terms of cultural and sexual difference. Analyzing such topics as territory, sexuality, and social and ethnic relations in image making, Tejada delves into the work of key figures including Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Marius de Zayas, and Julien Levy, as well as the Agustín Víctor Casasola Archive, the Boystown photographs, and contemporary Mexican and Latina photo-based artists. From the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920 to the U.S.–Mexico borderlands of today, Tejada traces the connective thread that photography has provided between Mexican and U.S. American intellectual and cultural production and, in doing so, defines both nations.

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Univ. of Minnesota Press

In National Camera, Roberto Tejada offers a comprehensive study of Mexican photography from the early twentieth century to today, demonstrating how images have shaped identities in Mexico, the United States, and in the borderlands where the two nations and cultures intersect—a place Tejada calls the shared image environment. The “problem” of photography in Mexico, Tejada shows, reveals cross-cultural episodes that are rife with contradictions, especially in the complex terms of cultural and sexual difference. Analyzing such topics as territory, sexuality, and social and ethnic relations in image making, Tejada delves into the work of key figures including Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Marius de Zayas, and Julien Levy, as well as the Agustín Víctor Casasola Archive, the Boystown photographs, and contemporary Mexican and Latina photo-based artists. From the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920 to the U.S.–Mexico borderlands of today, Tejada traces the connective thread that photography has provided between Mexican and U.S. American intellectual and cultural production and, in doing so, defines both nations.

Imagine a walking tour of stanzas and prose poems that give lyric voice to sight, public speech, and spectacle. In Exhibition Park, Roberto Tejada delivers a command performance in mixed genres that compel an array of literary styles. His poetry undertakes a wide range of subjects motivated by artworks from Latin America and the United States covering the colonial period to the present day. In serial poems, short sketches, guidebook parodies, painterly triptychs, translations, and other word-based dioramas, Tejada coins wonder with historical styles―baroque, classic, and experimental. As likened to a world's fair, the resulting voices intone global stories, the dream life of art, and first-person atmospheres both premodern and postindustrial. "Tejada's work is with dismantling borders and upsetting classifications... The result is a layered poetry that finds its form in dense stanzas composed of lines that frequently veer toward a kind of fractured prose…"―Alan Gilbert in Another Future: Poetry and Modern Art in a Postmodern Twilight "You walk through his world as a voyeur, a traveler of mirrors, witnessing your own reflection in the masses of flesh, simultaneously aroused and disturbed at the same time. Tejada's work is an invitation, a window into another world, unabashedly erotic, and succinct."―Christine Lark Fox, Poetry Project Newsletter, about Mirrors for Gold

Exposition Park (The Driftless Series & Wesleyan Film Series)

Wesleyan University Press

Review\nA stunningly original, politically complex, and masterful book of poems. Why the Assembly Disbanded, in its deep syntactical meditations and ever surprising use of powerful, yet subtle language and evocative forms, cuts out of the fear and pathos of the day as it arrests and reminds us of the need for invention and wonder at this precarious moment.---Ronaldo V. Wilson, University of California, Santa Cruz\nWhy the Assembly Disbanded by Roberto Tejada (Feb. 11, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-8232-9925-6). Reflecting on the state of affairs between the U.S. and Latin America, Tejada writes on white supremacy, immigration, intersectional identity, and community.---Publishers Weekly, Spring Announcements\nPushing the boundaries of Latinx literature and what constitutes a borderlands poetics.\nThroughout Roberto Tejada’s body of work, the renowned poet and celebrated critic has explored themes of Latinx culture, politics, history, language, and ecologies. In his latest collection, Why the Assembly Disbanded, he presents a unique contribution to Latinx letters that reflects on the relations between the United States and Latin America, especially their real and symbolic borderlands.\nImmersive, postmodern, and philosophical, Why the Assembly Disbanded provides an associative, critical Latinx aesthetic connecting the Mexico–United States borderlands to Latin America’s neo-baroque heritage. Migrants, settlers, tourists, and exiles moving across various hemispheric landscapes are featured in these exuberant, capacious, and self-reflexive poems. Tejada relates the ravages of white supremacy in our culture that, together with immigrant precarity, turn home into a place of foreboding and impending eviction, even as a dream-weather makes room at last for scenes of possibility and attainment in the account of human history.\nThe sweeping futuristic vistas open on to narratives of colonial extraction, human displacement, abuses of capitalism, mass media spectacle, the antagonism of language and technical images in the sensorium of urban and digital life-worlds, and the relations of desire encouraged by pictures and words in the economy of attention. Los Angeles and Mexico City figure prominently in poems committed to voicing modes of formation and community in an intersectional reckoning of personhoods prompted in work by artists Betye Saar, Amiri Baraka, Connie Samaras, and Rubén Ortiz Torres.\nWith language given to pageantry, tonal precision, and a hopeful lyric radiance that can accommodate ecstasy and justice, Roberto Tejada’s carnivalesque, borderland imagery pushes the boundaries of Latinx literature. World-building by way of reverie, speculation, and retro-futurist tableaux, and with vivid, sometimes violent particularity, his poems enact hallucinatory realities of the hemisphere: an imagination that triangulates history, lyricism, and art as social practice.

Why the Assembly Disbanded

Fordham University Press

A conceptual and multimedia artist known for her writing, photography, painting, installation, and public art, Celia Alvarez Muñoz has been invited to exhibit and to create site-specific works for more than fifty major U.S. museums and was included in the 1991 Whitney Biennial. In her work Muñoz draws on family and communal memories to explore her own experiences growing up Catholic and Mexican American on the Texas-Mexico border, as well as larger issues concerning the spaces between languages and cultures and the histories that connect place to community.
With more than one hundred color photographs, this book in the landmark A Ver series surveys Muñoz's career from her earliest bookmaking project, the Enlightenment series, and such installation pieces as Stories Your Mother Never Told You to her more recent works of public art and digital photography. Throughout his in-depth essay, Roberto Tejada illuminates Muñoz's feminist perspective, political engagement, and provocative use of ideas and artifacts from two cultures.

Celia Alvarez Muñoz (A Ver)

Biographies & Memoirs

Chicano Studies Research Center

Pop América, 1965–1975 accompanies the first traveling exhibition to stage Pop art as a hemispheric phenomenon. The richly illustrated catalogue reveals the skill with which Latin American and Latino/a artists adapted familiar languages of mass media, fashion, and advertising to create experimental art in a startling range of mediums. In a new era in hemispheric relations, artists enacted powerful debates over what “America” was and what Pop art could do, offering a radical new view onto the postwar “American way of life” and Pop’s presumed political neutrality. Nine essays grounded in original archival research narrate transnational accounts of how these artists remade América. The authors connect the decisive design of the Chicano/a movement in the United States with the vivid images of the Cuban Revolution and new contributions to the Mexican printmaking tradition. They follow iconic Pop images and tactics as they traveled between New York and São Paulo, Bogotá and Mexico City, San Francisco and La Habana. Pop art emerges in a fully American profile, picturing youthful celebration and painful violence, urban development and rural practices, and pronouncements of freedom made equally by democratic and repressive regimes. The bilingual catalogue reconstitutes a network of artists from the decade, including ASCO, Judith Baca, Eduardo Costa, Antonio Dias, Marcos Dimas, Felipe Ehrenberg, Rupert García, Nicolás García Uriburu, Rubens Gerchman, Edgardo Giménez, Alberto Gironella, José Gómez Fresquet (Frémez), Beatriz González, Gronk, Juan José Gurrola, Emilio Hernández Saavedra, Robert Indiana, Nelson Leirner, Anna Maria Maiolino, Marisol, Raúl Martínez, Cildo Meireles, Marta Minujín, Hélio Oiticica, Dalila Puzzovio, Hugo Rivera Scott, Jorge de la Vega, and Lance Wyman, among others. Pop América, 1965–1975 will be on display at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas, from October 4, 2018 to January 13, 2019; at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University from February 21 to July 21, 2019; and at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art from September 21 to December 8, 2019.

Pop América, 1965–1975

Maroja, Camila

Josten, Jennifer

de la Rosa, Natalia

Delgado Moya, Sergio

Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University

Whether in the play of shadows cast on a rock by drying leaves, or in the strength of a woman's crossed forearms covered in marriage tattoos, Joan Almond's photographs maintain an exceptional sobriety of form and treatment. Shot in Morocco, Algeria, India, and Jerusalem, her photographic images focus on family traditions still strong in North Africa and the Middle East but long lost in her native America. Traveling to and working in villages and homes where few photographers have tread, Almond manages to show human beings with remarkable dignity and resilience, despite their sometimes impoverished personal circumstances. This first monograph of Almond's work is printed in tritone to replicate the platinum printing process so integral to the viewing of her photographs.

Joan Almond: The Past In The Present

Almond, Joan

Individual Artists

St Anns Pr

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

Books by Tejada, Roberto

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

Full Foreground (Camino del Sol)

National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment

National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment

Exposition Park (The Driftless Series & Wesleyan Film Series)

Why the Assembly Disbanded

Celia Alvarez Muñoz (A Ver)

Celia Alvarez Muñoz (A Ver)

Pop América, 1965–1975

Joan Almond: The Past In The Present

Joan Almond: The Past In The Present