• 20th- and 21st-Century American
• Chicana/o and/or Latina/o
• Cultural Studies

The Daring Flight of My Pen: Cultural Politics and Gaspar Perez de Villagra's Historia de la Nueva Mexico. 2010

Nuevomexicano Cultural Legacy: Forms, Agencies and Discourse, ed. (with Francisco Lomeli and Vicotor Sorrell)  2002

My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography, 1993

Recoverying the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, ed. (with Ramon Gutierrez), 1993

Power, Race, and Gender in Academe: Strangers in the Tower? (contributing editor with Shirley Geok-Lin Lim and Maria Herrera-Sobek), 1999.

The Short Stories of Fray Angelico Chavez, editor and Introduction, 1987. 

I've just completed a study of a 17th century Spanish colonial epic titled "La Historia de la Nueva Mexico, 1610" (The Daring Flight of My Pen: Cultural Politics and La Historia de la Nueva Mexico, University of New Mexico Press, 2010) that provides a reading of this 12,000 line poem within a context that considers the problematics of contemporary cultural representations of the first encounter between Spain and indigenous people in what is now the state of New Mexico. In brief, I argue that the poet, Gaspar Perez de Villagra, critiqued empire at the same time he that he seemingly boasted empire. The book provides a sustained reading of the epic poem within the historical context of its own time, but really means to measure its placement within a troubled cultural politics of the present in New Mexico. I now turn to a study early 20th century Anglo-American painters and writers who introduced a modernist aesthetic in Santa Fe and Taos that continued to objectify Mexican and Native people at the same time that these artists organized historical and arts societies to preserve traditional arts in the region. What I am trying to understand is the contradiction between these advocates and practicioners of modernity and, once again, a regional cultural hegemony that literally made it impossible for Native and Mexican American artists and writers to engage modernism on their own terms.

Fall, 2013

Spring, 2013

Summer, 2013

Fall, 2012

Spring, 2012

Fall, 2011