WE EXIST IN THE WHISPER, HOUSTON, TX- In We Exist in the Whisper: Huelga School Verses (ISBN: 979-8-89375-030-0; $17.95), author Lupe Mendez reveals the Mexican community’s school boycott in Houston through interviews and historical documents. This anthropoetry collection, which brings to life the issues of school segregation in the 1970s, depicts one of many school walkouts by Latino students during the civil rights era.
“One day all these classrooms / will no longer hold any of us. / Leave no evidence we were here. / We exist in the whisper….” Lupe Mendez’s innovative new collection captures a unique time in Houston, Texas, “a sliver of a moment for Mexican-American and Mexican communities in the early 1970s,” that explores Houston ISD’s racist plan to integrate schools by sending Mexican-American children-labeled as white— to predominantly African-American schools, thereby satisfying federal desegregation laws.
Incensed that its children would have to travel to schools no better than the ones they could walk to, the Chicano community resisted by instituting a walkout, or huelga, and by creating its own schools in churches, homes, and neighborhood centers. Weaving poetry and history, the book contains “found” poems created from newspaper articles about the strike; oral history interviews with teachers, principals, and students; notes from visits the author made to the sites where classes were held more than 50 years ago; docupoems created from official Huelga School papers; and historical documents such as photographs, charts, fliers, and letters.
In his illuminating notes about the book, Mendez describes the methodology for creating this collection and includes a list of best practices for the “poethnographer.” His research revealed the racism that existed in this era, perpetuated by the majority white population and between brown and black populations forced to compete for every resource. Ultimately, Mendez asserts the Huelga School strike had a critical impact on Houston, both in the development of Mexican-American leaders who got their start in these “freedom schools” and the nascent collaborations between diverse communities.
LUPE MENDEZ, the 2022-2023 Texas Poet Laureate, is the author of W/by I Am Like Tequila (Willow Books, 2019), winner of the 2019 John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. ARTE PÚBLICO PRESS.
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BROWN ON BROWN, Luis Montez despises Harry López, a con man he has represented many times and who still owes him money. But when the petty criminal asks him to consider taking on a distant cousin as a client, the lawyer sets aside his distaste because he needs the work.
Montez meets with Fermín Santos, a wealthy rancher from the San Luis Valley, whose son has been imprisoned again. He is accused of threatening a neighboring Anglo rancher-who also happens to head up the water company. The Santos patriarch has been fighting for water rights for decades. His land sits above a huge aquifer, but rights were lost generations ago, and the water is exported to other parts of Colorado and California.
Before Montez can even deposit the retainer, Santos’ son is killed in a jailhouse riot. Against his better judgment, the attorney agrees to travel to the valley to investigate.
There, he is attacked in a bar’s parking lot, badly beaten and left for dead. Is there more going on than rights to the liquid gold below the earth’s surface? This riveting read-the fifth and final installment in the Luis Montez Mystery series-deals with an issue that has become even more relevant as the planet heats up.
MANUEL RAMOS is the recipient of several literary awards for his books, which include Blues for the Buffalo (Arte Público Press, 2025). ARTE PÚBLICO PRESS.
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A NECKLACE OF EARS, Houston, TX— Alberto Roblest’s new novel, A Necklace of Ears (ISBN: 979-8-89375-009-6; $18.95), is a thriller that mixes magic with reality while moving between tension, eroticism, and mystery. After leaving the artificial charm of Las Vegas behind, Sergio makes a living working at a military base. While repairing houses and maintaining the complex’s gardens, he enters the lives of characters as diverse as married women in need of a sexual encounter— who are marked by the absence of their husbands at the front— and veterans who carry the echoes of war, facing ghosts that never fade away. In a bold narrative game, the reader becomes an accomplice to the clandestine encounters and gossip of the military base. With a provocative tone, Alberto Roblest invites us to witness the human dynamics that unfold in this microcosm: the unbridled flirtation of
the playboy protagonist and the stories that are whispered in the shadows. As relationships blossom and wither, Sergio is presented as an enigma: in sudden dreams— or hazy memories— we find him wandering through the
desert, a collar made of ears hanging from his neck. The haunting question persists: to whom do these ears belong? The novel combines detailed descriptions with reflections on today’s society to graphically explore the reality of many hard-working migrants facing harsh conditions in the United States.
ALBERTO ROBLEST, an award-winning digital artist, writer and educator, is the co-founder of the arts and humanities website, Hola Cultura. ARTE PÚBLICO Press
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CREATIVE COLLECTIVES, By following the artistic and ideological journeys of two groups of Northern California Chicana artists, María Ochoa argues that the women involved in these collectives created complex images whose powerful visual social commentary sprang from the daily experiences of their lives.
Ochoa’s artistic narrative first focuses on Mujeres Muralistas, a pathbreaking San Francisco group of mural painters organized in the early 1970s at the height of the Chicana/o movement. The story then turns its attention to Co-Madres Artistas, a group of artists who came together in the 1990s after spending decades tending their families, becoming successful in their careers, and launching key Chicana/o cultural institutions in the Sacramento Valley. Ochoa tells the stories of the individual members of these collectives to show how they combined art and activism. Through an innovative application of oral-history interviews, a fascinating compilation of individual and collective stories emerges.
Creative Collectives is notable for its skillful weaving of personal recollections, representational analysis of mural and easel painting, and social-movement narration.
Maria Ochoa teaches at San José State University in the Department of Social Science. ARTE PÚBLICO PRESS.
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CRY, When sixteen-year-old Grace Martinez, a goth filmmaker in Austin, Texas, is struck by lightning, her crush Blake Abrams miraculously brings her back to life with CPR. Afterwards, the girl discovers she can communicate with ghosts. Among these spectral visitors is a troubled Muslim teen, who appears to her with a noose around his neck. Did he hang himself?
As she recovers from her brush with death, the girl struggles with her friends’ incredulity about her new ability, her evolving relationship with Blake, her clueless father, and her obnoxious stepmother. Meanwhile, haunted by her mother’s suicide, Grace delves deeper into the mystery of Mohammad’s passing, trying to decipher the ghost’s messages, which are sent via song lyrics from the 80s!
Along the way, Grace discovers a treasure trove of secrets about her own family as well as those of Mohammad and other friends. She also learns that her ancestral spirit guide is none other than La Llorona, the fabled demon woman who killed her own children! Alisa Valdés pens a suspenseful novel for teens narrated by a quick-witted and articulate young woman dealing with issues all young people can relate to, including friendship, family, and the power of belonging.
ALISA VALDÉS is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The Dirty Girls Social Club (St. Martin’s Press, 2003). ARTE PÚBLICO PRESS.
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THE LIGHT OF YOUR BODY, Lingering whispers of the departed echo throughout this volume of short fiction. At a Día de los Muertos celebration attended by those left behind- and loved ones who have moved on —Pati, dead for twenty-nine years, remembers when her daughter came out and is amazed that Emm Elisa still builds an altar for her. Miguelito remembers his Mamá, his father who transitioned to a woman and lost custody of her son to her traditional, tyrannical father.
ire’ne lara silva’s stories are rooted in mythical realism, in liminal spaces that don’t differentiate the voices of the dead from those of the living, that navigate borders and borderless places fearlessly to bring us the stories of gods, mortals, and animals. An extraterrestrial relates an eyewitness account of Malinche and the Conquest. Santísima Muerte opens a taco truck in Austin and finds love. A woman blinded by a hummingbird and distracted by multiple lovers struggles to find her purpose.
The pieces in this tender yet fierce collection consider grief, death, and love, all through the prism of indigenous beliefs. Highlighting the importance of art, spirituality, and relationships in healing wounds from generations of trauma, ire’ne lara silva explores how stories inhabit the body-the mythologized, sexualized, historicized, embattled body —and how different kinds of desire fuel imagination towards transformation and wholeness. The characters in these stories are driven by their gods, echoes of the dead, and their desire to love-and to create.
ire’ne lara silva, the 2023 Texas State Poet Laureate, is the author of five poetry collections: furia, Blood Sugar Canto, Cuicacalli/House of Song,
ARTE PÚBLICO PRESS.
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