Why read Agent of Change?

Book cover of Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist

Book description

Liz Carpenter Award for Research in the History of Women, Texas State Historical Association

The essayist Adela Sloss-Vento (1901-1998) was a powerhouse of activism in South Texas's Lower Rio Grande Valley throughout the Mexican American civil rights movement beginning in 1920 and the subsequent Chicano movement of the 1960s and…

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American history

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1 author picked Agent of Change as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Melita M. Garza

Author

During a period when Mexican American women were seen as having only three possible roles in life, either as hypersexualized figures, maids, or beauty queens, this stirring biography uncovers how one Latina, Adela Sloss-Vento, broke the mold.

She had only a high school education—and one belatedly received at that, but Sloss-Vento became a public intellectual and a vital, though hidden figure in the emerging Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Reading this stimulating biography, I found it easy to see Sloss-Vento (1901-1998), sitting at her kitchen table writing spirited columns and letters in defense of Mexican Americans to English and Spanish…

From Melita's list on The best books about how media makes and unmakes Mexican Americans and immigrants.