Why read Barrios to Burbs?

Book cover of Barrios to Burbs: The Making of the Mexican American Middle Class

Book description

Too frequently, the media and politicians cast Mexican immigrants as a threat to American society. Given America's increasing ethnic diversity and the large size of the Mexican-origin population, an investigation of how Mexican immigrants and their descendants achieve upward mobility and enter the middle class is long overdue. Barrios to…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Barrios to Burbs as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Tace Hedrick

Author

Vallejo painstakingly lays out the way some Mexican Americans, usually the poorest of the minorities, struggle to make it into a specifically American middle class. She details how these Latinas/Latinos carefully shape themselves, and in turn are shaped by corporate and state interests, into an ethnicity that is for the most part deracinated and stripped of their more obvious “ethnic” attributes (as a small example, most drop the accent marks in their names). For my book, a look at the middle-class Latinx is a look at the desires and strivings of Latina writers and characters of Chica Lit.

From Tace's list on The best books to understand the writing and marketing of chica lit.