76 Books Like They Called Them Greasers

Chavez modernizes the Mexican miscreant myth, explaining how vivid TV news scenes of immigrants inspire visceral reactions.

He argues that the emotions inspired by media coverage of vigilante groups rounding up immigrants are a potent part of “the spectacle” that plays out on the news. Chavez also gives the xenophobic storytelling of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century an updated name: The Latino Threat Narrative.

The book powerfully picks apart ideas posited by the late Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington, among others, that suggest that Mexican Americans won’t assimilate, making them perennial “others” who threaten American democracy. Another thing I like about this book is that it includes a chapter on Latinas and how media coverage of Latina fertility and sexuality plays into racist stereotyping.

The compelling, digestible, and often dangerous metaphor is the star of Brown Tide Rising.

Santa Ana clearly explains that it is the mediated metaphor that embeds itself in our brains, cementing ideas and tropes. Looking at Latino metaphors in historical issues of the Los Angeles Times, he offers a new application for linguist George Lakoff’s cognitive model of metaphor, which studies how metaphors map to each other.

For instance, Santa Ana identifies “flowing waters” as one such metaphoric tie-in that joins metaphors such as tides, surges, waves. I like this book because it is a great reminder about how the images conjured by words—in this case metaphors—make us “see” the world in certain ways. 

Lee & Low, the book’s publisher, describes Shame the Stars as a YA Romeo & Juliet story. This piece of historical fiction is so much more.

It draws on true stories of how Texas Rangers lynched and pillaged Mexican Americans in South Texas. These are stories that my parents heard growing up in San Antonio, Texas, and that were often orally passed on in families, though not so often in the history books of that era.

This novel is on my list because it flips the camera angle on images of Mexican Americans in media, with characters taking to the printing press to assert their rights and tell their stories. One such journalist/protagonist is the father of the character Juliet/Dulceña, who illuminates the misdeeds of the Rangers in his news accounts.

Without giving too much away, I’ll merely hint that the book draws inspiration from the long overlooked crusading Mexican… show more.

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 Texas newspaper editors.

Though Mexican American women didn’t begin entering into mainstream journalism jobs in any sizeable numbers until the 1980s, Sloss-Vento’s story shows how at least one Latina beat back the barriers and made her own way into print.

V. (Violet) Castro’s debut novel, released in 2021, put her on the horror map, and for good reason.

I loved how she blended Mexican legend and culture to tell a supernatural horror story that is rich in detail, dialogue, and dark humor. The setting is a Texas wedding held on a renovated farm.

But very bad things start to happen, all seemingly tied to a legend of a 1950s murder of a Mexican farmworker. But—so people say—the woman’s death piqued the interest of the Aztec Goddess of Death, who pledges herself to the murdered woman.

Castro’s expert storytelling upends classic tropes to make this book an exhilarating and frightening literary ride that is smart and timely.

Griffin’s account of his journey through the Deep South as a white man disguised to look Black, originally published in 1960, has stood the test of time because it reveals Griffin’s keen insight into a society riddled with racism. Griffin’s humanity shines through in his descriptions of his encounters with people of all races. He encounters ignorance, cruelty, and threats, but also kindness. His perspective from both sides of the color line reveals the desperate need for the change that would soon come during the Civil Rights movement.

Valentine handles some very heavy topics beautifully.

Many of the characters are connected by only one thread: they are women trying to survive in West Texas in the early 1970s. It centers around a brutal incident and the quest to find justice for a Mexican teenage girl who was violently assaulted.

Throughout the story we get such an intimate look at these women’s lives. I felt like I knew them. I felt like I was sitting right next to them in their kitchen or on their front porch.

These women were all hardened by the trials life had thrown at them, and were battling the urge to protect themselves with the urge to protect one another. I loved this book because it was just so honest. 

The first in Locke’s Highway 59 series, featuring African American Texas ranger Darren Matthews involving two bodies one black, one white that wash up in a small East Texas town.

The story combines procedural, western, and Southern gothic to give an entertaining, human, yet unflinching look at race both past and present. This book enlightened me on how much African Americans contribute to what we call Texas culture.

This coverage of the crime wave of the Overton gang who burgled, pimped, and committed various crimes up and down I-35 is nonfiction, but hard to believe at times.

The story paints vivid time in Austin with a supporting cast of colorful lawyers, madams, and even UT Tower sniper Charles Whitman. Jesse Sublett, author, musician, painter, journalist, and photographer is basically as close as Austin has to royalty and portrays the events in a rock n’ roll style.

I’d also recommend Jesse’s fiction series staring bass player and skip tracer Martin Fender.

A young woman, Callie finds herself needing to stay at Finn’s ranch as her nephew needs protective custody having witnessed a violent murder. Rather than going into Witness Protection she finds solace and help with the man she served in Afghanistan with (he a sniper; her, his spotter). As they fall in love now that they are not restricted by their career in the Army, they expand the family, aiding the woman who sold Finn the ranch, making a home for Callie’s nephew and three siblings he befriends at school who are trapped in the foster care system. Family is at the heart of this book as Callie and Finn fall deeply in love, overcoming their fears and anxieties when it comes to trusting and committing to someone in a deep, fulfilling relationship.