7 Academic Books on Display at La Feria 2025
On September 27, 2025, The Latinx Project will host La Feria: Print Media Fair, a spotlight on zines, media, and other works by Latinx creators. As part of the event, TLP will also showcase recent academic books on a range of topics, including activism, border politics, identity formation, and art.
Ahead of the event, we interviewed a few of the featured authors to learn more about what inspired their texts.
La Feria: Print Media Fair will take place on September 27, 2025, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The event will close with a reception to celebrate the launch of Intervenxions Vol. 4. RSVP here. For a list of all of the booksTLP will showcase at La Feria, check out this spreadsheet.
Latinx Comics Studies: Critical and Creative Crossings, edited by Edited by Fernanda Díaz-Basteris and Maite Urcaregui
Courtesy of Rutgers University Press
Publish date: April 2025
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Describe your book.
Urcaregui: Our book examines how we can teach and study comics to better understand the intersectional issues that affect Latinx people, including: migration across borders; national identities and histories; multilingual experiences; citizenship and belonging; and racial, gendered and sexual identities. We understand Latinx comics as not simply celebrating or representing Latinx experiences at the level of content but also creatively theorizing the intersections and tensions within Latinidad through their formal innovations.
Díaz-Basteris: Our book is a community practice. More than a dozen contributors worked together for almost four years building this edited collection. Our focus is on elevating BIPOC narratives, and paying attention to what was missing in our teaching materials or graduate school training. Latinx Comics Studies serves different purposes; we try to open a conversation where we propose and search for a definition of Latinx Comics, exploring boundaries and inclusions of space, time, and ethnicity.
Our book is also a tool for teachers, professors, and independent scholars to teach and learn about Latinidades, borders, and colonization. Finally, our is a new path to view comics as vehicles for social change and inclusion in curricula, not just as escapism or reading for pleasure.
Why is your book relevant today?
Díaz-Basteris: This is one of the first academic publications in which most contributions are by self-identified Latinxs and queer creators and scholars. This book reimagines histories, remembers the past, contests the present, and proposes decolonial methodologies for Caribbean and Latinx fields in the humanities.
Urcaregui: Whether you study comics or not, I think our book offers an exciting, novel approach to exploring many important themes and topics within Latinx studies. It's particularly relevant for thinking about teaching Latinx studies in and through comics, which I find students really connect with, as it includes some essays that offer practical pedagogical strategies as well as original and republished short comics that you can easily incorporate into any classroom.
Courtesy of Johns Hopkins University Press.
Publish date: July 2025
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Describe your book.
My book is about how we can apply Latin American liberation praxis to the work of university leadership today. I am a first-gen Latina college student and even as a professor and leader, I encounter obstacles that were not addressed by existing higher education leadership books. I wrote this book for people who know a different way is possible but need guidance for how to enact it. I focus on personal and collective liberation as a frame that can help us re-create the higher education workplace so that everyone can thrive.
Why is your book relevant today?
For this book, I draw from the lessons of the president and provost of the Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas in El Salvador in the 1980s. During this time, Central America and El Salvador, in particular, were the sites of a proxy Cold War, and the ruling elite took advantage of these dynamics to engage in oppressive and repressive tactics against the poor in the country. The leaders of the UCA stood against oppression by siding and collaborating with poor communities. Their witness is relevant for today's higher education leaders who are facing similar attempts to silence and eradicate opposition. It is a courageous witness for us.
Courtesy of Duke University Press.
Publish date: January 2025
Publisher: Duke University Press
Describe your book.
My book, Doom Patterns: Latinx Speculations and the Aesthetics of Violence, positions Latinx speculative fiction as a crucial space for theorizing latinidad across ethnic and national lines, emphasizing the formative weight of historical trauma. Rather than relying on reparative readings, I show how depictions of violence in Latinx literature paradoxically also generate aesthetic pleasure and illustrate the cyclical nature and haunting presence of historical violence and trauma.
To account for this paradox, I introduce the concept of doom patterns—narrative strategies such as repetition, nonlinear storytelling, fragmented characters, and unresolved endings. These patterns continually return readers to moments of historical violence, highlighting how this violence is so excessive and constant that only the tropes of speculative fiction can attempt to lay them bare. Engaging works by established Latinx writers like Junot Díaz and Cristina García alongside multiethnic authors such as Colson Whitehead and Sesshu Foster, I unsettle conventional boundaries around both Latinx literature and speculative fiction. In dismantling fixed ideas of genre, race, ethnicity, and nationhood, Doom Patterns opens the way for a more expansive understanding of the speculative, of history, and of the central role violence plays in literary production.
Why is your book relevant today?
Doom Patterns is particularly relevant in the contemporary for a few reasons. We are in a cultural moment where the vestiges of various forms of historical violence (coloniality, slavery, anti-Blackness, immigration and anti-immigrant violence, militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, environmental catastrophe) are being revisited with urgency while also elided by sectors of power such as the Trump administration, local governments, and individual universities. My book grapples with various forms of violence and contemporary debates surrounding memory, repair, and survival.
Most importantly, I show that historical forms of violence, which we assume are elements of the past, have haunting remainders in the present. Doom Patterns also challenges definitional boundaries by calling for a more expansive conception of speculative fiction and Latinx literature. On the one hand, my book shows how violence in literature is so pervasive that it needs the tropes of speculative fiction to illustrate its excessiveness, and on the other hand, it challenges the narrow definition of Latinidad by pointing a more expansive, transnational understanding of the field. Lastly, in highlighting the paradox between pleasure and pain, my book captures important questions contemporary audiences continue to grapple with: why are we drawn to stories of violence and destruction, and how do we contend with aesthetic pleasure depictions of this violence generate?
Courtesy of Rutgers University Press
Latinas/os in New Jersey: Histories, Communities, and Cultures, edited by Aldo A. Lauria Santiago and Ulla D. Berg
Publish date: January 2025
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Describe your book.
Lauria Santiago: The book is the result of two decades of departmental practice, including curriculum development and engagement with our students' diverse backgrounds. It also reflects years of learning, research, and innovation in the study of migration, transnationalism, identity, labor, social movements, and urban spaces. Our commitment to quality work is evident in the depth of research and the broad range of themes covered. Rooted in a history of community engagement and Puerto Rican studies at Rutgers since 1970, this book brings together a very diverse group of authors. The contributors reflect the range of New Jersey’s Latino communities, making this anthology nearly unique in comparison to similar works on other states and cities.
Why is your book relevant today?
Lauria Santiago: Latinos in New Jersey have remained relatively invisible. While New York City has been the subject of hundreds of books and articles on Puerto Ricans and other Latina/os, I was shocked to find only a handful of studies about Puerto Ricans in New Jersey—despite a population of half a million people by now. This lack of research is due in part to the failure of educational institutions to support it. There has been neglect, hostility, and other forms of resistance to these efforts. It is shameful that, for decades, there was little support—even within Rutgers.
Sanctuary People: Faith-Based Organizing in Latina/o Communities by Gina M. Pérez
Courtesy of NYU Press
Publish date: June 2024
Publisher: NYU Press
Describe your book.
My book explores ways faith communities work with other religious and secular activists to address their precarious conditions that structure the lives of Latinas/os in Ohio: Immigration enforcement; displacement as a result of (un)natural disasters; heightened xenophobia and discourses that position Latinas/os as a threat to the nation.
Based on four years of ethnographic research and interviews at the local, state, and national levels from 2016–2020, Sanctuary People offers a compelling exploration of the ways in which faith communities are creating new activist strategies and enacting new forms of solidarity, working within the sometimes conflicting ideological space between religion and activism to answer the call of justice and live their faith.
Why is your book relevant today?
Although my book focuses on a period that began nearly 10 years ago, it is clear that the findings in my book, including the material, political, ideological, and cultural contexts that first gave rise to this project in 2016—all of that endures and continues to inform the various responses communities, organizations and people will bring in in the work they do.
Tears for Tears: Aesthetics in Grief Minor by Sandra Ruiz
Publish date: June 2025
Publisher: NYU Press
Describe your book.
Tears for Tears: Aesthetics in Grief Minor chronicles how minoritarian artists working across performance and video art, sculpture, photography, music, and theatre grapple with personal and collective grief. To chart impending loss due to state-sanctioned violence, colonial racial capitalism, natural disaster, and cultural circumstance, I underscore the affective entanglements across death that reshape the topography of grief into portals of possibility. Drawing from original interviews, familial artifacts, images, and archival notes of artists—much of which have never been written about before—the project centers the minoritarian artist negotiating loss through aesthetic grief-acts.
Why is your book relevant today?
Tears for Tears sheds light on the relationship between everyday life and staged events as critical lenses to rethink colonial and imperial structures mediating grief and grieving. Offering invaluable insights into the production of these performances by way of a tear for a tear, I examine how these artists move across social, political corporeal, and psychic constructions of sorrow in their art—often traveling from parental loss into the domain of communal death—and see grieving, however painful, as an act of transformation and communal building.
The Rise of Necro/Narco Citizenship: Belonging and Dying in the Southwest North American Region by Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez
Courtesy of The University of Arizona Press
Publish date: March 2025
Publisher: The University of Arizona Press
Describe your book.
My previous works especially in Reflections of a Transborder Anthropologist highlighted resilience—how transborder communities adapt through cultural practices, language and networks of reciprocity despite displacement and exploitation. But in Necro/Narco Citizenship, the focus shifts from resilience to survival under death-dealing conditions—where communities are forced to negotiate lives amid militarization, drug economies, community level addictions, and state violence.
Why is your book relevant today?
Today is a conflictive period from celebrating survival strategies to exposing the deadly cost of survival itself as structural violence of the transborder region of Southwest North America has produced new identities; NECRO (sacrificial lives) AND NARCO (lives bound up with narco-economies) so that the transborder frame emphasizes constraint and mortality.