Texas, for years, was a one-party state controlled by white democrats. In 1962, a young eighteen-year-old heard the first rumblings of Chicano community organization in the barrios of Cristal. The rumor in the town was that five Mexican Americans were going to run for all five seats on the city council. But first, poor citizens had to find a way to pay the $1.75 poll tax. Money had to be raised—through bake sales of tamales, cake walks, and dances. So began the political activism of José Angel Gutiérrez.
    Gutiérrez's autobiography, The Making of a Chicano Militant, is the first insider's view of the important political and social events within the Mexican American communities in South Texas during the 1960s and 1970s. A controversial and dynamic political figure during the height of the Chicano movement, Gutiérrez offers an absorbing personal account of his life at the forefront of the Mexican-American civil rights movement—first as a Chicano and then as a militant.
    Gutiérrez traces the racial, ethnic, economic, and social prejudices facing Chicanos with powerful scenes from his own life: his first summer job as a tortilla maker at the age of eleven, his racially motivated kidnapping as a teenager, and his coming of age in the face of discrimination as a radical organizer in college and graduate school. When Gutiérrez finally returned to Cristal, he helped form the Mexican American Youth Organization and, subsequently the Raza Unida Party to confront issues of ethnic intolerance in his community. His story is soon to be a classic in the developing literature of Mexican American leaders.

Journalist and activist Thorne Dreyer has interviewed hundreds of people for Rag Radio since it went on the air in 2009. Making Waves features transcripts from twenty-one of those interviews, with everyone from TV anchor Dan Rather to Senator Bernie Sanders to monumental sculptor Bob “Daddy-O” Wade. The Rag Radio archive is now part of the collections at the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas.

As a student at the University of Texas in the 1960s, Dreyer joined the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and became heavily involved in civil rights and the movement to end the war in Vietnam. He also helped create and edit two underground newspapers—The Rag in Austin and Space City! in Houston—and later ran a public relations business with a diverse list of clients, including progressive political campaigns. Dreyer credits the influence of his artist mother and writer father and their lively salons plus his journalism career, his political and social activism, and his stage acting experience for his interviewing success—“Put it all in a blender and Rag Radio was bound to whip up.”

Making Waves holds a wealth of information, but Dreyer makes it read like conversations among friends. “I always tell my guests that I want the discussion to be informal,” Dreyer says. “We’re going to record some important history here, but we also want to have fun.”

From reviews of previous editions:

“This is the standard reference about Texas mammals.” —Wildlife Activist

“A must for anyone seriously interested in the wildlife of Texas.” —Texas Outdoor Writers Association News

“[This book] easily fills the role of both a field guide and a desk reference, and is written in a style that appeals to the professional biologist and amateur naturalist alike. . . . [It] should prove useful to anyone with an interest in the mammal fauna of Texas or the southern Great Plains.” —Prairie Naturalist

The Mammals of Texas has been the standard reference since the first edition was coauthored by William B. Davis and Walter P. Taylor in 1947. Revised several times over the succeeding decades, it remains the most authoritative source of information on the mammalian wildlife of Texas, with physical descriptions and life histories for 202 species, abundant photographs and drawings, and distribution maps.

In this new edition, David J. Schmidly is joined by one of the most active researchers on Texas mammals, Robert D. Bradley, to provide a thorough update of the taxonomy, distribution, and natural history of all species of wild mammals that inhabit Texas today. Using the most recent advances in molecular biology and in wildlife ecology and management, the authors include the most current information about the scientific nomenclature, taxonomy, and identification of species, while also covering significant advances in natural history and conservation.

2020 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) Book Award Winner
Honorable Mention, Ramirez Family Award for Most Significant Scholarly Book, Texas Institute of Letters, 2019

Managed Migrations examines the concurrent development of a border agricultural industry and changing methods of border enforcement in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas during the past century.

Needed at one moment, scorned at others, Mexican agricultural workers have moved back and forth across the US–Mexico border for the past century. In South Texas, Anglo growers’ dreams of creating a modern agricultural empire depended on continuous access to Mexican workers. While this access was officially regulated by immigration laws and policy promulgated in Washington, DC, in practice the migration of Mexican labor involved daily, on-the-ground negotiations among growers, workers, and the US Border Patrol. In a very real sense, these groups set the parameters of border enforcement policy.

Managed Migrations examines the relationship between immigration laws and policy and the agricultural labor relations of growers and workers in South Texas and El Paso during the 1940s and 1950s. Cristina Salinas argues that immigration law was mainly enacted not in embassies or the halls of Congress but on the ground, as a result of daily decisions by the Border Patrol that growers and workers negotiated and contested. She describes how the INS devised techniques to facilitate high-volume yearly deportations and shows how the agency used these enforcement practices to manage the seasonal agricultural labor migration across the border. Her pioneering research reveals the great extent to which immigration policy was made at the local level, as well as the agency of Mexican farmworkers who managed to maintain their mobility and kinship networks despite the constraints of grower paternalism and enforcement actions by the Border Patrol.

A small town in the vast desert of West Texas, Marfa attracts visitors from around the world to its art foundations and galleries, film and music festivals, and design and architecture symposiums. While newcomers sometimes see it as “another Santa Fe,” long-time residents often take a bemused, even disapproving attitude toward the changes that Marfa has undergone since artist Donald Judd came to town in the 1970s and began creating spaces for his own and other artists’ work. They remember when ranching and the military formed the basis of the town’s economy, even as they acknowledge that tourist dollars are now essential to Marfa’s sustainability

Marfa tells an engaging story of how this isolated place became a beacon in the art world, like the famous Marfa Lights that draw curious spectators into the West Texas night. As Kathleen Shafer delves into the town’s early history, the impact of Donald Judd, the expansion of arts programming, and the increase in tourism, she unlocks the complex interplay between the particularities of the place, the forces of commerce and growth, the textures of local culture and tradition, and the transformative role of artists and creative work. Bookending her story between two iconic artworks—the whimsical Prada Marfa and the crass Playboy Marfa—Shafer illuminates the shifting cultural landscape of Marfa, showing why this place has become a mecca for so many and how the influx of newcomers has transformed its character.

Winner, San Antonio Conservation Society Citation, 2011

Texas's King Ranch has become legendary for a long list of innovations, the most enduring of which is the development of the first official cattle breed in the Americas, the Santa Gertrudis. Among those who played a crucial role in the breed's success were Librado and Alberto "Beto" Maldonado, master showmen of the King Ranch. A true "bull whisperer," Librado Maldonado developed a method for gentling and training cattle that allowed him and his son Beto to show the Santa Gertrudis to their best advantage at venues ranging from the famous King Ranch auctions to a Chicago television studio to the Dallas–Fort Worth airport. They even boarded a plane with the cattle en route to the International Fair in Casablanca, Morocco, where they introduced the Santa Gertrudis to the African continent.

In The Master Showmen of King Ranch, Beto Maldonado recalls an eventful life of training and showing King Ranch Santa Gertrudis. He engagingly describes the process of teaching two-thousand-pound bulls to behave "like gentlemen" in the show ring, as well as the significant logistical challenges of transporting them to various high-profile venues around the world. His reminiscences, which span more than seventy years of King Ranch history, combine with quotes from other Maldonado family members, co-workers, and ranch owners to shed light on many aspects of ranch life, including day-to-day work routines, family relations, women's roles, annual celebrations, and the enduring ties between King Ranch owners and the vaquero families who worked on the ranch through several generations.

Texas has been home to so many colorful characters, out-of-staters might wonder if any normal people live here. And it's true that the "Texian" desire to act out sometimes overcomes even the most sober citizens—which makes it a real challenge for the genuine eccentrics to distinguish themselves from the rest of us. Fortunately, though, many maverick Texans have risen to the test, and in this book, Gene Fowler introduces us to a gallery of Texas eccentrics from the worlds of oil, ranching, real estate, politics, rodeo, metaphysics, showbiz, art, and folklore.

Mavericks rounds up dozens of Fowler's favorite Texas characters, folks like the Trinity River prophet Commodore Basil Muse Hatfield; the colorful poet-politician Cyclone Davis Jr.; Big Bend tourist attraction Bobcat Carter; and the dynamic chief executive of the East Texas Oil Field Governor Willie. Fowler persuasively argues that many of these characters should be viewed as folk performance artists who created "happenings" long before the modern art world took up that practice in the 1960s. Other featured mavericks run the demographic gamut from inspirational connoisseurs of the region's native quirkiness to creative con artists and carnival oddities. But, artist or poser, all of the eccentrics in Mavericks completely embody the style and spirit that makes Texas so interesting, entertaining, and culturally unique.

Seeking a closer connection with nature than the manicured lawns of suburbia, naturalist Fred Gehlbach and his family built a house on the edge of a wooded ravine in Central Texas in the mid-1960s. On daily walks over the hills, creek hollows, and fields of the ravine, Gehlbach has observed the cycles of weather and seasons, the annual migrations of birds, and the life cycles of animals and plants that also live in the ravine.

In this book, Gehlbach draws on thirty-five years of journal entries to present a composite, day-by-day almanac of the life cycles of this semiwild natural island in the midst of urban Texas. Recording such events as the hatching of Eastern screech owl chicks, the emergence of June bugs, and the first freeze of November, he reminds us of nature's daily, monthly, and annual cycles, from which humans are becoming ever more detached in our unnatural urban environments. The long span of the almanac also allows Gehlbach to track how local and even global developments have affected the ravine, from scars left by sewer construction to an increase in frost-free days probably linked to global warming.

This long-term record of natural cycles provides one of only two such baseline data sets for North America. At the same time, the book is an eloquent account of one keen observer's daily interactions with his wild and human neighbors and of the lessons in connectedness and the "play of life" that they teach.

Among the protest movements of the 1960s, the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) emerged as one of the principal Chicano organizations seeking social change. By the time MAYO evolved into the Raza Unida Party (RUP) in 1972, its influence had spread far beyond its Crystal City, Texas, origins. Its members precipitated some thirty-nine school walkouts, demonstrated against the Vietnam War, and confronted church and governmental bodies on numerous occasions.

Armando Navarro here offers the first comprehensive assessment of MAYO's history, politics, leadership, ideology, strategies and tactics, and activist program. Interviews with many MAYO and RUP organizers and members, as well as first-hand knowledge drawn from his own participation in meetings, presentations, and rallies, enrich the text.

This wealth of material yields the first reliable history of this extremely vocal and visible catalyst of the Chicano Movement. The book will add significantly to our understanding of Sixties protest movements and the social and political conditions that gave them birth.

Winner, Award of Merit for Non-Fiction, The Philosophical Society of Texas, 2015

Before Abstract Expressionism of New York City was canonized as American postwar modernism, the United States was filled with localized manifestations of modern art. One such place where considerable modernist activity occurred was Texas, where artists absorbed and interpreted the latest, most radical formal lessons from Mexico, the East Coast, and Europe, while still responding to the state’s dramatic history and geography. This barely known chapter in the story of American art is the focus of Midcentury Modern Art in Texas.

Presenting new research and artwork that has never before been published, Katie Robinson Edwards examines the contributions of many modernist painters and sculptors in Texas, with an emphasis on the era’s most abstract and compelling artists. Edwards looks first at the Dallas Nine and the 1936 Texas Centennial, which offered local artists a chance to take stock of who they were and where they stood within the national artistic setting. She then traces the modernist impulse through various manifestations, including the foundations of early Texas modernism in Houston; early practitioners of abstraction and non-objectivity; the Fort Worth Circle; artists at the University of Texas at Austin; Houston artists in the 1950s; sculpture in and around an influential Fort Worth studio; and, to see how some Texas artists fared on a national scale, the Museum of Modern Art’s “Americans” exhibitions.

The first full-length treatment of abstract art in Texas during this vital and canon-defining period, Midcentury Modern Art in Texas gives these artists their due place in American art, while also valuing the quality of Texan-ness that subtly undergirds much of their production.

2022 Art in Service to the Environment Award, Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter
Honorable Mention, 2022 Nonfiction Prize, Writers' League of Texas

Writers explore a city’s relationship with chronic catastrophic flooding.

Shortly after Hurricane Harvey dumped a record 61 inches of rain on Houston in 2017, celebrated writer and Bayou City resident Lacy M. Johnson began collecting flood stories. Although these stories attested to the infinite variety of experience in America’s most diverse city, they also pointed to a consistent question: What does catastrophic flooding reveal about this city, and what does it obscure?

More City than Water brings together essays, conversations, and personal narratives from climate scientists, marine ecologists, housing activists, urban planners, artists, poets, and historians as they reflect on the human geography of a region increasingly defined by flooding. Both a literary and a cartographic anthology, More City than Water features striking maps of Houston’s floodplains, waterways, drainage systems, reservoirs, and inundated neighborhoods. Designed by University of Houston seniors from the Graphic Design program, each map, imaginative and precise, shifts our understanding of the flooding, the public’s relationship to it, and the fraught reality of rebuilding. Evocative and unique, this is an atlas that uncovers the changing nature of living where the waters rise.

The weather patterns and topography of America's Gulf Coast create favorable growing conditions for thousands of species of mushrooms, but the complete region has generally gone uncharted when it comes to mycology. Mushrooms of the Gulf Coast States at last delivers an in-depth, high-quality, user-friendly field guide, featuring more than 1,000 common and lesser-known species—some of which are being illustrated in color for the first time.

Using easily identifiable characteristics and a color key, the authors enable anyone, whether amateur mushroom hunter or professional mycologist, to discern and learn about the numerous species of mushrooms encountered in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. Wild-food enthusiasts will appreciate the information on edibility or toxicity that accompanies each description, and they will also find the book’s detailed instructions for collecting, cleaning, testing, preserving, and cooking wild mushrooms to be of great interest. Providing encyclopedic knowledge in a handy format that fits in a backpack, Mushrooms of the Gulf Coast States is a must-have for any mushroom lover.

Almost a century and a half went into the making of My Eighty Years in Texas. It began as a diary, kept by fifteen-year-old William Physick Zuber after he joined Sam Houston’s Texas army in 1836, hoping he could emulate the heroism of American Revolutionary patriots. Although his hopes were never realized, Zuber recorded the privations, victories, and defeats of armies on the move during the Texas Revolution, the Indian campaigns, and, as he styled it, the Confederate War.

In 1910, at the age of ninety, Zuber began the enormous task of transcribing his diaries and his memories for publication. After his death in 1913, the handwritten manuscript, 1, was placed in the Texas State Archives, where it was used as a reference source by students and scholars of Texas history. Over a half century after Zuber’s death, Janis Boyle Mayfield finally brought his publication plans to fruition.

Zuber details his early zest for learning and his laborious methods of self-education. He tells of the trials of organizing and teaching schools in the sparsely populated plains. He recalls the day-by-day happenings of a private soldier in the Texas army of 1836, the Texas Militia, and the Confederate army—including the mishaps of army life and the encounters with enemies from San Jacinto to Cape Girardeau. After the Civil War, his interest turns to the politics of Reconstruction, the veterans’ pension, and the founding of the Texas Veterans Association.

This is the story of and by an outspoken Texian, complete with his attitudes, principles, and moralizings, and the nineteenth-century style and flavor of his writing.

Included as an appendix is “An Escape from the Alamo,” the account of Moses Rose for which Zuber, who was a prolific writer, was best known. A historiography of the Rose story, a bibliography of Zuber’s published and unpublished writings, annotation, and an introduction are provided by Llerena Friend.

In Myself and Strangers, John Graves, the highly regarded author of Goodbye to a River and other classic works, recalls the decade-long apprenticeship in which he found his voice as a writer. He recounts his wanderings from Texas to Mexico, New York, and Spain, where, like Hemingway, he hoped to find the material with which to write books that mattered. With characteristic honesty, Graves admits the false starts and dead ends that dogged much of his writing, along with the exhilaration he felt when the words finally flowed. He frankly describes both the pleasures and the restlessness of expatriate life in Europe after World War II—as well as his surprising discovery, when family obligations eventually called him home to Texas, that the years away had prepared him to embrace his native land as the fit subject matter for his writing. For anyone seeking the springs that fed John Graves' best-loved books, this memoir of apprenticeship will be genuinely rewarding.