“In New Orleans, you gotta start with music,” said Ned Sublette, before singing a tune by James Andrews: “One, Two, What You Gonna Do?”, on the response, or lack thereof, to Hurricane Katr...
Before he was a legendary jazz bassist and composer, Charles Mingus was known for some different qualities.
William “Buddy” Collette, who at the age of 12 recruited then 11-year-old Mingus ...
Singer Ceci Bastida sits down with veteran journalist Oscar Garza as part of our Drinks With ... series. From her days as a teenager in Mexican ska-punk band Tijuana No!, Bastida has been a star on th...
Drug violence in Mexico is far from being the country’s central story, but at times it feels like it is consuming all our bandwidth. Any nation has a number of narrative threads, and Mexicans ha...
Oscar Garza and Ned Sublette joined Zócalo for our conference, La Nueva Orleans? Race and Immigration in Post-Katrina America. Before the event began, the two sat down to chat about Sublette’s latest, The Year Before the Flood: A Story of New Orleans. Sublette explains how the book came to be, his relationship with New Orleans, and why New Orleans culture is still going strong.
To read more about Sublette and Garza’s discussions at the conference, click here.
The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America
by Mae Ngai
Hyphenated cultures seem to be a natural part of California’s landscape today, but it wasn’t always so. The Lucky Ones by Mae Ngai offers a fresh look at California history by reconstructing the lives of immigrant and second generation pioneers who lived between cultures when it was not such a common phenomenon. Ngai’s narrative brings Chinese Americans into a richer tradition of historical storytelling by humanizing an ambivalent, middle-class immigrant family, situating their lives within the more well-known histories of Chinese laborers and those who suffered from the 1882 Exclusion Act.
