by Claudia Vázquez
In Los Angeles, we use odd clues to measure success. That’s why, when celebrity magazine InStyle emailed me a little over a year ago for comments regarding a J-Lo scandal,...
In Squaring Off, Zócalo invites authors into the public square to answer five probing questions about the essence of their books. For this round, we pose questions to Robin Wright, author of Rock...
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...
For the past four decades, Juan Felipe Herrera has been a storyteller, teacher, and poet. His writings have been devoted to interpreting—and seeing in new ways—contemporary society in Amer...
Ted Gioia, author of The Birth (and Death) of the Cool, dropped by Zócalo’s office to explain why the hip, ironic pose we’ve come to know as “coolness” is over, and earnestness is in.
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.
