Mark Kurlansky, best-selling author of Cod and Salt, spent several years covering the Caribbean for the Chicago Tribune in the 1980s, when he first came to the town to which he devotes his latest ...
Lauren Weber, author of In CHEAP We Trust: The Story of a Misunderstood American Virtue, stopped by Zócalo's offices to chat about how cheap became a bad word, whether there's such a thing as bei...
From the tender age of 20, when he helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Julian Bond has been at the forefront of civil rights activism in America. Now, more than 50 years into h...
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...
Joyce Appleby, author of The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism, stopped by Zócalo’s offices to explain why capitalism is a cultural system rather than a purely economic one. She chats with Zócalo about pinpointing where and when capitalism began, what caused it to flourish, and whether it’s a good thing.
*Video by Laura Villalpando. Photo courtesy moneyc.net.
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.
