Anything but mexican : Chicanos in contemporary Los Angeles

The first of the late Marianne Fritz's works to be translated into English. This dark gem of a novel swerves from uneasy pantomime comedy to sheer domestic horror. Fritz has a clammy handle on all that makes humans miserable: roll up for the horrors of jealousy, war, confinement, mental illness, regret and unhappy motherhood. The Weight of Things is the first book, and the first translated book by Austrian writer Marianne Fritz (1948-2007). After winning acclaim with this novel-awarded the Robert Walser Prize in 1978-she embarked on a brilliant and ambitious literary project called "The Fortress," which earned her cult status, comparisons to James Joyce, and admirers including Elfriede Jelinek and W. G. Sebald. Yet in this, her first novel, we discover not an eccentric fluke of literary nature but rather a brilliant and masterful satirist, philosophically minded yet raging with anger and wit, who under the guise of a domestic horror story manages to expose the hypocrisy and deep abiding cruelties running parallel, over time, through the society and the individual minds of a century. "Mexicans and other Latinos comprise fifty percent of the population of Los Angeles and are the largest ethnic group in California. In this completely revised and updated edition of a classic political and social history, one of the foremost scholars of the Latino experience situates the US's largest immigrant community in a time of anti-immigrant fervor. Originally published in 1996, this edition analyses the rise and rule of LA's first-ever Mexican American mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, as well as the harsh pressures facing Chicanos in an increasingly unequal and gentrifying city"-- Provided by publisher Originally published in the tumult of 1996, in an era of new nativism and panic about the Latinization of America, Anything But Mexican solidified Rodolfo Acu�a's place as "the W.E.B. Du Bois of Chicano Studies." A stirring, insightful chronicle of Los Angeles's working class chicanos, this new edition brings their story and struggles up to present day. "By the year 2000, Mexicans and other Latinos will comprise fifty percent of the population of Los Angeles. In this new book, the author of the widely praised Occupied America describes the harsh realities facing Chicanos in LA today"