Mexicano and Latino politics and the quest for self-determination : what needs to be done /

Navarro (Univ. of California, Riverside) describes this 577-page tome as a "consequence of forty-six years of activism and forty-some years of scholarship." The raison d'etre for the book is to answer the question of what needs to be done in the struggle for self-determination in Aztlan, the land that Mexico lost to the US as a result of the 1846-48 Mexican-American War. The intended audiences are Mexicanos and other Latinos who reside today in the region of Aztlan, or what is now known as the American Southwest, home to descendants of Mexicanos who are now an occupied and internally colonized people. Two change models are proposed: Aztlan's Politics of a Nation-Within-a-Nation (APNWN) and Aztlan's Politics of Separatism (APS). These models can be applied to any global secessionist struggle (i.e., Palestinians and Kurds). Navarro provides a rich historical analysis spanning the Aztecs to contemporary US foreign policy. The book is recommended for historians and political scientists; the extensive bibliography and endnotes indicate that the book is well researched. Navarro hopes that this accessible, engaging, and challenging book serves as a catalyst for dialogue and action. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduate, graduate, and research collections. --Irasema Coronado, University of Texas at El Paso