De colores means all of us : latina views for a multi-colored century /

Journalist, teacher, writer, scholar, activist, and public intellectual Martinez has assembled and updated some of her best previously published political essays on Chicanas/Chicanos and other US Latinos, linking their issues, struggles, and perspectives with other peoples of color. Within broad themes of black-white race relations and paradigm, immigrant rights, economic and environmental justice, multiculturalism, gender and sexuality, youth and leadership, these 30 short, impassionately argued essays--many polemical in the best sense of the word, each standing on its own--seek to inform, persuade, and confirm the already initiated, the still skeptical, the uninformed, and anyone else with half an open mind that capitalism creates inequalities. By illuminating and documenting specific instances of repression by the powerful followed by resistance on the part of the oppressed, then infusing each piece with her own "transformative, feminist worldview," Martinez hopes to move her readers toward imagining a more just and equal social order in a "rainbow century" founded on the ideal of "unity-in-diversity." All levels. E. Hu-DeHart; University of Colorado at Boulder