Un lugar sagrado, a sacred place where two or more are gathered in the name of community, can be found almost anywhere and yet it is a charro arena behind a rock quarry, on the pilgrimage trail to Chimayó, a curandero 's shrine in South Texas, or at a binational Mass along the border. Sagrado is neither a search for identity nor a quest for a homeland but an affirmation of an ever-evolving cultural landscape. Embedded at the heart of this remarkable book, in which prose, photographs, and poems complement each other, is a photopoetic journey across the Chicano Southwest.

This book of stories and recipes introduces two eccentric families that would never have eaten together, let alone exchanged recipes, but for the improbable marriage of the author’s a nuevomexicano from Taos and a painter who came from Texas to New Mexico to study art. Recalling the good and the terrible cooks in her family, Anita Rodríguez also shares the complications of navigating a safe path among contradictory cultural perspectives. She takes us from the mountain villages of New Mexico in the 1940s to sipping mint juleps on the porch of a mansion in the South, and also on a prolonged pilgrimage to Mexico and back again to New Mexico. Accompanied by Rodríguez’s vibrant paintings—including scenes of people eating on fiesta nights and plastering an adobe church—Coyota in the Kitchen shows how food reflects the complicated family histories that shape our lives.

During the Chicano Movement in the 1960s and 1970s, the idea of Aztlán, homeland of the ancient Aztecs, served as a unifying force in an emerging cultural renaissance. Does the term remain useful? This expanded new edition of the classic 1989 collection of essays about Aztlán weighs its value. To encompass new developments in the discourse the editors have added six new essays.