We Are Aztlan with CHOICE Award

PULLMAN, Wash.— A Washington State University (WSU) Press title, We Are Aztlán!: Chicanx Histories in the Northern Borderlands, has been selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. It also received a top community college recommendation from the organization. Focusing on the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest, multidisciplinary essays in We Are Aztlán! examine the Chicanx movement and experience beyond the Southwest to illuminate how Mexican Americans have challenged racialization, marginalization, and isolation in the northern borderlands.

Every year in the January issue, in print and online, Choice publishes their picks for Outstanding Academic Titles—a prestigious list that reflects the best scholarly titles they reviewed over the past year and carries extraordinary recognition from the academic library community. Only about ten percent of the approximately 6,000 works Choice reviews each year are included.

In awarding Outstanding Academic Titles, the editors examine overall excellence in presentation and scholarship; importance relative to other literature in the field; distinction as a first treatment of a given subject in book or electronic form; originality or uniqueness of treatment; value to undergraduate students; and importance in building undergraduate library collections.

The review itself reveals several of the ways We Are Aztlán! met Choice’s criteria. Critic J. G. Moreno from Northern Arizona University wrote, “This scholarly collection challenges the usual southwest focus on the Mexican and Latino experiences and diverse populations in the US…Each contributor’s academic findings are based on historical archival and oral interviews, which makes this book original and organic. This is the first book collection that links the various Mexican and Latino social and cultural experiences within the US Pacific northwest and midwest regions. García’s leadership in bringing together several scholars will result in major contributions for future research and scholarship on this critical subject matter.”

Choice is part of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) division of the American Library Association. Together, Choice and ACRL provide libraries with professional development tools, including objective, high-quality evaluations of nonfiction academic writing. Their flagship publication, Choice Reviews (www.choicereviews.org), contains over 200,000 reviews of academic monographs. They publish around 5,000 new reviews annually and serve more than 2,400 institutions worldwide.

WSU Press is a nonprofit academic publisher associated with Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, and concentrates on telling unique, focused stories of the Northwest.