Works by
Rubén Martínez
(Journalist, Writer)
[1962 - ]

Non-fiction

• Flesh Life: Sex in Mexico City (2006) by Rubén Martínez with Joseph Rodriguez, Photographer

• The New Americans: Seven Families Journey to Another Country (2004) by Rubén Martínez with Joseph Rodriguez, Photographer
  Spanning four continents and several years in the lives of seven immigrant families, The New Americans is at once the most globe-trotting and intimate introduction to the new American immigration. Emmy award-winning journalist Rubén Martínez's "powerful and perceptive chronicle" (Booklist) lyrically recounts the dramatic voyages and day-to-day experiences of a small group of families who were featured in the PBS documentary of the same name. They come from Mexico, Nigeria, Palestine, India, and the Dominican Republic, and wind up in Chicago, Montana, Silicon Valley, and the California badlands. Their stories paint a portrait of the new, multicultural America.
  
  Martínez weaves his own family's moving immigrant history into the book, and essays on the films of Indian American director Mira Nair, the contemporary corridos of Mexican border musicians Los Tigres del Norte, and other immigrant artists explore the ways the new immigrant culture is transforming the United States.

• Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail (2001)
  The U.S.-Mexican border is one of the most permeable boundaries in the world, breached daily by Mexicans in search of work. Thousands die crossing the line and those who reach the other side are branded illegals, undocumented and unprotected. Crossing Over puts a human face on the phenomenon, following the exodus of the Chvez clan, an extended Mexican family who lost three sons in a tragic border accident. Martnez follows the migrants progress from their small southern Mexican town of Chern to California, Wisconsin, and Missouri where far from joining the melting pot, Martnez argues, the seven million migrants in the U.S. are creating a new culture that will alter both Mexico and the United States as the two countries come increasingly to resemble each other.

• East Side Stories: Gang Life in East LA (1998) by Rubén Martínez with Joseph Rodriguez, Photographer

• The Other Side: Notes From the New LA, Mexico City, and Beyond (1993)
  Here is a convincing, often exhilarating vision of a new Latino culture that bubbles from San Salvador to L.A. and that embraces cumbia and hip-hop, anarchists and Catholic priests. The Other Side describes a future that--for some of us--has already arrived. Photographs throughout.

• Minority Youth Dropouts: Personal, Social and Institutional Reasons for Leaving School (1986)

Other

• Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico Since 1940 (2001), Anne Rubenstein, Gilbert M. Joseph, and Eric Zolov, eds.
  During the twentieth century the Mexican government invested in the creation and promotion of a national culture more aggressively than any other state in the western hemisphere. Fragments of a Golden Age provides a comprehensive cultural history of the vibrant Mexico that emerged after 1940. Agreeing that the politics of culture and its production, dissemination, and reception constitute one of the keys to understanding this period of Mexican history, the volume’s contributors—historians, popular writers, anthropologists, artists, and cultural critics—weigh in on a wealth of topics from music, tourism, television, and sports to theatre, unions, art, and magazines.
  
  Each essay in its own way addresses the fragmentation of a cultural consensus that prevailed during the “golden age” of post–revolutionary prosperity, a time when the state was still successfully bolstering its power with narratives of modernization and shared community. Combining detailed case studies—both urban and rural—with larger discussions of political, economic, and cultural phenomena, the contributors take on such topics as the golden age of Mexican cinema, the death of Pedro Infante as a political spectacle, the 1951 “caravan of hunger,” professional wrestling, rock music, and soap operas.
  
  Fragments of a Golden Age will fill a particular gap for students of modern Mexico, Latin American studies, cultural studies, political economy, and twentieth century history, as well as to others concerned with rethinking the cultural dimensions of nationalism, imperialism, and modernization.
  
  Contributors include Alex Saragoza, Alison Greene, Anne Rubenstein, Arthur Schmidt, Elena Poniatowska, Emile McAnany, Eric Zolov, Gilbert M. Joseph, Heather Levi, Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Jis & Trino, John Mraz, Mary Kay Vaughan, Omar Hernández, Quetzil E. Castañeda, Rubén Martínez, Seth Fein, Steven J. Bachelor.