Now, in A Journey Around Our America, Mendoza offers his own account of the visceral, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual dimensions of traveling the country in search of a deeper, broader understanding of what it means to be Latino in the United States in the twenty-first century. With a blend of first- and second-person narratives, blog entries, poetry, and excerpts from conversations he had along the way, Mendoza presents his own aspirations for and critique of social relations, political ruminations, personal experiences, and emotional vulnerability alongside the stories of people from all walks of life, including students, activists, manual laborers, and intellectuals. His conversations and his experiences as a Latino on the road reveal the multilayered complexity of Latino life today as no academic study or newspaper report ever could.
Louis G. Mendoza is Associate Vice Provost in the Office for Equity and Diversity at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, where he is also Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Chicano Studies. He is coeditor of Crossing Into America: The New Literature of Immigration and author of Historia: The Literary Making of Chicana and Chicano History.