Adopted Land, Beloved Land

Adopted Land, Beloved Land
Author: Christopher G. Peña
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2010-05-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1452000603

Both informative and engaging, Adopted Land, Beloved Land: The Peña-Lara Story depicts the author’s family history, while also telling the story of how a Mexican family successfully assimilated into the United States, adopting the American way of life, though never loosing sight of their Hispanic heritage. Having no choice but to flee what was then a war-ravaged Mexico during the Mexican Revolution, author Christopher Peña’s paternal grandparents and four of his uncles crossed the border at Laredo in 1915. Once in the States, four additional children were born, including his father - totaling seven boys and a girl. Six of the boys went on to serve during the Second World War, including one who was wounded at Iwo Jima. Adopted Land, Beloved Land: The Peña-Lara Story chronicles Peña’s father’s roots in Mexico starting in the 1860s, the Mexican Revolution, life in Monterrey, history of and family life in Laredo, the military service of the six boys during the Second World War, and the post-war years of the family, ending in 2009.

Abandoning Their Beloved Land

Abandoning Their Beloved Land
Author: Alberto García
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2023-01-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520390245

Abandoning Their Beloved Land offers an essential new history of the Bracero Program, a bilateral initiative that allowed Mexican men to work in the United States as seasonal contract farmworkers from 1942 to 1964. Using national and local archives in Mexico, historian Alberto García uncovers previously unexamined political factors that shaped the direction of the program, including how officials administered the bracero selection process and what motivated campesinos from central states to migrate. Notably, García's book reveals how and why the Mexican government's delegation of Bracero Program–related responsibilities, the powerful influence of conservative Catholic opposition groups in central Mexico, and the failures of the revolution's agrarian reform all profoundly influenced the program's administration and individuals' decisions to migrate as braceros.

My Promised Land

My Promised Land
Author: Ari Shavit
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 482
Release: 2013-11-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812984641

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR “A deeply reported, deeply personal history of Zionism and Israel that does something few books even attempt: It balances the strength and weakness, the idealism and the brutality, the hope and the horror, that has always been at Zionism’s heart.”—Ezra Klein, The New York Times Winner of the Natan Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Ari Shavit’s riveting work, now updated with new material, draws on historical documents, interviews, and private diaries and letters, as well as his own family’s story, to create a narrative larger than the sum of its parts: both personal and of profound historical dimension. As he examines the complexities and contradictions of the Israeli condition, Shavit asks difficult but important questions: Why did Israel come to be? How did it come to be? Can it survive? Culminating with an analysis of the issues and threats that Israel is facing, My Promised Land uses the defining events of the past to shed new light on the present. Shavit’s analysis of Israeli history provides a landmark portrait of a small, vibrant country living on the edge, whose identity and presence play a crucial role in today’s global political landscape.

My Other Life

My Other Life
Author: Hildy Gard
Publisher: Page Publishing Inc
Total Pages: 714
Release: 2022-11-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1642148822

My younger siblings often wanted to know about the house they were born to and the homeland's traditions and rituals. I, the oldest of five, related to them the experiences we encountered among the Gottscheers, who worked, toiled, and survived in this little known native land surrounded by Slovenia and bordered by Croatia.

The Peña-Lara Story

The Peña-Lara Story
Author: Christopher G. Peña
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2014-02-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1491863412

After discovering additional information pertaining to his paternal side of the family, author Christopher G. Pea revised his original book to provide the reader with a richly detailed account of each member of the Pea-Lara family, along with their respective spouses. Both highly informative and engaging, The Pea-Lara Story: Revisited retraces the familys roots that began in New Spain (Mexico), including the military exploits of the familys patriarch, Lt. Col. Jos Emeterio Pozas, who served under Spain and Mexico. In addition, the story includes an account of the familys life in Monterrey, Nuevo Len, Mexico, the Pea-Laras forced evacuation of the city during the height of the 1910-1920 Mexican Revolution, the familys assimilation into the United States, including the military service of six of the Pea-Lara sons during the Second World War and, finally, the familys postwar years. It is a family chronicle that includes almost two centuries of history telling. The Pena-Lara Story: Revisited provides the reader with a wealth of new and detailed information about the familys origins, some of which was recently discovered during an exhaustive search through Mexican Civil and Church archival records, as well as many United States civil and religious documents. This information now enlightens and contradicts long-held beliefs about the origins and lives of the Pea-Lara lineage.