Memory & History

On March 1, Texas A&M University Press will publish historian, ethnographer and photographer Marie Theresa Hernández’s “Cemeteries of Ambivalent Desire: Unearthing Deep South Narratives from a Texas Graveyard,” an intricate history of the San Isidro Cemetery, which Hernández discovered was the site of a slave owning plantation before it was a burial site for Mexican/Mexican-American workers at the Imperial Sugar Company in Sugar Land, TX (which is located 20 miles southwest of Houston, Texas). According to the book description, Hernández used interviews, newspaper stories and other sources to construct a history that brings together Southern history and Mexican-American history. No doubt that Hernández’s monograph merits much attention in the field of memory/memory studies, as well as Chicana/o studies.