Yoga writ large helps illuminate the nature and the limits of evolving countercultures. Yoga in the 1960s and 1970s United States operated as a crucial vehicle for expressing critiques of patriarchy and sexual repression. Expressive forms of sexuality became pervasive in yoga culture, symptoms of the increased discursive and physical openness of the sexual revolutions. The broad-ranging spirituality associated with yoga often challenged rigid religiosity, frequently by pitting Eastern against Western belief systems, often oversimplifying this duality. The American encounter with yoga has been a vehicle for the rise of a capacious spirituality, often defined as “New Age” and more recently subsumed within the “spiritual-but-not-religious” movement, which today over 30 percent of Americans reportedly embrace. Yoga has been a crucial vehicle for expressing how Americans see themselves as spiritual, sexual, and physical beings, and the 1960s and 1970s represent a period in which these identities were articulated, if not always enacted, as distinctly countercultural. At the same time, this famously experimental era paradoxically corresponded to the incorporation of yoga into a popular mainstream fitness culture. The mainstreaming of yoga at times sapped this spiritual practice of a significant measure of radicalism and at others merely expressed that radicalism differently.

This special issue of Pacific Historical Review , “Gender and Intimacy across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” is guest edited by Miroslava Chávez-García and Verónica Castillo-Muñoz. The articles in the collection reflect the primacy of gender and intimacy as tools of analysis in recovering the experiences of women of Spanish-Mexican and Mexican origin in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century borderlands. As the authors demonstrate, using gender and intimacy, along with race, ethnicity, class, and culture, allow for the recovery of women’s personal and family lives and how they intersected with the economic, political, and social transformations of the region. The result is nuanced understandings of how women negotiated and resisted state-based, patriarchal ideologies and practices that sought to limit their lives and those of their families. The special issue includes a preface from Marc S. Rodriguez, this introduction, and articles by Celeste Menchaca, Erika Pérez, and Margie Brown-Coronel.

This article explores the little-known history of Japanese American survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. By focusing on this particular group of survivors with a careful attention to their layered citizenship, national belonging, and gender identity, the article makes important connections between the history of the bomb and the history of immigration across the Pacific. U.S. survivors were both American citizens and immigrants with deep ties to Japan. Their stories expand our understanding of the bomb by taking it out of the context of the clash between nations and placing it in the lives of people who were not within a victors-or-victims dichotomy. Using oral histories with U.S. survivors, their families, and their supporters, the article reveals experiences, memories, and activism that have connected U.S. survivors to both Japan and the United States in person-centered, relatable ways. Moreover, the article brings to light under-explored aspects of Asian America, namely, significant intersections of former internees’ and bomb survivors’ experiences and the role of older women’s agency in the making of Asian American identity. In so doing, the article destabilizes the rigidly nation-bound understanding of the bomb and its human costs that has prevailed in the Pacific region.

This article examines a debate that emerged in El Paso, Texas at the turn of the twentieth century surrounding the transmission of pulmonary tuberculosis from predominantly Anglo American migrants to the city’s ethnic Mexican population. Reports of Anglo-to-Mexican infections came from cities and towns throughout the U.S. Southwest, but by 1915 El Paso had emerged as the epicenter of the debate. Using popular and professional sources, the article tracks a shift in dominant perceptions of tubercular contagion from an association with white bodies to Mexican ones. An early narrative casts the Mexican female domestic servant as a victim of the infectious indigent white consumptive male health seeker. In 1915, as the Mexican Revolution raged and tensions between whites and ethnic Mexicans in the city sharpened, federal public health authorities published a report dismissing health seekers as a source of contagion to ethnic Mexicans. This article highlights the power of notions of race, gender, and class in shaping perceptions of and responses to epidemics, often with tragic results.

This article analyzes Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart and Ernesto Galarza’s Barrio Boy in tandem with Angeles Monrayo’s Tomorrow’s Memories . While both America Is in the Heart and Barrio Boy are considered foundational texts in ethnic studies, Tomorrow’s Memories (which offers Monrayo’s personal reflections about life as a Filipina in Hawai‘i and California during the 1920s) is less well known. Each of these books highlights a young narrator who is migrating under U.S. empire. Their narratives underscore the protagonists’ constant movement through the U.S. West in the search for labor and education, their growing independence from the core family unit, as well as their evolving political consciousness. A comparison of the books enables us to consider how gender shapes migration, place, and space, especially because Monrayo’s experience illuminates the male privilege of Bulosan’s and Galarza’s protagonists.

Prior to the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, Chinese officials prohibited the presence of foreign women in China. While many Chinese regulations concerning foreign merchants and missionaries were not enforced, this rule was. In 1830 and again in the 1840s, in the aftermath of the first Opium War, clusters of British and American families traveled up the Pearl River to the factories that housed visiting merchants in Canton (Guangzhou). On both occasions, trouble ensued. But the conflicts may not have been all they seemed. This article suggests that foreign women did have the potential to be a problem in China, less because of inherent cultural differences than because both Chinese officials and Western merchants used Western women to embody a boundary between peoples.

Chicana history has come a long way since its inception in the 1960s and 1970s. While initially a neglected area of study limited to issues of labor and class, today scholars in history, literature, anthropology, and sociology, among others, study topics of gender, culture, and sexuality, as well as youth culture, reproductive rights, migration, and immigration. In the process, these scholars contribute to the collective project of Mexican and Mexican American women’s history in the United States, making it diverse in its analytical themes, methodologies, and sources. Indeed, Chicana history is not confined by disciplinary boundaries. Rather, its cross-disciplinary nature gives it life. This article charts that interdisciplinarity and demonstrates its significance in expanding and recasting Chicano history more broadly.

This article explores the usefulness of Chicano/a history to teaching and representing the nineteenth-century history of northern Mexico, U.S. imperial expansion, and the constructed nature of borders. Typically considered a twentieth-century discipline, Chicano/a historians have a long history of engaging the subject in the nineteenth century. This focus dovetails with recent critical works on race and gender in the U.S. West as well as transnational approaches to history. This article makes the case that the perspective on the nineteenth century provided by Chicano/a historians forces readers to reframe their understanding of the sweep of U.S. history.

The sudden availability of funds through President Johnson's War on Poverty disrupted established social movements and urban politics; the very definition of minority changed as a result. In San Francisco, agitation for federal monies challenged existing understandings of who was or was not "disadvantaged" and hence eligible for assistance. Initially, the San Francisco Equal Opportunity Council defined disadvantage in terms of the ethnic minority status of certain neighborhoods, but organizers in the Tenderloin and South of Market areas fought for equal eligibility for their own constituencies, including white people disadvantaged by both poverty and their sexual orientation and gender identities. As a consequence, the geographic definition of minority groups was mapped anew. Among residents of these San Francisco neighborhoods, affinity groups who previously had not yet been considered minorities coalesced into a true minority constituency that for the first time was recognized as such by an entity of the state.