Joe Mondragon, a feisty hustler with a talent for trouble, slammed his battered pickup to a stop, tugged on his gumboots, and marched into the arid patch of ground. Carefully (and also illegally), he tapped into the main irrigation channel. And so began-though few knew it at the time-the Milagro beanfield war. But like everything else in the dirt-poor town of Milagro, it would be a patchwork war, fought more by tactical retreats than by battlefield victories. Gradually, the small farmers and sheepmen begin to rally to Joe's beanfield as the symbol of their lost rights and their lost lands....

Judy Juanita views activism and feminism as it plays out in her political, artistic and spiritual life. A distinguished semifinalist for OSU's 2016 Non/Fiction Collection Prize, De Facto... blends essays, poems, graphics by the late Rini Templeton and literary criticism. An act of self-definition with the feel of memoir, these essays follow a long line of thinkers, including Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Michelle Wallace, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Paula Giddings, Michelle Alexander, Roxane Gay, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche. In her...