Is race only about the color of your skin? In The Latinos of Asia, Anthony Christian Ocampo shows that what “color” you are depends largely on your social context. Filipino Americans, for example, helped establish the Asian American movement and are classified by the US Census as Asian. But the legacy of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines means that they share many cultural characteristics with Latinos, such as last names, religion, and language.

Thus, Filipinos’ “color” —their sense of connection with other racial groups—changes depending on their social context. The Filipino story demonstrates how immigration is changing the way people negotiate race, particularly in cities like Los Angeles where Latinos and Asians now constitute a collective majority.

Amplifying their voices, Ocampo illustrates how second-generation Filipino Americans’ racial identities change depending on the communities they grow up in, the schools they attend, and the people they befriend. Ultimately, The Latinos of Asia offers a window into both the racial consciousness of everyday people and the changing racial landscape of American society.

Praxiteles Lumpkin are one of the great cultural treasures of rural Massachusetts. Helen Shandy, librarian at Balaclava Agricultural College, is roaming the countryside, camera in hand, capturing images of these lovely copper sculptures, trying to give them the attention they deserve. But each time she takes a picture, the featured vane vanishes. Could there be a gang of breezy-minded burglars on her tail? The night after Helen photographs the vane atop the famous Lumpkin soap works, the building burns to the ground. With the help of her husband, Peter, she tries to track the thieves-turned-arsonists. But when the things take a dangerous turn, Helen doesn’t need a weather vane to see that a deadly wind is blowing.

Born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, Eudora Welty shares details of her upbringing that show us how her family and her surroundings contributed to the shaping not only of her personality but of her writing as well. Everyday sights, sounds, and objects resonate with the emotions of recollection: the striking clocks, the Victrola, her orphaned father’s coverless little book saved since boyhood, the tall mountains of the West Virginia back country that became a metaphor for her mother’s sturdy independence, Eudora’s earliest box camera that suspended a moment forever and taught her that every feeling awaits a gesture.

In her vivid descriptions of growing up in the South—of the interplay between black and white, between town and countryside, between dedicated schoolteachers and the children they taught—she recreates the vanished world of her youth with the same subtlety and insight that mark her fiction, capturing “the mysterious transfiguring gift by which dream, memory, and experience become art” (Los Angeles Times Book Review).