Since first launching in 2015, Luminos has served as one of UC Press’s flagship open access programs. Having published more than seventy-five full length scholarly monographs—fully open and available to the public for free— in a variety of disciplines, Luminos embodies the University of California mission to provide high quality, innovative, peer reviewed research for widespread consumption and debate.

Given the recent need for increased remote work and academic participation, UC Press is delighted to highlight the breadth of Luminos’s scholarly disciplines.

The Indigenous State
Race, Politics, and Performance in Plurinational Bolivia

by Nancy Postero

“Postero explores in magnificent detail and profound insight what happens when indigenous people come to power and attempt to decolonize the state. Postero offers a clear view of the tensions, fissures, and contradictions within Bolivia’s ‘indigenous state’ while never losing sight of its considerable achievements on a very human level.”
—Professor Andrew Canessa, author of Intimate Indigeneities: Race, Sex and History in the Small Spaces of Life

Exit and Voice
The Paradox of Cross-Border Politics in Mexico

by Lauren Duquette-Rury

“An extraordinary analysis of what it means to be a migrant. Duquette has given us a text that goes well beyond the familiar. She situates the migrant in a complex set of vectors, both local and transnational, opening up the meaning of migration itself.”
—Saskia Sassen, author of Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy

Unjust Conditions
Women’s Work and the Hidden Cost of Cash Transfer Programs

by Tara Patricia Cookson

“In this much-needed ethnography of the impact that conditionality has on the recipients of cash transfers, Cookson shows the importance of looking beyond the statistics of short-term poverty reduction to shed light on the hidden and unintended effects of conditional cash transfers on people’s lives and how these undermine long-term social change.”
—Jelke Boesten, author of Intersecting Inequalities:Women and Social Policy in Peru and Sexual Violence in War and Peace: Gender and Post-conflict Justice in Peru 

Virtuous Waters
Mineral Springs, Bathing, and Infrastructure in Mexico

by Casey Walsh

“Virtuous Waters reminds us that, within wider homogenizing discourses, there are multiple unique waters, whose particular ‘virtues’ are central in defining how people have imagined, understood, and interacted with them over time. The cumulative appropriation of Mexico’s mineral springs by religious, state, and corporate agencies also highlights the importance of protecting community relationships with local water sources.”
—Veronica Strang, author of Gardening the World: Agency, Identity, and the Ownership of Water

Of Love and Papers
How Immigration Policy Affects Romance and Family

by Laura E. Enriquez

“By highlighting the ways U.S. immigration policies shape the experiences of romantic love, intimacy and family formation, Enriquez’s meticulous research calls attention to the enduring injurious effects on undocumented and DACAmented young adults, and on their citizen spouses and children.  An innovative and sobering account of the far-reaching consequences of our punishing immigration policies. Timely and compelling.”
—Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Florence Everline Professor of Sociology, University of Southern California