USMA faculty member, Adonia Lugo, PhD, has a new book out. Based on her dissertation, an ethnography of bicycle advocates in Los Angeles, Bicycle/Race: Transportation, Culture, & Resistance is a conversion by Lugo and her editor at Microcosm Publishing of that academic document into a more easily accessible memoir to share with public audiences. “After years of doing academic writing, where citation is a huge part of the process, it was scary but also fun to strip away the jargon and tell my own story,” she said.
From the book jacket:
This is a book of borderlands and intersections, a cautionary tale about the dangers of putting infrastructure before culture, and a coming-of-age story about power and identity. The colonial history of southern California is interwoven through Adonia Lugo’s story of growing up Chicana in Orange County, becoming a bicycle anthropologist, and co-founding Los Angeles’s hallmark open streets cycling event, CicLAvia, along the way.
“Something that made the writing process easier was that I had kept a blog, Urban Adonia, for years,” Lugo said. “I think it’s helpful for writers to practice writing for different audiences if we want to expand our reach.” She recently gave a talk on her book at Lawrence University in Appleton, WI.
