Hidden Chicano Cinema
Hidden Chicano Cinema

Author: A. Gabriel Meléndez

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2013-08-19

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0813561086

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Hidden Chicano Cinema examines how New Mexico, situated within the boundaries of the United States, became a stand-in for the exotic non-western world that tourists, artists, scientists, and others sought to possess at the dawn of early filmmaking, a disposition stretching from the silent era to today as filmmakers screen their fantasies of what they wished the Southwest Borderlands to be. The book highlights “film moments” in this region’s history including the “filmic turn” ushered in by Chicano/a filmmakers who created new ways to represent their community and region. A. Gabriel Meléndez narrates the drama, intrigue, and politics of these moments and accounts for the specific cinematic practices and the sociocultural detail that explains how the camera itself brought filmmakers and their subjects to unexpected encounters on and off the screen. Such films as Adventures in Kit Carson Land, The Rattlesnake, and Red Sky at Morning, among others, provide examples of movies that have both educated and misinformed us about a place that remains a “distant locale” in the mind of most film audiences.

Race in American Film [3 volumes]
Race in American Film [3 volumes]

Author: Daniel Bernardi

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2017-07-07

Total Pages: 1149

ISBN-13:

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This expansive three-volume set investigates racial representation in film, providing an authoritative cross-section of the most racially significant films, actors, directors, and movements in American cinematic history. Hollywood has always reflected current American cultural norms and ideas. As such, film provides a window into attitudes about race and ethnicity over the last century. This comprehensive set provides information on hundreds of films chosen based on scholarly consensus of their importance regarding the subject, examining aspects of race and ethnicity in American film through the historical context, themes, and people involved. This three-volume set highlights the most important films and artists of the era, identifying films, actors, or characterizations that were considered racist, were tremendously popular or hugely influential, attempted to be progressive, or some combination thereof. Readers will not only learn basic information about each subject but also be able to contextualize it culturally, historically, and in terms of its reception to understand what average moviegoers thought about the subject at the time of its popularity—and grasp how the subject is perceived now through the lens of history.

Borderlands Saints
Borderlands Saints

Author: Desirée A. Martín

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2013-12-19

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 081356235X

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In Borderlands Saints, Desirée A. Martín examines the rise and fall of popular saints and saint-like figures in the borderlands of the United States and Mexico. Focusing specifically on Teresa Urrea (La Santa de Cabora), Pancho Villa, César Chávez, Subcomandante Marcos, and Santa Muerte, she traces the intersections of these figures, their devotees, artistic representations, and dominant institutions with an eye for the ways in which such unofficial saints mirror traditional spiritual practices and serve specific cultural needs. Popular spirituality of this kind engages the use and exchange of relics, faith healing, pilgrimages, and spirit possession, exemplifying the contradictions between high and popular culture, human and divine, and secular and sacred. Martín focuses upon a wide range of Mexican and Chicano/a cultural works drawn from the nineteenth century to the present, covering such diverse genres as the novel, the communiqué, drama, the essay or crónica, film, and contemporary digital media. She argues that spiritual practice is often represented as narrative, while narrative—whether literary, historical, visual, or oral—may modify or even function as devotional practice.

Southwest Asia
Southwest Asia

Author: Jayson Gonzales Sae-Saue

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2016-06-17

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 0813577195

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Chicana/o literature is justly acclaimed for the ways it voices opposition to the dominant Anglo culture, speaking for communities ignored by mainstream American media. Yet the world depicted in these texts is not solely inhabited by Anglos and Chicanos; as this groundbreaking new book shows, Asian characters are cast in peripheral but nonetheless pivotal roles. Southwest Asia investigates why key Chicana/o writers, including Américo Paredes, Rolando Hinojosa, Oscar Acosta, Miguel Méndez, and Virginia Grise, from the 1950s to the present day, have persistently referenced Asian people and places in the course of articulating their political ideas. Jayson Gonzales Sae-Saue takes our conception of Chicana/o literature as a transnational movement in a new direction, showing that it is not only interested in North-South migrations within the Americas, but is also deeply engaged with East-West interactions across the Pacific. He also raises serious concerns about how these texts invariably marginalize their Asian characters, suggesting that darker legacies of imperialism and exclusion might lurk beneath their utopian visions of a Chicana/o nation. Southwest Asia provides a fresh take on the Chicana/o literary canon, analyzing how these writers have depicted everything from interracial romances to the wars Americans fought in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. As it examines novels, plays, poems, and short stories, the book makes a compelling case that Chicana/o writers have long been at the forefront of theorizing U.S.–Asian relations.

From the Edge
From the Edge

Author: Allison E. Fagan

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2016-07-14

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 081358390X

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Chicana/o literature frequently depicts characters who exist in a vulnerable liminal space, living on the border between Mexican and American identities, and sometimes pushed to the edge by authorities who seek to restrict their freedom. As this groundbreaking new study reveals, the books themselves have occupied similarly precarious positions, as Chicana/o literature has struggled for economic viability and visibility on the margins of the American publishing industry, while Chicana/o writers have grappled with editorial practices that compromise their creative autonomy. From the Edge reveals the tangled textual histories behind some of the most cherished works in the Chicana/o literary canon, tracing the negotiations between authors, editors, and publishers that determined how these books appeared in print. Allison Fagan demonstrates how the texts surrounding the authors’ words—from editorial prefaces to Spanish-language glossaries, from cover illustrations to reviewers’ blurbs—have crucially shaped the reception of Chicana/o literature. To gain an even richer perspective on the politics of print, she ultimately explores one more border space, studying the marks and remarks that readers have left in the margins of these books. From the Edge vividly demonstrates that to comprehend fully the roles that ethnicity, language, class, and gender play within Chicana/o literature, we must understand the material conditions that governed the production, publication, and reception of these works. By teaching us how to read the borders of the text, it demonstrates how we might perceive and preserve the faint traces of those on the margins.

Of Forests and Fields
Of Forests and Fields

Author: Mario Jimenez Sifuentez

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2016-03-08

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 0813576911

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2016 Choice Oustanding Academic Title Just looking at the Pacific Northwest’s many verdant forests and fields, it may be hard to imagine the intense work it took to transform the region into the agricultural powerhouse it is today. Much of this labor was provided by Mexican guest workers, Tejano migrants, and undocumented immigrants, who converged on the region beginning in the mid-1940s. Of Forests and Fields tells the story of these workers, who toiled in the fields, canneries, packing sheds, and forests, turning the Pacific Northwest into one of the most productive agricultural regions in the country. Employing an innovative approach that traces the intersections between Chicana/o labor and environmental history, Mario Sifuentez shows how ethnic Mexican workers responded to white communities that only welcomed them when they were economically useful, then quickly shunned them. He vividly renders the feelings of isolation and desperation that led to the formation of ethnic Mexican labor organizations like the Pineros y Campesinos Unidos Noroeste (PCUN) farm workers union, which fought back against discrimination and exploitation. Of Forests and Fields not only extends the scope of Mexican labor history beyond the Southwest, it offers valuable historical precedents for understanding the struggles of immigrant and migrant laborers in our own era. Sifuentez supplements his extensive archival research with a unique set of first-hand interviews, offering new perspectives on events covered in the printed historical record. A descendent of ethnic Mexican immigrant laborers in Oregon, Sifuentez also poignantly demonstrates the links between the personal and political, as his research leads him to amazing discoveries about his own family history... www.mariosifuentez.com

Deconstructing Eurocentric Tourism and Heritage Narratives in Mexican American Communities
Deconstructing Eurocentric Tourism and Heritage Narratives in Mexican American Communities

Author: Frank G. Perez

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-09-24

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 042964809X

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This book attempts to dismantle the unfounded Eurocentric view of US-born and immigrant Mexican peoples, that groups together the identities of Latinx, Chicanx, and other indigenous peoples of the Southwest into Hispanics whose contributions to the cultural, historical, and social development of the Southwest are marginalized or made non-existent. The narrative and performative legacies that tourism and fantasy heritage produce are promulgated and consumed by both Latinx and non-Latinx peoples and cultures. This book endeavors to expose these productions through analysis of on-the-ground resistance in the service and spirit of intercultural dialogue and change. This book will offer a precise set of recommendations for breaking away from these practices and thus forming new, veritable identities. With a strongly heritage-oriented discourse, this book on deconstructing Eurocentric representation of Mexican people and their culture will appeal to academics and scholars of heritage tourism, Chicano studies, Southwest studies and Native American studies courses.

Mexican Hometown Associations in Chicagoacán
Mexican Hometown Associations in Chicagoacán

Author: Xóchitl Bada

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2014-04-30

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 0813564948

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Chicago is home to the second-largest Mexican immigrant population in the United States, yet the activities of this community have gone relatively unexamined by both the media and academia. In this groundbreaking new book, Xóchitl Bada takes us inside one of the most vital parts of Chicago’s Mexican immigrant community—its many hometown associations. Hometown associations (HTAs) consist of immigrants from the same town in Mexico and often begin quite informally, as soccer clubs or prayer groups. As Bada’s work shows, however, HTAs have become a powerful force for change, advocating for Mexican immigrants in the United States while also working to improve living conditions in their communities of origin. Focusing on a group of HTAs founded by immigrants from the state of Michoacán, the book shows how their activism has bridged public and private spheres, mobilizing social reforms in both inner-city Chicago and rural Mexico. Bringing together ethnography, political theory, and archival research, Bada excavates the surprisingly long history of Chicago’s HTAs, dating back to the 1920s, then traces the emergence of new models of community activism in the twenty-first century. Filled with vivid observations and original interviews, Mexican Hometown Associations in Chicagoacán gives voice to an underrepresented community and sheds light on an underexplored form of global activism.

Family Activism
Family Activism

Author: Amalia Pallares

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2014-11-30

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 0813564581

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During the past ten years, legal and political changes in the United States have dramatically altered the legalization process for millions of undocumented immigrants and their families. Faced with fewer legalization options, immigrants without legal status and their supporters have organized around the concept of the family as a political subject—a political subject with its rights violated by immigration laws. Drawing upon the idea of the “impossible activism” of undocumented immigrants, Amalia Pallares argues that those without legal status defy this “impossible” context by relying on the politicization of the family to challenge justice within contemporary immigration law. The culmination of a seven-year-long ethnography of undocumented immigrants and their families in Chicago, as well as national immigrant politics,Family Activism examines the three ways in which the family has become politically significant: as a political subject, as a frame for immigrant rights activism, and as a symbol of racial subordination and resistance. By analyzing grassroots campaigns, churches and interfaith coalitions, immigrant rights movements, and immigration legislation, Pallares challenges the traditional familial idea, ultimately reframing the family as a site of political struggle and as a basis for mobilization in immigrant communities.