Dance and the Hollywood Latina asks why every Latina star in Hollywood history began as a dancer or danced onscreen. Introducing the concepts of ""inbetween-ness"" and ""racial mobility"" to further illuminate how racialized sexuality and the dancing female body operate in film, this book focuses on the careers of Dolores Del Rio, Rita Hayworth, Carmen Miranda, Rita Moreno, and Jennifer Lopez and helps readers better understand how the United States grapples with race, gender, and sexuality through dancing bodies on screen
Heroes, Lovers, and Others tells the fascinating history of Latino actors in American film from the silent era to today. Rodriguez examines such Latino legends as Desi Arnaz, Dolores del Rio, Rita Hayworth, Raquel Welch, Anthony Quinn, Selma Hayek, and Antonio Banderas. More than just a collection of celebrity stories, the book explores the attitudes, cultural conditions, and assumptions that influenced the portrayal of Latinos in film as well as their reception by the public. Heroes, Lovers, and Others is a comprehensive volume packed with carefully researched information and analysis for both students and cinema enthusiasts alike.
Driven by exacting methods and hard data, this volume reveals gender dynamics within the dance world in the twenty-first century. It provides concrete evidence about how gender impacts the daily lives of dancers, choreographers, directors, educators, and students through surveys, interviews, analyses of data from institutional sources, and action research studies. Dancers, dance artists, and dance scholars from the United States, Australia, and Canada discuss equity in three areas: concert dance, the studio, and higher education. The chapters provide evidence of bias, stereotyping, and other behaviors that are often invisible to those involved, as well as to audiences. The contributors answer incisive questions about the role of gender in various aspects of the field, including physical expression and body image, classroom experiences and pedagogy, and performance and funding opportunities. The findings reveal how inequitable practices combined with societal pressures can create environments that hinder health, happiness, and success. At the same time, they highlight the individuals working to eliminate discrimination and open up new possibilities for expression and achievement in studios, choreography, performance venues, and institutions of higher education. The dance community can strive to eliminate discrimination, but first it must understand the status quo for gender in the dance world. Wendy Oliver, professor of dance at Providence College, is coeditor of Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches. Doug Risner, professor of dance at Wayne State University, is coeditor of Hybrid Lives of Teaching Artists in Dance and Theatre Arts: A Critical Reader. Contributors: Gareth Belling | Karen Bond | Carolyn Hebert | Eliza Larson | Pamela S. Musil | Wendy Oliver | Katherine Polasek | Doug Risner | Emily Roper | Karen Schupp | Jan Van Dyke
In this New York Times bestselling memoir, West Side Story star Rita Moreno shares her remarkable journey from a young girl with simple beginnings in Puerto Rico to Hollywood legend—one of the few performers, and the only Hispanic, to win an Oscar, Grammy, Tony and two Emmys. Born Rosita Dolores Alverio in the idyll of Puerto Rico, Moreno, at age five, embarked on a harrowing sea voyage with her mother and wound up in the harsh barrios of the Bronx, where she discovered dancing, singing, and acting as ways to escape a tumultuous childhood. Making her Broadway debut by age thirteen—and moving on to Hollywood in its Golden Age just a few years later—she worked alongside such stars as Gary Cooper, Yul Brynner, and Ann Miller. When discovered by Louis B. Mayer of MGM, the wizard himself declared: “She looks like a Spanish Elizabeth Taylor.” Cast by Gene Kelly as Zelda Zanders in Singin’ in the Rain and then on to her Oscar-winning performance in West Side Story, she catapulted to fame—yet found herself repeatedly typecast as the “utility ethnic,” a role she found almost impossible to elude. Here, for the first time, Rita reflects on her struggles to break through Hollywood’s racial and sexual barriers. She explores the wounded little girl behind the glamorous façade—and what it took to find her place in the world. She talks candidly about her relationship with Elvis Presley, her encounters with Howard Hughes, and the passionate romance with Marlon Brando that nearly killed her. And she shares the illusiveness of a “perfect” marriage and the incomparable joys of motherhood. Infused with Rita Moreno’s quick wit and deep insight, this memoir is the dazzling portrait of a stage and screen star who longed to become who she really is—and triumphed.
Examines how Day of the Dead celebrations among America's Latino communities have changed throughout history, discussing how the traditional celebration has been influenced by mass media, consumer culture, and globalization.
Residential and industrial sprawl changed more than the political landscape of postwar Los Angeles. It expanded the employment and living opportunities for millions of Angelinos into new suburbs. In Search of the Mexican Beverly Hills examines the struggle for inclusion into this exclusive world—a multilayered process by which Mexican Americans moved out of the barrios and emerged as a majority population in the San Gabriel Valley—and the impact that movement had on collective racial and class identity. Contrary to the assimilation processes experienced by most Euro-Americans, Mexican Americans did not graduate to whiteness on the basis of their suburban residence. Rather, In Search of the Mexican Beverly Hills illuminates how Mexican American racial and class identity were both reinforced by and took on added metropolitan and transnational dimensions in the city during the second half of the twentieth century.
"Until recently, most research on Latina/os in the U.S. has ignored historical and contemporary dynamics in Latin America, just as scholars of Latin America have generally stopped their studies at the border. This volume roots Los Angeles in the larger arena of globalization, exploring the demographic changes that have transformed the Latino presence in LA from primarily Mexican-origin to one that now includes peoples from throughout the hemisphere. Bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines, it combines historical perspectives with analyses of power and inequality to consider how Latina/os are responding to exclusionary immigration, labor, and schooling practices and actively creating communities. Book jacket."--BOOK JACKET.
"Emmy Award-winning NPR journalist Maria Hinojosa shares her personal story interwoven with American immigration policy's coming-of-age journey at a time when our country's branding went from "The Land of the Free" to "the land of invasion.""--
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • Latinas of Indigenous descent living in the American West take center stage in this haunting debut story collection—a powerful meditation on friendship, mothers and daughters, and the deep-rooted truths of our homelands. “Here are stories that blaze like wildfires, with characters who made me laugh and broke my heart.”—Sandra Cisneros WINNER OF THE AMERICAN BOOK AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE STORY PRIZE • FINALIST FOR THE PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE FOR DEBUT SHORT STORY COLLECTION Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s magnetic story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit in the American West. Against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado—a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite—these women navigate the land the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force. In “Sugar Babies,” ancestry and heritage are hidden inside the earth but tend to rise during land disputes. “Any Further West” follows a sex worker and her daughter as they leave their ancestral home in southern Colorado only to find a foreign and hostile land in California. In “Tomi,” a woman leaves prison and finds herself in a gentrified city that is a shadow of the one she remembers from her childhood. And in the title story, “Sabrina & Corina,” a Denver family falls into a cycle of violence against women, coming together only through ritual. Sabrina & Corina is a moving narrative of unrelenting feminine power and an exploration of the universal experiences of abandonment, heritage, and an eternal sense of home. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews • Library Journal “Sabrina & Corina isn’t just good, it’s masterful storytelling. Fajardo-Anstine is a fearless writer: her women are strong and scarred witnesses of the violations of their homelands, their culture, their bodies; her plots turn and surprise, unerring and organic in their comprehensiveness; her characters break your heart, but you keep on going because you know you are in the hands of a master. Her stories move through the heart of darkness and illuminate it with the soul of truth.”—Julia Alvarez, author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents “[A] powerhouse debut . . . stylistically superb, with crisp dialogue and unforgettable characters, Sabrina & Corina introduces an impressive new talent to American letters.”—Rigoberto González, NBC News
