Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture and Chicana/o Sexualities (New Directions in Latino American Cultures)

In Chicana/o popular culture, nothing signifies the working class, highly-layered, textured, and metaphoric sensibility known as "rasquache aesthetic" more than black velvet art. The essays in this volume examine that aesthetic by looking at icons, heroes, cultural myths, popular rituals, and border issues as they are expressed in a variety of ways. The contributors dialectically engage methods of popular cultural studies with discourses of gender, sexuality, identity politics, representation, and cultural production. In addition to a hagiography of "locas santas," the book includes studies of the sexual politics of early Chicana activists in the Chicano youth movement, the representation of Latina bodies in popular magazines, the stereotypical renderings of recipe books and calendar art, the ritual performance of Mexican femaleness in the quinceañera, and mediums through which Chicano masculinity is measured. Introduction, or, Welcome to the closet of barrio popular culture / Alicia Gaspar de Alba A Chicana hagiography for the twenty-first century : Ana Castillo's Locas santas / Rita Cano Alcalá In search of the authentic pachuco : an interpretive essay / Arturo Madrid The "macho" body as social malinche / Gabriel S. Estrada Deconstructing the mythical homeland : Mexico in contemporary Chicana performance / Laura Gutiérrez A poverty of relations : on not "making familia from scratch," but scratching familia / Ralph Rodríguez "Tanto tiempo disfrutamos ..." : revisiting the gender and sexual politics of Chicana/o youth culture in East Los Angeles in the 1960s / Dionne Espinoza The verse of the godfather : signifying family and nationalism in Chicano rap and hip-hop culture / Richard T. Rodríguez Revisiting the Chavez ravine : baseball, urban renewal, and the gendered civic culture of postwar Los Angeles / Eric Avila La quinceañera : making gender and ethnic identities / Karen Mary Davalos Only cauldrons know the secrets of their soups : queer romance and Like water for chocolate / Miguel A. Segovia Cruising through low rider culture : Chicana/o identity in the marketing of Low rider magazine / Denise Michelle Sandoval Rights of passage : from cultural schizophrenia to border consciousness in Cheech Marín's Born in East L.A. / Alicia Gaspar de Alba Gendered bodies and borders in contemporary Chican@ performance and literature / Suzanne Chávez-Silverman Lost in the cinematic landscape : Chicanas as lloronas in contemporary film / Domino Renee Pérez "Lupe's song" : on the origins of Mexican-woman-hating in the United States / Deena J. González Resisting "beauty" and Real women have curves / María P. Figueroa Out of the fringe : desire and homosexuality in the 1990s Latino theater / M. Teresa Marrero Velvet malinche : fantasies of "the" Aztec princess in the Chicana/o sexual imagination / Catrióna Rueda Esquibél "Los borrados" : a Chicano quest for identity in a post-apocalyptic, culturally defunct Hispanic utopia : a reinterpretive Chicano comic / Oscar "The Oz" Madrigal. Front Matter....Pages i-xxviii Front Matter....Pages 1-1 A Chicana Hagiography for the Twenty-first Century....Pages 3-15 In Search of the Authentic Pachuco....Pages 17-40 The “Macho” Body as Social Malinche....Pages 41-60 Front Matter....Pages 61-61 Deconstructing the Mythical Homeland....Pages 63-74 A Poverty of Relations....Pages 75-88 “Tanto Tiempo Disfrutamos...”....Pages 89-106 The Verse of the Godfather....Pages 107-122 Front Matter....Pages 123-123 Revisiting the Chavez Ravine....Pages 125-139 La Quinceañera ....Pages 141-162 Only Cauldrons Know the Secrets of Their Soups....Pages 163-178 Cruising Through Low Rider Culture....Pages 179-196 Front Matter....Pages 197-197 Rights of Passage....Pages 199-213 Gendered Bodies and Borders in Contemporary Chican@ Performance and Literature....Pages 215-227 Lost in the Cinematic Landscape....Pages 229-247 Front Matter....Pages 249-249 “Lupe’s Song”....Pages 251-264 Resisting “Beauty” and Real Women Have Curves ....Pages 265-282 Out of the Fringe....Pages 283-294 Velvet Malinche....Pages 295-307 Front Matter....Pages 309-309 “Los Borrados”....Pages 311-321 Back Matter....Pages 323-327 In Chicano/a popular culture, nothing signifies the working class, highly-layered, textured, and metaphoric sensibility known as "rasquache aesthetic" more than black velvet art. The essays in this volume examine that aesthetic by looking at icons, heroes, cultural myths, popular rituals, and border issues as they are expressed in a variety of ways. The contributors dialectically engage methods of popular cultural studies with discourses of gender, sexuality, identity politics, representation, and cultural production. In addition to a hagiography of "locas santas," the book includes studies of the sexual politics of early Chicana activists in the Chicano youth movement, the representation of Latina bodies in popular magazines, the stereotypical renderings of recipe books and calendar art, the ritual performance of Mexican femaleness in the quinceañera, and mediums through which Chicano masculinity is measured In many ways it is no surprise that a novel set in a small town in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of New Mexico-where penitent brothers and miracle-seeking pilgrims visit the sacred grounds of Chimayo-would intergrate the medieval religious genre of the vidas de santos (the lives of saints). An expos�� of Guatemala's genocidal campaign against the Maya in the late 1970s and mid-1980s documents the massacres and displacements that took place as well as the experiences of Maya survivors seeking justice and healing.