Velvet Barrios Popular Culture & Chicana/o Sexualities

by Gaspar de Alba, Alicia; Ybarra Frausto, Tomas

• ISBN13: 9781403960962
• ISBN10: 1403960968
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-02-22
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

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 quinceantilde;era, and mediums through which Chicano masculinity is measured.

Author Biography

Alicia Gaspar de Alba is Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies at UCLA.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	xi
Acknowledgments	xiii
Notes from Losaida: A Foreword	xv
Tomas Ybarra-Frausto
Introduction, or, Welcome to the Closet of Barrio Popular Culture	xix
Alicia Gaspar de Alba
Part 1: A Barrio Altar: Heroes & Icons
A Chicana Hagiography for the Twenty-first Century: Ana Castillo's Locas Santas	3	(14)
Rita Cano Alcala
In Search of the Authentic Pachuco: An Interpretive Essay	17	(24)
Arturo Madrid
The ``Macho'' Body as Social Malinche	41	(22)
Gabriel S. Estrada
Part 2: Mythic Barrios: Cultural Myths
Deconstructing the Mythical Homeland: Mexico in Contemporary Chicana Performance	63	(12)
Laura Gutierrez
A Poverty of Relations: On Not ``Making Familia from Scratch,'' but Scratching Familia	75	(14)
Ralph Rodriguez
``Tanto Tiempo Disfrutamos . . .'': Revisiting the Gender and Sexual Politics of Chicana/o Youth Culture in East Los Angeles in the 1960s	89	(18)
Dionne Espinoza
The Verse of the Godfather: Signifying Family and Nationalism in Chicano Rap and Hip-Hop Culture	107	(18)
Richard T. Rodriguez
Part 3: Barrio Rites: Popular Rituals
Revisiting the Chavez Ravine: Baseball, Urban Renewal, and the Gendered Civic Culture of Postwar Los Angeles	125	(16)
Eric Avila
La Quinceanera: Making Gender and Ethnic Identities	141	(22)
Karen Mary Davalos
Only Cauldrons Know the Secrets of Their Soups: Queer Romance and Like Water for Chocolate	163	(16)
Miguel A. Segovia
Cruising Through Low Rider Culture: Chicana/o Identity in the Marketing of Low Rider Magazine	179	(20)
Denise Michelle Sandoval
Part 4: Border Barrios: ``A Tradition of Long Walks''
Rights of Passage: From Cultural Schizophrenia to Border Consciousness in Cheech Marin's Born in East L.A.	199	(16)
Alicia Gaspar de Alba
Gendered Bodies and Borders in Contemporary Chican@ Performance and Literature	215	(14)
Suzanne Chavez-Silverman
Lost in the Cinematic Landscape: Chicanas as Lloronas in Contemporary Film	229	(22)
Domino Renee Perez
Part 5: Velvet Barrios: Este-Reo-Tipos/Stereotypes
``Lupe's Song'': On the Origins of Mexican-Woman-Hating in the United States	251	(14)
Deena J. Gonzalez
Resisting ``Beauty'' and Real Women Have Curves	265	(18)
Maria P. Figueroa
Out of the Fringe: Desire and Homosexuality in the 1990s Latino Theater	283	(12)
M. Teresa Marrero
Velvet Malinche: Fantasies of ``the'' Aztec Princess in the Chicana/o Sexual Imagination	295	(16)
Catriona Rueda Esquibel
Part 6: A Barrio Comic: (Introducing . . .)
``Los Borrados'': A Chicano Quest for Identity in a Post-Apocalyptic, Culturally Defunct Hispanic Utopia (A Reinterpretive Chicano Comic)	311	(12)
Oscar ``The Oz'' Madrigal
Contributors	323	(4)
Reprints & Permissions	327