"Advancing a Chicana feminist interpretation, Davalos carefully explores both the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century museum practices and the more recent phenomenon of physically locating Mestizo/Chicano art within "insider spaces" (such as ethnically or racially specific cultural institutions and alternative galleries). Just as public museums instruct visitors about who does and who does not belong to a nation's legacy, Davalos makes clear that exhibitions in so-called minority museums are likewise shaped by notions of difference and nationalism and by the politics of identity and race."--BOOK JACKET.

Focusing on the often unrecognized role race plays in expressions of Chicano culture, Mestizaje is a provocative exploration of the volatility and mutability of racial identities. In this important moment in Chicano studies, Rafael Pérez-Torres reveals how the concepts and realities of race, historical memory, the body, and community have both constrained and opened possibilities for forging new and potentially liberating multiracial identities. Informed by a broad-ranging theoretical investigation of identity politics and race and incorporating feminist and queer critiques, Pérez-Torres skillfully analyzes Chicano cultural production. Contextualizing the history of mestizaje, he shows how the concept of mixed race has been used to engage issues of hybridity and voice and examines the dynamics that make mestizo and mestiza identities resistant to, as well as affirmative of, dominant forms of power. He also addresses the role that mestizaje has played in expressive culture, including the hip-hop music of Cypress Hill and the vibrancy of Chicano poster art. Turning to issues of mestizaje in literary creation, Pérez-Torres offers critical readings of the works of Emma Pérez, Gil Cuadros, and Sandra Cisneros, among others. This book concludes with a consideration of the role that the mestizo body plays as a site of elusive or displaced knowledge. Moving beyond the oppositions—nationalism versus assimilation, men versus women, Texans versus Californians—that have characterized much of Chicano studies, Mestizaje synthesizes and assesses twenty-five years of pathbreaking thinking to make a case for the core components, sensibilities, and concerns of the discipline. Rafael Pérez-Torres is professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is author of Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins, coauthor of To Alcatraz, Death Row, and Back: Memories of an East LA Outlaw, and coeditor of The Chicano Studies Reader: An Anthology of Aztlán, 1970–2000.

Rewrites our understanding of the last 50 years of Chicana/o cultural production. Chicana/o Remix casts new light not only on artists—such as Sandra de la Loza, Judy Baca, and David Botello, among others—but on the exhibitions that feature their work, and the collectors, curators, critics, and advocates who engage it. Combining feminist theory, critical ethnic studies, art historical analysis, and extensive archival and field research, Karen Mary Davalos argues that narrow notions of identity, politics, and aesthetics limit our ability to understand the full capacities of Chicana/o art. She employs fresh vernacular concepts such as the “errata exhibit,” or the staging of exhibits that critically question mainstream art museums, and the “remix,” or the act of bringing new narratives and forgotten histories from the background and into the foreground. These concepts, which emerge out of art practice itself, drive her analysis and reinforce the rejection of familiar narratives that evaluate Chicana/o art in simplistic, traditional terms, such as political versus commercial, or realist versus conceptual. Throughout Chicana/o Remix, Davalos explores undocumented or previously ignored information about artists, their cultural production, and the exhibitions and collections that feature their work. Each chapter exposes and challenges conventions in art history and Chicana/o studies, documenting how Chicana artists were the first to critically challenge exhibitions of Chicana/o art, tracing the origins of the first Chicano arts organizations, and highlighting the influence of Europe and Asia on Chicana/o artists who traveled abroad. As a leading scholar in the study of Chicana/o artists, art spaces, and exhibition practices, Davalos presents her most ambitious project to date in this re-examination of fifty years of Chicana/o art production.

Latina/o/x places exist as both tangible physical phenomena and gatherings created and maintained by creative cultural practices. In this collection, an interdisciplinary group of contributors critically examines the many ways that varied Latina/o/x communities cohere through cultural expression. Authors consider how our embodied experiences of place, together with our histories and knowledge, inform our imagination and reimagination of our surroundings in acts of placemaking. This placemaking often considers environmental sustainability as it helps to sustain communities in the face of xenophobia and racism through cultural expression ranging from festivals to zines to sanctuary movements. It emerges not only in specific locations but as movement within and between sites; not only as part of a built environment, but also as an aesthetic practice; and not only because of efforts by cultural, political, and institutional leaders, but through mass media and countless human interactions. A rare and crucial perspective on Latina/o/x people in the Midwest, Building Sustainable Worlds reveals how expressive culture contributes to, and sustains, a sense of place in an uncertain era.

"Literally, chilaquiles are a breakfast I grew up eating: fried corn tortillas with tomato-chile sauce. Symbolically, they are the culinary metaphor for how working-class women speak with the seasoning of their food."?from the Introduction?Through the ages and across cultures, women have carved out a domain in which their cooking allowed them to express themselves, strengthen family relationships, and create a world of shared meanings with other women. In Voices in the Kitchen, Meredith E. Abarca features the voices of her mother and several other family members and friends, seated at their kitchen tables, to share the grassroots world view of these working-class Mexican and Mexican American women. In the kitchen, Abarca demonstrates, women assert their own saz?n (seasoning), not only in their cooking but also in their lives. Through a series of oral histories, or charlas culinarias (culinary chats), the women interviewed address issues of space, sensual knowledge, artistic and narrative expression, and cultural and social change. From her mother?s breakfast chilaquiles to the most elaborate traditional dinner, these women share their lives as they share their savory, symbolic, and theoretical meanings of food. The charlas culinarias represent spoken personal narratives, testimonial autobiography, and a form of culinary memoir, one created by the cooks-as-writers who speak from their kitchen space. Abarca then looks at writers-as-cooks to add an additional dimension to the understanding of women?s power to define themselves. Voices in the Kitchen joins the extensive culinary research of the last decade in exploring the importance of the knowledge found in the practical, concrete, and temporal aspects of the ordinary practice of everyday cooking.

This Fall 2011 (IX, 4) issue of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, entitled “Contesting Memory: Museumizations of Migration in Comparative Global Context,” includes papers from the conference on “Museums and Migration” organized by the volume co-editors on June 25-26, 2010, at the Maison des Science de l’Homme (MSH) in Paris. The focus here is on questions of representation and social agency of both migrants and migration museum officials, adopting a comparative perspective on the complex and conflictive articulation between how migrants are represented by themselves and by museum institutions. Migrants are not passive but social agents actively involved in their communities and socially vigilant of the way they are treated, perceived and represented by the host society. They produce also their own representations that are often in conflict with Western hegemonic perceptions of their cultures and identities. Their strong presence in global cities and metropolitan societies today confronts the dominant society with issues of racial/ethnic discrimination and historical memory otherwise ignored by hegemonic Western views. Museums dealing with the history of slavery, migration and colonialism emerged as spaces of contestation, the term “migrant” itself being contested by long-established “minority” groups as one of the ways the dominant society still treats them as “foreigners” and “immigrants.” Contributors include: Ramón Grosfoguel (also as journal issue guest editor), Yvon Le Bot (also as journal issue guest editor), Alexandra Poli (also as journal issue guest editor), Andrea Meza Torres, Lia Paula Rodrigues, Cristina Castellano, Estela Rodríguez García, Ilham Boumankhar, Véronique Bragard, Artwell Cain, Stephen Small, and Mohammad H. Tamdgidi (also as journal editor-in-chief). Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge is a publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics). For more information about OKCIR and other issues in its journal’s Edited Collection as well as Monograph and Translation series visit OKCIR’s homepage.

In this interdisciplinary volume, contributors analyze the expression of Latina/o cultural identity through performance. With music, theater, dance, visual arts, body art, spoken word, performance activism, fashion, and street theater as points of entry, contributors discuss cultural practices and the fashoning of identity in Latino/a communities throughout the US. Examining the areas of crossover between Latin and American cultures gives new meaning to the notion of "borderlands." This volume features senior scholars and up-and-coming academics from cultural, visual, and performance studies, folklore, and ethnomusicology.

Chicanismo, the idea of what it means to be Chicano, was born in the 1970s, when grassroots activists, academics, and artists joined forces in the civil rights movimiento that spread new ideas about Mexican American history and identity. The community murals those artists painted in the barrios of East Los Angeles were a powerful part of that cultural vitality, and these artworks have been an important feature of LA culture ever since. This book offers detailed analyses of individual East LA murals, sets them in social context, and explains how they were produced. The authors, leading experts on mural art, use a distinctive methodology, analyzing the art from aesthetic, political, and cultural perspectives to show how murals and graffiti reflected and influenced the Chicano civil rights movement. This publication is made possible in part by a generous contribution from Furthermore, a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

"A multidisciplinary, intergenerational, critical-creative herstory of Mujeres de Maiz, a Los Angeles-based Indigenous Xicana-led spiritual artivist organization and movement by and for women and feminists of color"--

Curators make many decisions when they build collections or design exhibitions, plotting a passage of discovery that also tells an essential story. Collecting captures the past in a way useful to the present and the future. Exhibits play to our senses and orchestrate our impressions, balancing presentation and preservation, information and emotion. Curators consider visitors’ interactions with objects and with one another, how our bodies move through displays, how our eyes grasp objects, how we learn and how we feel. Inside the Lost Museum documents the work museums do and suggests ways these institutions can enrich the educational and aesthetic experience of their visitors. Woven throughout Inside the Lost Museum is the story of the Jenks Museum at Brown University, a nineteenth-century display of natural history, anthropology, and curiosities that disappeared a century ago. The Jenks Museum’s past, and a recent effort by artist Mark Dion, Steven Lubar, and their students to reimagine it as art and history, serve as a framework for exploring the long record of museums’ usefulness and service. Museum lovers know that energy and mystery run through every collection and exhibition. Lubar explains work behind the scenes—collecting, preserving, displaying, and using art and artifacts in teaching, research, and community-building—through historical and contemporary examples. Inside the Lost Museum speaks to the hunt, the find, and the reveal that make curating and visiting exhibitions and using collections such a rewarding and vital pursuit.