Aída Hurtado and Norma E. Cantú (eds.), MeXicana Fashions: Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction

Abstract

Reviewed by: MeXicana Fashions: Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction ed. by Aída Hurtado and Norma E. Cantú Karen Mary Davalos (bio) Aída Hurtado and Norma E. Cantú, eds., MeXicana Fashions: Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction. University of Texas Press, 2020. Pp. 330. I have been waiting years for this book! In 2011 I purchased my first fashion item from the pop-up clothing shop UrbanXic at the annual Summer Institute of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social to express my Chicana sensibilities. The turquoise blue cotton knit sleeveless tunic is decorated with white faux embroidery, making visual quotations of Mexican textiles through a screenprinting process. The "anatomical corazón" (a design that Sandoval et al. take on in chapter 13 of the book) that appears on the lower portion of the dress covers my womb, symbolically referencing another life force (293). A few years later when UrbanXic was announced as one of the vendors at the antimall mercadito at Trópico de Nopal Gallery Art-Space, I traveled across Los Angeles County—from Westside to Eastside—to make several purchases of t-shirts and dresses for family gifts. Eventually, I came to recognize UrbanXic fashions at academic conferences, proclaiming to the wearer that we were creators of a "Chicana feminist uniform," a term I used to affectionately announce the shared symbolic meaning and subjectivity. The anthology takes up the same charge, and in its multiple chapters announcing the self-adornment of Chicana feminists in the academy (1, 3, 4, and 12) and one (13) specifically about UrbanXic fashions, the collection shows clearly that I was not the only person to take note of the trend and its meaning. The thirteen chapters plus an introduction push beyond my expectations, however. While I anticipated and enjoyed the chapters that employ personal narrative, I did not expect fashion analysis through literary criticism (chapter 10), media studies (chapters 7 and 8), consumption (chapters 6 and 12), visual and performing arts (chapters 9 and 13), and new media platforms about body positivity among women [End Page 146] of color (chapter 8). More significantly for the fields of Chicana/o/x and Latinx studies, I did not previously connect "Chicana" self-adornment to "meXicanas." The editors employ this term to mark inclusive, translingual, transnational, and blended structures that generate interdependence and unequal relations among Mexican women, Chicanas, Indigenous Mexican women, who often have their Asian and African roots, a point not always recognized; this complexity of style is at the heart of the book. They also use this term to declare homage to Rosa-Linda Fregoso, the scholar who coined the hybrid word. Their transnational and cross-cultural framing of fashion is more than I had imagined for a discussion of the politics of self-adornment, dress, and entrepreneurship, the topics of the book's three sections. Furthermore, as the editors observe, these transnational connections are discussed as appropriations of and as empowerment for meXicana indigeneity. Fashion and style provide the cultural texts through and on which the book's varied subjects create an "aesthetic of the self" both intimately personal and deeply social. One stand-out aspect of the book is its accessibility. The contributors employ a range of methods of Chicana feminist thought, from the intimacy of autobiography and personal narrative to quantitative social sciences and their reserved voice. As such, the book has something for every type of reader: undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and popular audiences. Its intersectional analysis and interdisciplinary approach will be familiar to Chicana/x and women of color feminist scholars. But if the book's organization appears linear, do not be misled; it offers a wide array of methodological and critical voices. Although the authors in the first section (Cantú, Méndez-Negrete, Díaz-Sánchez, Gutiérrez y Muhs, and D. Perez) center the personal narrative afforded by fashion and style, Petermon, Macías, and coauthors Sandoval, González, and Montes directly employ the autobiographical voice, a reminder of the embodied experience frequently edited out of academic writing. The final chapter is utterly inventive in its collaboration and in how the essay structures its critique as performance, and I expect it...