MeXicana Fashions: Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction ed. by Aída Hurtado and Norma E. Cantú

Abstract

Reviewed by: meXicana Fashions: Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction ed. by Aída Hurtado and Norma E. Cantú Amanda Ellis meXicana Fashions: Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction. Edited by Aída Hurtado and Norma E. Cantú. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020. iv + 330 pp. $105.00 hardcover/$34.95 paper. meXicana Fashions explores the complex cultural politics undergirding various aesthetic modes, self-adornment traditions, and shared vestimentary practices and their relationship to Xicana identity formation and cultural belonging. This dynamic, unparalleled edited collection is organized into three sections: “Rendering of Self: Personal Narratives/Personal Adornment,” “The Politics of Dress: Saying It Loud/Saying It Clear,” and “The Politics of Entrepreneurship: Making (It)/Selling (It).” Through thirteen chapters, the volume illuminates the significance of fashion, performance, and personal aesthetics as reactive processes and “strategic weapon[s] of public self-presentation” by teasing out the ways fashion is leveraged to counter the stigmatization and derogation of social identity (14). The volume’s raison d’être is to “argue that meXicanas are exposed to more fashion and aesthetic vocabularies than those floating in the hegemonic sea of fashion” and that these vocabularies constitute an array of political meanings behind Xicana sartorial choices (14). Garments like huipiles and accessories like sarapes, rebozos, and huaraches are understood as stylized multidimensional cultural phenomena that make up the tactical practices and visual semantics that variously signify meXicanidad. Ergo, the volume theoretically situates dress as an everyday mode or technology of resistance by which people “declare allegiance to particular intersectional identities or . . . refute them” (8). The single greatest strength of this collection is its diverse interdisciplinary and topical reach. meXicana Fashions forwards the analysis of poetry, novelistic [End Page 190] discourse, visual archives, blogging practices, and song lyrics by bringing together literary criticism, auto-ethnographies, transcribed platicas, and the qualitative and quantitative content analysis of mass (print) media. Several chapters contribute to discussions of decoloniality, as they relate to self-stylization, Indigenous fashion shows, and community art exhibitions. Each chapter sophisticatedly elaborates the conceptual terrain in which to wrestle with fashion in relationship to political praxis, effectively illuminating the ways sartorial choices become the mechanisms by which people articulate ownership of their bodies by refashioning, asserting, and/or reclaiming an identity through self-adornment. In the first section, Norma E. Cantú contends that though the huipil garment is linked to a specific region of origin and communal group, huipiles take on new politically charged meanings when donned by Chicanas. The volume opens with the voices of women who “claim the garment as a signifier of Indigenous identity” and who self-consciously don the huipil as a “referent to their ethnic identity, albeit one that has been denied them as mestizas” (41). Chapter 2 forwards Josie Méndez-Negrete’s intimate retrospection and visual art that recounts how sewing and embroidery became central to her survival and metamorphosis after her move to the United States. She vividly describes the huipil as part of a counter-aesthetic and as “a living, inspiring, and protective garment” that announces both her own indigeneity and her solidarity with other Indigenous women (68). In chapter 3, Micaela Díaz-Sánchez interviews women in the professoriate who use clothing as part of an expressive technique and political intervention, describing dress as part of “a choreography enacted by Chicana academics” as they navigate academic institutions (74). Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs’s auto-ethnography renders an analysis of song lyrics and common refrains to think through the complex signification of attire in chapter 4. The author ultimately asserts that though ethnic outsiders can only “abstractly and at best marginally comprehend the deep cultural meaning instilled” in Maya garments, “Indigenous clothes carry an equally immense value for Chicanas, serving as a deeply personal expression” of identity (101). Chapter 5 closes out the first section of the volume, and in it Domino Renee Perez poetically grapples with her South Texas familial legacy through close readings of vintage family photographs and dress practices to reflect on the relationships between intergenerational memory, adornment, family resemblance, and belonging. The second section begins with an ethnographic exploration of women’s use of the quinceañera tradition and consumer...