Mexican Identity Research Articles

The Rights of Royal Patronage and the Legitimacy of anti-Clericalism after the Independence of Mexico

The Church-State statutory institutional relationship is particularly significant apropos the debate of cultural tolerance. Here, I review the mechanisms by which this relation circumscribes to an ethno-centric pattern in the reading of Mexican history, and examine the discursive atmosphere the Church and the State institutional struggle to master the symbols of nationhood, and account for the ethnic images ratified by institutional narratives with liberal pragmatic postulates. In particular, I focus on the complex netting of political demarcations between religious and civil institutions, and its distinctive tone they acquired under Hispanic Patronage; all of which set the background upon which the Church’s antagonism to official lay discourses on Mexican identity appears futile.

Border crossings and border exclusions: Academic and social experiences of a second-grade child of indigenous descent in a dual language school

ABSTRACT In this ethnographic case study, border theory was used to analyze how a Guatemalan/Mexican student of Indigenous descent confronted borders in a second-grade, Spanish-English dual-language (DL) classroom in the U.S. The student faced structural/institutional borders that affected all the DL participants or Latinx students and social borders specific to himself and other students of Indigenous descent. He initially coped by not speaking English and assuming a Mexican identity. With his teacher’s support, he crossed social borders by speaking English, taking pride in his Indigeneity, and using Q’anjob’al. How DL programs could better address the needs of Indigenous students is discussed.

Teaching “Aztec Classicism”: Early Modern Myths in the Twentieth-Century Classroom

History has long been regarded a vital tool for emergent nation-states and subsequent nationalist regimes in unifying disparate groups around a common historical memory. And nowhere can such a memory be more effectively instilled in a population than in its schools, where the textbook gives state-approved narratives an unimpeachable authority in children’s minds. This essay traces the canonisation of a colonial, Classicised narrative portraying pre-Columbian Anahuac as the Mexican national past through its monumentalisation in state-approved textbooks until well into the twentieth century. By focusing on mythical Greco-Roman representations of the Acolhua monarch Nezahualcoyotl that emerged shortly after the Spanish Conquest and were consolidated in the early years of Independence, I contend that the projection of Mexican identity in schoolbooks rests upon a fictionalised, unifying conception of history steeped in European Classicism but used as a strategy of identification against the European. In doing so, this essay opens up a reading of history textbooks as Mexican sites of memory: sites which reflect the lost Indigenous cultures of Mexico yet simultaneously offer an ingrained European reading of those very cultures.

Prizefighting and Civilization: A Cultural History of Boxing, Race, and Masculinity in Mexico and Cuba, 1840–1940

In Prizefighting and Civilization, David LaFevor explains how boxing not only became legalized and legitimized but eventually woven into the fabric of a national culture in Cuba and Mexico during their transition from colonialism to decolonization. This riff on Gail Bederman's singular text about masculinity and race in Progressive Era America, Manliness and Civilization (1995), is much more focused on nationalism than gender. The result is a comparative analysis of one sport across multiple nation-states that adds to a growing body of literature on the cultural diplomacy of sport in both national and transnational contexts.LaFevor frames his study with a question: “How did an exotic and repugnant ‘Anglo-Saxon’ diversion come to symbolize national identity and masculinity for millions across Latin America?” (vii). Based on traditional primary research in archives and newspapers, as well as a trove of revistas (boxing, sport, or cultural periodicals), graphic novels, and films from Latin America, the book argues that “prizefighting served as a nationalist parable” in both Cuba and Mexico (9). LaFevor's choice of these two countries is purposeful not only in the political parallels but also as places where LaFevor has lived, worked, researched, and visited boxing gyms. His passion for the sport and the people under study is evident in the text, and the comparison supports his view of prize-fighting as “transnational popular culture” (12) from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.Organized in a generally chronological fashion, the book's five body chapters tend to toggle between Cuba and Mexico. These two nations are more explicitly linked in the introduction and conclusion. A couple of significant fistic intersections—the Jack Johnson-versus-Jess Willard bout in 1915 and the championship aspirations of Luis Firpo in the 1920s—serve as fulcrums for the comparison. The Johnson-Willard fight was initially set in Mexico, as Johnson remained a champion-in-exile from the United States, but eventually took place in Cuba. Argentinian heavyweight Firpo, LaFevor demonstrates, became not just a national but a regional hero—the “Latin Hope” (197)—across Latin America. In both nations, however, the growth of a free press and sports-centric media were crucial to the proliferation of prize-fighting. Whether writers covered illegal, quasi-legal, or recently legalized boxing matches, for anticolonial or neocolonial purposes, or just to cater to the tastes of a rising working class, the celebration of boxers in newspapers and revistas helped integrate the sport into evolving national identities.By the time boxing was introduced to Cuba and Mexico, LaFevor notes, it was already a “highly significant medium that . . . was dominated by U.S. Americans and Europeans” (171). That it became accepted and appropriated by so many people with vastly different relationships to those purveyors of cultural imperialism is in itself historically significant. In particular, the use of boxing by very different Cubans, from Castilians to Castros, to promote national strength and virility on a global stage is a valuable case study. Although scholars may find LaFevor's analyses of Cuba to be the stronger chapters, this addition mixes well with recent literature on sport and Mexican identity, including José Alamillo's Deportes: The Making of a Sporting Mexican Diaspora (2020).Those teaching the book may choose to explore the similarities to boxing's legalization and commodification in the United States or use these cases as an opportunity to discuss the reverberations of phenomena like the Harlem Renaissance across the Western hemisphere in a sporting context. But the dual-nation organization, and prose that is heavy with in-text referencing, may be challenging for undergraduate students. Graduate students, on the other hand, will no doubt appreciate the transparent historiography and perhaps see a model for their own theses, as this work grew out of LaFevor's dissertation. That he revised and expanded the project into this engaging book is a benefit to students and scholars of boxing history and the history of sport in Latin America.

Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera(eds.), Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature

Reviewed by: Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature ed. by Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera Victoria Ramirez Gentry (bio) Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera, eds., Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature. University Press of Mississippi, 2020. Pp. 214. Trevor Buffone and Cristina Herrera’s collection Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature highlights the ability of YA literature to empower Latinx youth by representing their identities as “outsiders.” This collection defines the concept of “outsider” by exploring texts that characterize Latinx youth as more than the prevailing tropes we often see in media. The authors depict various examples of Latinxs who exist “in-between,” expanding upon Gloria Anzaldúa’s new mestiza to “include those nerdy, goth, geeky, freaky, and outsider Latinx teens” (8). This collection draws YA texts into conversation with Chicanx/Latinx theories to signify the importance of representing Latinx youth as multifaceted individuals. Section 1 introduces the “outsider” experience with Latinxs who overcome not feeling Mexican enough by writing and creating. Amanda Ellis’s chapter on Gabi, A Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero explores how Gabi struggles with her Mexican identity, viewing her body as fat and white, and wishing to be “thin and brown” (18). Despite Gabi’s negative self-image, Gabi’s zines create “a space in which she becomes the authority on the female body” (25). Similarly, Lettycia Terrones argues that Malú, the protagonist of Celia C. Pérez’s The First Rule of Punk, uses zines to reconcile with her bicultural identity—half Mexican, half white—and connects to “a larger collective of brown feminist punks” (32). Terrones asserts that Malú’s zine represents her acceptance of nepantla (41). Placing Quintero’s novel in conversation with Erika L. Sánchez’s I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, Adrianna M. Santos uses Anzaldúa’s theory to assert that these young Latinxs use writing to find “self-healing” (56). Like Anzaldúa, these Latinas acknowledge their “multiple identities” (51) through writing and expressing that they are “brainy, creative, moody, witty, and rebellious” (56) and that these qualities do not prevent them from being Mexican. Building on multifaceted Latinx identities, section 2 covers Latinx “superheroes and other worldly beings.” Christi Cook draws together Marta Acosta’s Happy Hour at Casa Dracula and Anna-Marie McLemore’s The Weight of Feathers. Cook explains how the characters’ racial, ethnic, and supernatural hybridity illustrate to readers that “Chicanas have the strength to survive the real world after learning and growing from their struggles within the supernatural realm” (72). Similarly, Domino Pérez examines how Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older and Labyrinth Lost by Zoraida Córdova portray magic-wielding Afro-Latinas (74). Pérez critiques the default whiteness of popular fantasy texts—such as Harry Potter—and praises Older and Córdova for refusing to erase racial identities (76). This representation [End Page 270] upends the tropes in YA fantasy that often assign nonwhite children to be the “side-kick” (77). Instead, the youths’ cultural identities shape their magical journeys. Indeed, Ella Diaz points out that shadow shaping is part of Sierra’s cultural identity, “an art form that is part of an expressive tradition … in which the New Mestiza uses her abilities to transcend the colonial limitations of race and gender” (100). Ultimately, their supernatural and cultural identities blend. Section 3 continues to push against tropes by examining Latinxs who simultaneously embrace education and cultural identity. Roxanne Schroeder-Arce analyzes how Miriam Gonzales’s play The Smartest Girl in the World represents Latinxs who are smart and maintain connections to their culture and family (113). This story is significant since society often equates intelligence with whiteness and pressures Latinx youth to assimilate (108). Cristina Herrera further explores the smart Latinx in Meg Medina’s Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass. While Herrera recognizes the importance of cholas in scholarship, she focuses on how Medina disrupts the stereotype (120). The text depicts Latinas who face discrimination from other Latinas because of “monolithic” ideas that assume Latinas can’t be smart (127). Tim Wadham’s chapter...

Chin-Chun-Chan:Popular Sinophobia in Early Twentieth-Century Mexico City

AbstractThis article looks at popular responses to the zarzuela Chin-Chun-Chan and the issues that surfaced around its timely subject in early twentieth-century Mexico City. The principal source is the Mexico City satiric penny press for workers, supplemented by somewhat less polemical broadsides, both sold on the streets of the capital. Aimed mostly at working-class Mexicans, these sources offer a glimpse at popular attitudes circulating in a public sphere otherwise dominated by the perspective of educated elites. The article has four sections. First, it briefly reviews social commentary on the democratization of musical theater. Second, it examines Chin-Chun-Chan as a political symbol that crystalized around working-class complaints about the Porfirian regime, especially its alleged disregard for Mexican workers and Mexican national identity. Third, it analyzes the ways in which the phrase “Chin-Chun-Chan” entered popular language as a racial signifier for a range of things, some of which bore little relation to its theatrical origins. Finally, it links popular Sinophobia in late Porfirian Mexico City to the virulent anti-Chinese campaigns in northern Mexico, which played a key role in defining national identity after the 1910 Revolution, and to the “hemispheric orientalism” that has characterized anti-Asian sentiments throughout the Americas.

Centros históricos en México, patrimonialización global y turistificación

El patrimonio cultural urbano de ciudades y pueblos mexicanos desde la década de 1970 se protege y valora mediante las declaratorias d e Zonas de Monumentos Históricos, una política pública para exaltar la identidad, el nacionalismo y la historia mexicana. En la década de 1980 México entró al mercado global, y priorizó el turismo y la economía. El objetivo de este artículo es mostrar cómo México pasó del culto a los monumentos a la industria patrimonial turística y a la patrimonialización global, y cómo las declaratorias disminuyeron desde 2001, con la creación del programa turístico Pueblos Mágicos, que aprovecha el patrimonio cultural urbano de las localidades para atraer turistas nacionales y extranjeros. Mediante el análisis entre las declaratorias y los nombramientos de Pueblos Mágicos entre 1970 y 2018, se demuestra que las políticas turísticas tomaron el patrimonio como un recurso económico y se descuidó su conservación.

Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in Post-revolutionary Mexico by David S. Dalton (review).

Reviewed by: Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in Post-revolutionary Mexico by David S. Dalton Jethro Hernández Berrones (bio) Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in Post-revolutionary Mexico By David S. Dalton. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2018. Pp. 248. In Mestizo Modernity, David S. Dalton examines the role of technology in the construction of the national Mexican identity after the Mexican Revolution and throughout the twentieth century. Analyzing theater plays, murals, films, and novels, the author exposes the contradictions of the project of post-revolutionary governments to create a mix-raced, mestizo, population that adopted and adapted technology in order to become part of a modern nation and a modern world. Theoretically sophisticated yet with deeply engaging examples, the analysis explains that writers, painters, and filmmakers viewed the incorporation of Western science and technology as a tool that redeemed Mexicans through mestizaje. The author uses the concept of technological hybridity to expand the work on the intersections of science and culture in Latin America that other culture studies scholars such as Pilar Blanco, Joanna Page, Ruben Gallo, and Andrew Brown have developed in the last two decades. Technological hybridity equates the entities and characters represented in Mexican literary and visual productions with Donna Haraway's cyborgs—entities defined by human-machine interactions, and the resulting mestizo modernity with a post-human society. Through this lens, the author shows that post-revolutionary discourses on mestizaje embraced ideas about human-machine identities half a century before scholars theorized about them. If Haraway's cyborg promised to denaturalize—and therefore escape from—the issues of human identity, Mestizo Modernity shows the limits and complexities of this liberatory promise. Cyborgs and post-humanist perspectives in the post-revolutionary culture represented an internal imperialistic project to colonize the indigenous at the same time that the resulting mestizos resisted external imperialistic forces. The key element of this analysis is that mestizo cyborgs and post-humanism reframed indigenous Mexicans in oppressive ways that still offered spaces for resistance through the technologically-mediated selective preservation of traditional indigenous values against some colonial forms of oppression centered around class, race, and gender. The four chapters trace instances of technological hybridity chronologically, from the elitist cultural space of literate government officials to more popular, visual forms of art that could reach illiterate, Spanish-speaking Mexicans. José Vasconcelos' theater play Prometeo Vencedor describes the transformation of an indigenous proto-humanity into a celestial/cosmic [End Page 1268] post-human race through technological and racial hybridity. José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera embraced Vasconcelos' view in contrasting ways. While Orozco's Cortés y la malinche and La conquista de México aligned technology with the Catholic Church, European influences, and male domination to transform and subjugate the indigenous population, Rivera's Panamerican Unity and Mecanización de la tierra emphasized the role of indigenous spirituality and women to balance technologies' potential harms. Emilio Fernández's films María Candelaria, Río Escondido, and The Torch centered social progress on a technologically hybrid body. In them, immunized cyborg and mestizo virgins mediated between traditional racial, gender, socioeconomic structures and modern ones. These women, for instance, raise their voices publicly to challenge local strongmen while still performing the domestic roles of housewives and teachers. El Santo films epitomize the official government discourse of mestizo modernity. Carlos Olvera's novel Perdidos en el espacio criticized nationalist state discourses of the 1950s and 60s. Displacing colonizing efforts from the Earth to other planets allows Perdidos to equate global with national imperialistic efforts. Controlling Martians with devices that speak multiple languages, Central mexicans become one, post-human society with the Martians, where Martians can only talk to themselves, and the state can only listen to them when mediated by technology. Dalton's elegant analysis demonstrates the power of cyborg and post-humanism theories to explain the key role technology had in framing the bodies of twentieth-century Mexico's national identity. This analysis will fascinate scholars and graduate students. Undergrads interested in Mexican culture will enjoy the interpretation of visual art and performances through this lens. The book's theoretical framework will help historians, sociologists, and visual and literary...

Tejas, Afuera de México: Newspapers, the Mexican Government,Mutualistas, and Migrants in San Antonio 1910–1940

AbstractHalf a million Mexicans left Mexico during the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), and another half a million left in the 1920s. San Antonio became home to the largest Mexican community in Texas; new immigrants joined both older immigrants and Mexican Americans. Some looked to the United States as the focus of their new lives while others promoted a Mexican identity based on the nationalist rhetoric of the Mexican Revolution. This paper looks at the latter and the institutions that supported it in San Antonio—La Prensa newspaper, the mutualistas, and the Mexican consulate—to understand how the ideology of México de Afuera worked on the ground. I argue that, more than simply a conservative ideology, México de Afuera enjoyed widespread support because it fit into migrants’ worldviews. Central to the idea of México de Afuera was the belief that people would return to Mexico one day. The Great Depression put this to the test and led nearly every Mexican organization in Texas to support and organize repatriation. México de Afuera ultimately hindered the creation of a forceful defense of Mexican migrants as members of the US polity.

Film Review – La Negrada

Film Review:La Negrada Javier Ramirez (bio) Directed by Jorge Pérez Solano, performances by Magdalena Soriano, Juana Mariche Domínguez, and Felipe Neri Acevedo Corcuera, Tirisia Cine, 2018. 104 mins. In preparation for the 2020 Census, the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática, or INEGI) conducted the Intercensal Survey (2015), and for the first time ever, included an afrodescendiente (Afro-descendant) category, a watershed moment for afromexicanos (Afro-Mexicans).1 Prior to 2015, Afro-Mexicans lacked constitutional recognition. The Mexican government quite literally did not count them in census data. Afro-Mexicans's invisibility dates back to the 1917 Constitution, which erased African heritage from a nascent Mexican identity.2 A postrevolutionary Mexican government furthered the erasure of Afro-Mexicans by unifying the country's heterogeneous population under the umbrella of mestizaje, a term that celebrates the racial mixing of indigenous and European ancestries.3 In 2013, after nearly fifteen years of campaigning, two organizations, Huella Negra (Black Footprints) and México Negro (Black Mexico), successfully challenged Mexico's anti-Black, mestizo national identity.4 Such efforts proved historic when Afro-Mexicans were afforded the ability to self-identity in a census survey, thus officially acknowledging their existence. Even with the Mexican government finally recognizing them, Afro-Mexicans remained largely invisible. Nowhere is their existence more marginalized than in Mexican cinema, where stereotypical representations frame Afro-Mexicans and, by extension, Blackness, as foreign to the Mexican popular imaginary. Producer and director Jorge Pérez Solano sought to correct the cinematic neglect of Afro-Mexicans. His movie La Negrada (2018) marked the Mexican film industry's first-ever feature-length movie comprised of an all-Black Latinx cast. The studio-driven fiction film offers a fascinating portrayal of an Afro-Mexican coastal community living in Costa Chica, an area in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. The story chronicles the romantic entanglement of Magdalena (Magdalena Soriano) and Juana (Juana Mariche Domínguez), two estranged friends who share the same [End Page 503] lover, Neri (Felipe Neri Acevedo Corcuera).5 Tears in the marital dynamic appear after Juana's hospital stay reveals a terminal diagnosis. Magdalena hopes for a future of just Neri and herself, but he is unwilling to forgo his polygamist view on relationships. Ultimately, Juana's inevitable death realizes a new path for Magdalena, proving there is a life without Neri. Despite its narrative simplicity, La Negrada's slow cinema aesthetic pronounces the everydayness of the Afro-Mexican community. The film's opening moments features two semi-long takes, one with Neri fishing with his son and another of Sara (Sara Gallardo), Juana and Neri's daughter, casually walking between her home and her grandmother's house. Such stillness in the everyday accentuates the tranquility, colorfulness, and beauty of the Costa Chica region—home to many Afro-Mexicans. The quietude of the uncompressed shots also foregrounds the area's coastal acoustics, and in doing so, offers a sharp contrast to the noise-filled and fast-paced urban environment. Perhaps more importantly is how slowness allows viewers to contemplate the Afro-Mexican experience. In an effort to help her ailing mother, Sara travels to a nearby city in hopes of finding medicine that will minimize Juana's pain. Her return trip takes a turn for the worse when, at a migration checkpoint, a Mexican immigration officer orders Sara and several others off the bus. Because they lack IDs, Sara and two other gentlemen must "prove" their Mexican citizenship by singing the Mexican national anthem from a specific starting point. Only Sara is able to "prove" her Mexican citizen status. Elongated cinematic time in the scene, to quote Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge, "encourages a mode of engagement with images and sounds whereby slow time becomes a vehicle for introspection, reflection and thinking."6 In other words, temporal slowness urges viewers to contemplate the racist anti-Blackness that pervades Mexican societal structures. Linked closely to the film's slow cinema aesthetic is its borrowing of the cinéma vérité style. La Negrada is by no means a documentary, but the employment of an observational cinema technique serves the...

Two Welded into One: The Experiences of Mexican Americans Who Have Dual Citizenship and Live a Transborder Life

ABSTRACT The objective of this study is to add to the discussion of the diverse faces of border life between Mexico and the United States. Focusing on transborder binational Mexican Americans living in the region of Juárez-El Paso-Las Cruces, the study is based on in-depth interviews and discussion groups with 27 informants. The analysis of their narratives showed that they consider themselves different from Chicanos and Mexican Americans who live in other parts of the country. It seems that the transborder element, which gives residents a full understanding of contemporary Juarez culture, is what they recognize as particular for their identity. They consider themselves Mexican in principle, but they have learned to integrate elements of American culture and ideology and to defend their dual citizenship and their binational identity. Although they developed a legal consciousness after their first transition to the United States, their Mexican identity makes them vulnerable to discrimination or racist attitudes from other ethnic and cultural groups. Hence, binational transborder Mexican Americans are a category that is imperative to visibilize in their daily efforts to defend their identity, culture, and rights.

Framing indigeneity in early ethnographic Mexican film: An analysis of Peregrinación a Chalma/Pilgrimage to Chalma (Díaz Ordaz 1922)

This article approaches the exhibition of indigeneity in the early Mexican ethnographic film Peregrinación a Chalma / Pilgrimage to Chalma (Díaz Ordaz 1922) as a simultaneous display of criollo/mestizo hegemonic culture and institutions. As a product of the Mexican anthropological establishment at an early moment of the discipline’s investment in post-revolutionary indigenismo and mestizaje, the film participates in the endeavour to document and disseminate aspects of indigenous culture and the will to affirm the existence of a modern, non-indigenous Mexican identity. Through filmic analysis, the article illustrates how the film’s use of the stylistic conventions of the classical ethnographic mode creates a distanced rendering of Indigenous people that elevates the criollo/mestizo perspective and casts its representatives as the official curators of and modern foils to indigeneity. Furthermore, through its textual and stylistic conventions, Peregrinación a Chalma positions the spectator to view indigeneity from the position of hegemonic criollo/mestizo culture, aligning the spectator with the cultural perspective that presents itself as dominant and authoritative. The spectatorial positionality crafted by the film is in tune with the modernizing and homogenizing aims of indigenismo and mestizaje in the early post-revolutionary period.

El Cine Yost and the Power of Place for Mexican Migrants in Orange County, California, 1930–1990

Abstract This article explores the history of El Cine Yost (The Yost Theater) in Santa Ana, California, and the role of the Louis and Phoebe Olivos Sr. family in creating space for the development of ethnic Mexican identity and community in Orange County, California from 1930 to 1990. Alongside traditional archival materials, this article draws on oral history interviews, photographs, ephemera, and newspaper clippings obtained from the Olivos family and patrons of El Cine Yost to demonstrate the emotional ties that individuals and communities form to space and place, as well as the identities and relationships that emerge out of them. In this people-and-place–centered narrative, I argue that El Cine Yost exemplifies the central connections between space, place, and identity in the lived experiences of ethnic Mexicans across the US-Mexico borderlands. Further, this history disrupts the master narrative of Orange County as a place of Anglo-American/European settler history, which has ignored and left undocumented the affirmative presence and contributions of Latinas/os in the region.

Review: Modern Architecture in Mexico City: History, Representation, and the Shaping of a Capital, by Kathryn E. O'Rourke

Review: <i>Modern Architecture in Mexico City: History, Representation, and the Shaping of a Capital</i>, by Kathryn E. O'Rourke

Book Review: Mexican Costumbrismo: Race, Society, and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Art, by Mey-Yen Moriuchi

Mexican Costumbrismo: Race, Society, and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Art , by Mey-Yen Moriuchi. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018. 180 pages, 31 color and 29 b/w illus. Hardcover $99.95. Reviewed by Natalia Majluf. The past two decades have seen an extraordinary

Corridos, Tequila (and others), and Mexican/Chicano Masculinity

The Mexican corrido is one of the most popular cultural manifestations both in the United States and Mexico. From its origins in the mid-nineteenth century, the corrido has dealt with “people’s stuff,” such as war, love, honor, immigration and/or belonging to a land, among other everyday life issues. The corrido is, in short, a symbol of identity and belonging, and can be considered a marker of the Mexican identity on both sides of the border. In this sense, it is to be expected that the corrido, as an expression of “people’s stuff,” voices the relevance of a “national” symbol. In the same way, tequila is regarded, at least internationally, as directly related to “lo mexicano/chicano,” and in many cases also to Mexican/Chicano masculinity. Starting from this premise, the aim of this article is to observe the presence of tequila and its significance as a symbol of “lo mexicano/chicano” in the work of Los Tigres del Norte, one of the most prominent corrido bands, both locally and internationally.

Graciela Iturbide’s Cholos/as Series: Images of Cross-Border Identities

This article looks at Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide’s Cholos/as series taken on both sides of the border: in Los Angeles in 1986 and in Tijuana in 1989. The cholos/as, or gang members, have a complex relationship to Mexico; this response grows in part from the constructed nature of the border in general – a symbolic and relatively recent division between nations that does not represent lived reality or divisions between identities and cultures. As an outsider, Iturbide inserts visual cues throughout the series that tie the cholos/as’ lifestyle to its Mexican roots and historical legacies, thus recuperating the mexicanidad, or Mexican identity, that exists in the borderlands. The narrative thrust of this series is strong, foregrounding female agency and matrilineal family structures over traditional, heteropatriarchal conceptions of family; complex negotiations of personal identity; and generally emphasising the social ties of border communities and subcultural groups through a distinct aesthetic style that intervenes in traditional photographic genres like studio portraiture. Iturbide’s images form an origin story for the topicality of the US–Mexico border at the present moment and demonstrate that the issues of the border have been a critical point of inquiry for artists since the 1980s.

‘Inherited Images’: the Decolonialist agenda of Katherine Anne Porter and Anita Benner

Katherine Anne Porter and Anita Brenner engaged transcultural journeys in order to realize their visions of validating the work of Indigenous Mexican artists. They both believed that the Indigenismo movement, made popular by the muralists in 1920s post-revolutionary Mexico, celebrated the Natives without negotiating their harsh lived reality. Porter and Brenner employed what may be termed a decolonialist agenda when they chose to work with and showcase Indigenous art in their own creative endeavors. This decolonialist agenda situated the Indigenous voice in the forefront and helped further advance a working-class aesthetic and modern Mexican identity uniquely tied to indigeneity that was often neglected by other revolutionary efforts.

Burial Practices Expose Identity Formation: Muerte y figura hasta la sepultura

An examination of identity formation and its performative qualities or ways in which one enacts identity emerged as a result of a study of racially segregated cemeteries in a rural South Texas town, a practice that continues to dictate how burials are carried out, according to race. Fieldwork, archives, and pláticas, made visible the historical origins of funerary practices for the primary author—whose family lives in Nixon, Texas. Along with documenting funerary practices, this study explores the ways in which Pantoja Perez’s ancestors creatively camouflaged ethnicity to disidentify with their Mexican identity, in the context of an ideology of Americanization. It was found that cultural, as well as funerary practice veiled and protected Mexicans by class, thus not having to enact a racialized ethnicity while rejecting culture and language practices associated with being Mexican in public spaces.

Analysis of Mexican Identity in Furniture Design in Mexico

Analysis of Mexican Identity in Furniture Design in Mexico