In 1960s East Los Angeles, La Estrella de la Cancion Romantica interpreted boleros and other music from the collective memory of Mexico. Though an untrained, local artist, her musical performance was as trans-racial, trans-class, trans-generational, and trans-national as the most celebrated artists of the music of latinidad. That stage of her artistic career would be key when she later helped deconstruct the machismo that framed the mariachi tradition, as a founding member of the first all-female mariachi group, Las Generalas. Mucho Corazon, a biography/autoethnography written by the protagonist's daughter, relates the life- and performing stages of Aurora Prado Pastrano, who against overwhelming odds, followed her heart to become a bolerista, songwriter, and the first professional woman guitarron player in United States history. Seamless storytelling advances the long-neglected history of Chicana grassroots artists. Framed by allusions to the music popular during her Texas-Mexican American childhood, her young adult life in Mexico, to her artistic rise in East Los Angeles, the story vividly exemplifies how gendered subjectivity infuses public performance of what the author coins "cultural music." This is a resource on regional history and its music of the 1940s-1970s. Written for anyone interested in women's participation in the production and performance of mariachi music in the United States, Mexican, Mexican American, Chicano, and Latino music, and the cultural history of the Southwest, it is especially valuable to ethnomusicology, cultural studies, women's history, women's and gender studies, Latinx studies, Chicanx studies, cultural anthropology, ethnology, and sociology, and accessible to levels from high school to higher education professionals.

The Feminist Alliance Project in Appalachia: Minoritized Experiences of Women Faculty and Administrators in Higher Education illustrates the minoritized experiences of women faculty and administrators in higher education and highlights Appalachia as a geographic and cultural region, a sector in academia that still remains relatively ignored in mainstream feminist studies. This book is based on autobiographical and autoethnographic narratives of diverse women who discuss their similar and unique forms of oppression as students and as professionals in the academic workplace within Appalachia. Their minoritized experiences exemplify women's relational ties and the need for what the volume editor Alicia Chavira-Prado names the Feminist Alliance Project. Chavira-Prado calls for feminists to develop and enact an allied feminism that transcends class, race, or other artificially constructed borders and identities, as well as the specific subjectivities that have separated feminist groups. The narratives in The Feminist Alliance Project in Appalachia support the claim that white and nonwhite women experience similar minoritization within specific junctures of space, gender, and other identities. They thus show the need to be allies in recognizing and opposing all women's minoritization in order to end women's oppression. The book is of interest to women's studies, Appalachian studies, Latina/x studies, regional studies, American studies, critical theory, cultural anthropology and ethnic studies, autoethnography courses, sociology, philosophy, diversity and inclusion and human resources professionals in higher education, and the general public.