Months before Alma Lopez's digital collage Our Lady was shown at the Museum of International Folk Art in 2001, the museum began receiving angry phone calls from community activists and Catholic leaders who demanded that the image not be displayed. Protest rallies, prayer vigils, and death threats ensued, but the provocative image of la Virgen de Guadalupe (hands on hips, clad only in roses, and exalted by a bare-breasted butterfly angel) remained on exhibition.

Highlighting many of the pivotal questions that have haunted the art world since the NEA debacle of 1988, the contributors to Our Lady of Controversy present diverse perspectives, ranging from definitions of art to the artist's intention, feminism, queer theory, colonialism, and Chicano nationalism. Contributors include the exhibition curator, Tey Marianna Nunn; award-winning novelist and Chicana historian Emma Perez; and Deena Gonzalez (recognized as one of the fifty most important living women historians in America).

Accompanied by a bonus DVD of Alma Lopez's I Love Lupe video that looks at the Chicana artistic tradition of reimagining la Virgen de Guadalupe, featuring a historic conversation between Yolanda Lopez, Ester Hernandez, and Alma Lopez, Our Lady of Controversy promises to ignite important new dialogues.

Since 1993, more than five hundred women and girls have been murdered in Ciudad Juarez across the border from El Paso, Texas. At least a third have been sexually violated and mutilated as well. Thousands more have been reported missing and remain unaccounted for. The crimes have been poorly investigated and have gone unpunished and unresolved by Mexican authorities, thus creating an epidemic of misogynist violence on an increasingly globalized U.S.-Mexico border. This book, the first anthology to focus exclusively on the Juarez femicides, as the crimes have come to be known, compiles several different scholarly "interventions" from diverse perspectives, including feminism, Marxism, critical race theory, semiotics, and textual analysis. Editor Alicia Gaspar de Alba shapes a multidisciplinary analytical framework for considering the interconnections between gender, violence, and the U.S.-Mexico border. The essays examine the social and cultural conditions that have led to the heinous victimization of women on the border-from globalization, free trade agreements, exploitative maquiladora working conditions, and border politics, to the sexist attitudes that pervade the social discourse about the victims. The book also explores the evolving social movement that has been created by NGOs, mothers' organizing efforts, and other grassroots forms of activism related to the crimes. Contributors include U.S. and Mexican scholars and activists, as well as personal testimonies of two mothers of femicide victims.

Its the summer of 1998 and for 5 years over a hundred mangled and desecrated bodies have been found dumped in the Chicuahua desert outside of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, just across the river from El Paso, Texas. The perpetrators of the ever-rising number of violent deaths target poor young women, terrifying inhabitants on both sides of the border. El Paso native Ivon Villa has returned to her hometown to adopt the baby of Cecilia, a pregnant maquilodoro worker. When Cecilia turns up strangled in the desert, Ivon is thrown into the churning chaos of abuse and murder. As the rapes of girls from the south continue, a conspiracy covers up the crimes that implicate everyone from the Maquiladora Assn. to the Border Control. Ivon's younger sister gets kidnapped and she knows that its up to her to find her. From acclaimed poet Desert Blood is a gripping thriller that ponders the effects of patriarchy, gender identity, culture, transnationalism and globalization on an intl crisis.

In the early 1990s, a major exhibition Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985 toured major museums around the United States. As a first attempt to define and represent Chicano/a art for a national audience, the exhibit attracted both praise and controversy, while raising fundamental questions about the nature of multiculturalism in the U.S.

This book presents the first interdisciplinary cultural study of the CARA exhibit. Alicia Gaspar de Alba looks at the exhibit as a cultural text in which the Chicano/a community affirmed itself not as a "subculture" within the U.S. but as an "alter-Native" culture in opposition to the exclusionary and homogenizing practices of mainstream institutions. She also shows how the exhibit reflected the cultural and sexual politics of the Chicano Movement and how it serves as a model of Chicano/a popular culture more generally.

Drawing insights from cultural studies, feminist theory, anthropology, and semiotics, this book constitutes a wide-ranging analysis of Chicano/a art, popular culture, and mainstream cultural politics. It will appeal to a diverse audience in all of these fields.

The first major visual and cultural exploration of the legacy of La Malinche, simultaneously reviled as a traitor to her people and hailed as the mother of Mexico An enslaved Indigenous girl who became Hernan Cortes's interpreter and cultural translator, Malinche stood at center stage in one of the most significant events of modern history. Linguistically gifted, she played a key role in the transactions, negotiations, and conflicts between the Spanish and the Indigenous populations of Mexico that shaped the course of global politics for centuries to come. As mother to Cortes's firstborn son, she became the symbolic progenitor of a modern Mexican nation and a heroine to Chicana and Mexicana artists. Traitor, Survivor, Icon is the first major publication to present a comprehensive visual exploration of Malinche's enduring impact on communities living on both sides of the US-Mexico border. Five hundred years after her death, her image and legacy remain relevant to conversations around female empowerment, indigeneity, and national identity throughout the Americas. This book establishes and examines her symbolic import and the ways in which artists, scholars, and activists have appropriated her image to interpret and express their own experiences and agendas, from the 1500s through today. Published in association with the Denver Art Museum Exhibition Schedule: Denver Art Museum (February 6-May 8, 2022) Albuquerque Museum (June 11-September 4, 2022) San Antonio Museum of Art (October 14, 2022-January 8, 2023)