2020 Second Place, Best Nonfiction Multi Author, International Latino Book Awards Collecting the perspectives of scholars who reflect on their own relationships to particular garments, analyze the politics of dress, and examine the role of consumerism and entrepreneurialism in the production of creating and selling a style, meXicana Fashions examines and searches for meaning in these visible, performative aspects of identity. Focusing primarily on Chicanas but also considering trends connected to other Latin American communities, the authors highlight specific constituencies that are defined by region ("Tejana style," "L.A. style"), age group ("homie," "chola"), and social class (marked by haute couture labels such as Carolina Herrera and Oscar de la Renta). The essays acknowledge the complex layers of these styles, which are not mutually exclusive but instead reflect a range of intersections in occupation, origin, personality, sexuality, and fads. Other elements include urban indigenous fashion shows, the shifting quinceanera market, "walking altars" on the Days of the Dead, plus-size clothing, huipiles in the workplace, and dressing in drag. Together, these chapters illuminate the full array of messages woven into a vibrant social fabric.

2020 Second Place, Best Nonfiction Multi Author, International Latino Book Awards Collecting the perspectives of scholars who reflect on their own relationships to particular garments, analyze the politics of dress, and examine the role of consumerism and entrepreneurialism in the production of creating and selling a style, meXicana Fashions examines and searches for meaning in these visible, performative aspects of identity. Focusing primarily on Chicanas but also considering trends connected to other Latin American communities, the authors highlight specific constituencies that are defined by region ("Tejana style," "L.A. style"), age group ("homie," "chola"), and social class (marked by haute couture labels such as Carolina Herrera and Oscar de la Renta). The essays acknowledge the complex layers of these styles, which are not mutually exclusive but instead reflect a range of intersections in occupation, origin, personality, sexuality, and fads. Other elements include urban indigenous fashion shows, the shifting quinceanera market, "walking altars" on the Days of the Dead, plus-size clothing, huipiles in the workplace, and dressing in drag. Together, these chapters illuminate the full array of messages woven into a vibrant social fabric.

Dancing across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos focuses specifically on Mexican dance practices on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. The essays explore various types of Mexican popular and traditional dances and address questions of authenticity, aesthetics, identity, interpretation, and research methodologies in dance performance. Contributors include not only noted scholars from a variety of disciplines but also several dance practitioners who reflect on their engagement with dance and reveal subtexts of dance culture. Capturing dance as a living expression, the volume's ethnographic approach highlights the importance of the cultural and social contexts in which dances are practiced. Contributors are Norma E. Cantu, Susan Cashion, Maria Teresa Cesena, Xochitl C. Chavez, Adriana Cruz-Manjarrez, Renee de la Torre Castellanos, Peter J. Garcia, Rudy F. Garcia, Chris Goertzen, Martha Gonzalez, Elisa Diana Huerta, Sydney Hutchinson, Marie "Keta" Miranda, Olga Najera-Ramirez, Shakina Nayfack, Russell Rodriguez, Brenda M. Romero, Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter, Jose Sanchez Jimenez, and Alberto Zarate Rosales.

Chicana Traditions features essays from professionals engaged with a broad and ever-expanding Chicana expressive culture. Professors and students, performing artists and folklorists, and archivists and activists merge personal experience with formal discussion to share fascinating inside stories. The topics include a professional woman mariachi performer; the creation and evolution of the escaramuza charra (all-female precision riding team) within the male-dominated Mexican rodeo; the ranchera music of the transnational performer Lydia Mendoza, the complex crossover of Selena's Tejano music, and the bottle cap and jar lid art of Goldie Garcia. An eye-opening journey through a borderland where cultures and identities converge, Chicana Traditions reveals how Chicanas continue to invent, reshape, and transcend their traditional culture.

Mexican and Mexican American women have written about Texas and their lives in the state since colonial times. Edited by fellow Tejanas Ines Hernandez-Avila and Norma Elia Cantu, Entre Guadalupe y Malinche gathers, for the first time, a representative body of work about the lives and experiences of women who identify as Tejanas in both the literary and visual arts. The writings of more than fifty authors and the artwork of eight artists manifest the nuanced complexity of what it means to be Tejana and how this identity offers alternative perspectives to contemporary notions of Chicana identity, community, and culture. Considering Texas-Mexican women and their identity formations, subjectivities, and location on the longest border between Mexico and any of the southwestern states acknowledges the profound influence that land and history have on a people and a community, and how Tejana creative traditions have been shaped by historical, geographical, cultural, linguistic, social, and political forces. This representation of Tejana arts and letters brings together the work of rising stars along with well-known figures such as writers Gloria Anzaldua, Emma Perez, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Carmen Tafolla, and Pat Mora, and artists such as Carmen Lomas Garza, Kathy Vargas, Santa Barraza, and more. The collection attests to the rooted presence of the original indigenous peoples of the land now known as Tejas, as well as a strong Chicana/Mexicana feminism that has its precursors in Tejana history itself.

During the advent of Chicano teatro, dozens of groups sprang up across the country in Chicano/a communities. Since then, teatristas have been leading voices in the creation and production of plays touching minds and hearts that galvanize audiences to action. Barrio Dreams is the first book to collect the work of one of Arizona's foremost teatristas, playwright Silviana Wood. During her decades-long involvement in theater, Wood forged a reputation as a playwright, actor, director, and activist. Her works form a testimonio of Chicana life, steeped in art, politics, and the borderlands. Wood's plays challenge, question, and incite women to consider their lot in life. She ruptures stereotypes and raises awareness of social issues via humor and with an emphasis on the use of the physical body on stage. The play Una vez, en un barrio de suenos . . . offers a glimpse into familiar terrain-the barrio and its dwellers-in three actos. In Amor de hija, a fraught mother-daughter relationship in contemporary working-class Arizona is dealt an additional blow as the family faces Alzheimer's disease. In the tragedy A Drunkard's Tale of Melted Wings and Memories, and in the trilingual (Spanish, English, and Yaqui) tragicomedy Yo, Casimiro Flores, characters love, live, die, travel through time and space, and visit the afterlife. And in Anhelos por Oaxaca, a grandfather travels back in time through flashbacks, as he and his grandson travel through homelands from Arizona to Oaxaca. Part of Wood's genius is the way she portrays life in what Gloria Anzaldua called ""el mundo zurdo,"" that space inhabited by the people of color, the poor, the female, and the outsiders. It is a place for the atravesados, the odd, the different, those who do not fit the mainstream. The people who inhabit Wood's plays are common folk-janitors, mothers, grandmothers, and teenagers-hardworking people who, in one way or another, have made their way in life and who embody life in the barrio.

"Telling to Live" embodies the vision that compelled Latina feminists to engage their differences and find common ground. Its contributors reflect varied class, religious, ethnic, racial, linguistic, sexual, and national backgrounds. Yet in one way or another they are all professional producers of "testimonios"--or life stories--whether as poets, oral historians, literary scholars, ethnographers, or psychologists. Through coalitional politics, these women have forged feminist political stances about generating knowledge through experience. Reclaiming "testimonio" as a tool for understanding the complexities of Latina identity, they compare how each made the journey to become credentialed creative thinkers and writers. "Telling to Live" unleashes the clarifying power of sharing these stories.
The complex and rich tapestry of narratives that comprises this book introduces us to an intergenerational group of Latina women who negotiate their place in U.S. society at the cusp of the twenty-first century. These are the stories of women who struggled to reach the echelons of higher education, often against great odds, and constructed relationships of sustenance and creativity along the way. The stories, poetry, memoirs, and reflections of this diverse group of Puerto Rican, Chicana, Native American, Mexican, Cuban, Dominican, Sephardic, mixed-heritage, and Central American women provide new perspectives on feminist theorizing, perspectives located in the borderlands of Latino cultures.
This often heart wrenching, sometimes playful, yet always insightful collection will interest those who wish to understand the challenges U.S. society poses for women of complex cultural heritages who strive to carve out their own spaces in the ivory tower.

"Contributors." Luz del Alba Acevedo, Norma Alarcon, Celia Alvarez, Ruth Behar, Rina Benmayor, Norma E. Cantu, Daisy Cocco De Filippis, Gloria Holguin Cuadraz, Liza Fiol-Matta, Yvette Flores-Ortiz, Ines Hernandez-Avila, Aurora Levins Morales, Clara Lomas, Iris Ofelia Lopez, Mirtha N. Quintanales, Eliana Rivero, Caridad Souza, Patricia Zavella