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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.
Each year, for three days in September, the citizens of Jocotan, an
ancient indigenous community near Guadalajara, Mexico, symbolically
reenact the Spanish conquest of Mexico in mock battles between
Santiago, the patron saint of Spain, and the Tastoanes, the leaders
of the indigenous resistance. Paradoxically, the Jocotenos honor
Santiago, their special protector, and incorporate both Christian
and indigenous practices and beliefs in their fiesta. Employing the
concept of hegemony, the author explores what the festival means
culturally to the community and shows how it enables Jocotenos to
adapt to Christianity and to resist the social order it symbolizes.
Through the festival, Jocotenos address their collective identity,
the preservation of their folk culture, and their relationship to
the social-political power structure of Jocotan. Students of
Mexican culture and of syncretic religions worldwide will find this
study stimulating and informative.
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