This historically accurate and beautifully written novel explores the secret inclinations, subjective desires, and political struggles of the 17th-century Mexican nun and poet.
In the first story of this absorbing collection, Margarita—sixteen and married to a soldier who has gone off to fight in the first great war—meets and falls in love with Federico Garcia Lorca. He calls her “Margarita Petita,” and then turns her name into a poem. When he refuses to marry the widowed gypsy girl after a tryst at the river leaves her pregnant, her mother curses both Lorca and his offspring: “May they all die before they see the light of day.” And so Lorca is killed by fascists and his child dies in Margarita’s womb, where it remains—petrified—for 80 years. Mysteries and furtive desires pervade the enthralling stories in this group of ten the author calls a “deconstructed novel.” Rich in imagery and language, they chronicle the gypsy’s life, including banishment from Andalusia by her mother, marriage to a famous Mexican bull fighter and the lives of numerous descendants who ultimately leave Mexico for El Paso, Texas. In one of the final stories, “Calaveras in the Closet,” the gypsy’s extensive family comes together for her funeral, where several long-guarded secrets will suddenly come to light. Also included in this volume is a historical novella, Liberata Wilgefortis: The True and Tragic Story of the Bearded Female Saint, a mystical retelling of an ancient legend about the first bearded female saint of the Catholic Church whose cult was removed by Vatican II in 1969. Expertly weaving poetry, historical events, myth and legend into intriguing short fiction, Alicia Gaspar de Alba confirms her place as one of the leading contemporary Latinx voices.
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.
Months before Alma López'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 Pérez; and Deena González (recognized as one of the fifty most important living women historians in America). Accompanied by a bonus DVD of Alma López's I Love Lupe video that looks at the Chicana artistic tradition of reimagining la Virgen de Guadalupe, featuring a historic conversation between Yolanda López, Ester Hernández, and Alma López, Our Lady of Controversy promises to ignite important new dialogues.
Since 1993, more than five hundred women and girls have been murdered in Ciudad Juárez 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 Juárez 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.
This historically accurate and beautifully written novel explores the secret inclinations, subjective desires, and political struggles of the 17th-century Mexican nun and poet.
In this collection of poetry and essays, Gaspar de Alba incorporates the Mexican archetypal wailing woman who wanders in search of her lost children. La Llorona is more than an archetype: she is a tour guide through the ruins of love and family and the constant presence of the poet's voice. She transcends time, place, and gender. The lines of the poems breathe that haunted spirit as they describe her movidas, both geographic and figurative, in search of the lost mother, the absent father, the abandoned child, the lover, the self. These essays track other movements of thought: reflections on identity, sexuality, and resistance. As a leading interpreter of border life and culture, poet, storyteller, and essayist Gaspar de Alba explores the borders and limits of place, body, and language through a painful series of moves and losses. She prevails and becomes the forger of her own destiny, her own image on the landscape, the interpreter of her own dreams and history. These vibrant poems and essays of self-creation, even to the basic task of choosing her own name, are a testament to the phoenix-like quality of art: the poet can create beauty out of destruction and desolation.
After being captured by pirates, Concepciâon Benavidez, a young Spanish girl who has been impregnated by the pirate captain, is sold as a slave to a prominent Puritan and finds herself accused of witchcraft by the residents of Salem Village.
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.
One of America's leading interpreters of the Chicana experience dismantles the discourses that "frame" women who rebel against patriarchal strictures as "bad women" and offers empowering models of struggle, resistance, and rebirth.
This Book marks a time period (1870s-1940s) when Mexican authors writing in English saw themselves as transnational authors whose role was to teach the English speaking public about Mexico. This book takes a look at four inspiring women whose ideas represent the way medicine and science permeated the personal lives of Mexican and Indigenous peoples whose lifestyles did not happen to meet the requirements of an industrialized or modern citizenry. These women include historical figures such as the folkloric healer, Teresa Urrea (1873-1906), and authors, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton (1872), Maria Cristina Mena (1914), and Josefina Niggli (1947). These women writers focused on the modernist construction of the body and brought in aspects of how the soul (through racial, gendered, national, political, and socio-economic lenses) was reconstructed as a way to manage the health and space of the Mexican/Indigenous populations in order to move into an era of industrialism and positivism. By focusing on how industrialism led to the negation of racialized bodies, knowledges, and spaces, this book takes a deeper look at the concept of the “individual” as a medical, economic, political, and theoretical term, focusing on the way medical knowledge, the doctor, surgery, experimentation, healing, and specifically, the soul, is treated in Latina modernist literature. This book adds to the modernist discussions of literary figures such as Bernard Shaw, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Frida Kahlo, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein. Urrea, Ruiz de Burton, Mena, and Niggli continue the critique of a burgeoning medical system and rhetoric, and they add the Mexican/Indigenous viewpoint and transnational perspective that is important to any dialogue.
“What the women I write about have in common is that they are all rebels with a cause, and I see myself represented in their mirror,” asserts Alicia Gaspar de Alba. Looking back across a career in which she has written novels, poems, and scholarly works about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, la Malinche, Coyolxauhqui, the murdered women of Juárez, the Salem witches, and Chicana lesbian feminists, Gaspar de Alba realized that what links these historically and socially diverse figures is that they all fall into the category of “bad women,” as defined by their place, culture, and time, and all have been punished as well as remembered for rebelling against the “frames” imposed on them by capitalist patriarchal discourses. In [Un]Framing the “Bad Woman,” Gaspar de Alba revisits and expands several of her published articles and presents three new essays to analyze how specific brown/female bodies have been framed by racial, social, cultural, sexual, national/regional, historical, and religious discourses of identity—as well as how Chicanas can be liberated from these frames. Employing interdisciplinary methodologies of activist scholarship that draw from art, literature, history, politics, popular culture, and feminist theory, she shows how the “bad women” who interest her are transgressive bodies that refuse to cooperate with patriarchal dictates about what constitutes a “good woman” and that queer/alter the male-centric and heteronormative history, politics, and consciousness of Chicano/Mexicano culture. By “unframing” these bad women and rewriting their stories within a revolutionary frame, Gaspar de Alba offers her compañeras and fellow luchadoras empowering models of struggle, resistance, and rebirth.
In the first story of this absorbing collection, Margarita—sixteen and married to a soldier who has gone off to fight in the first great war—meets and falls in love with Federico Garcia Lorca. He calls her “Margarita Petita,” and then turns her name into a poem. When he refuses to marry the widowed gypsy girl after a tryst at the river leaves her pregnant, her mother curses both Lorca and his offspring: “May they all die before they see the light of day.” And so Lorca is killed by fascists and his child dies in Margarita’s womb, where it remains—petrified—for 80 years. Mysteries and furtive desires pervade the enthralling stories in this group of ten the author calls a “deconstructed novel.” Rich in imagery and language, they chronicle the gypsy’s life, including banishment from Andalusia by her mother, marriage to a famous Mexican bull fighter and the lives of numerous descendants who ultimately leave Mexico for El Paso, Texas. In one of the final stories, “Calaveras in the Closet,” the gypsy’s extensive family comes together for her funeral, where several long-guarded secrets will suddenly come to light. Also included in this volume is a historical novella, Liberata Wilgefortis: The True and Tragic Story of the Bearded Female Saint, a mystical retelling of an ancient legend about the first bearded female saint of the Catholic Church whose cult was removed by Vatican II in 1969. Expertly weaving poetry, historical events, myth and legend into intriguing short fiction, Alicia Gaspar de Alba confirms her place as one of the leading contemporary Latinx voices.
In this collection of poetry and essays, Gaspar de Alba incorporates the Mexican archetypal wailing woman who wanders in search of her lost children. La Llorona is more than an archetype: she is a tour guide through the ruins of love and family and the constant presence of the poet's voice. She transcends time, place, and gender. The lines of the poems breathe that haunted spirit as they describe her movidas, both geographic and figurative, in search of the lost mother, the absent father, the abandoned child, the lover, the self. These essays track other movements of thought: reflections on identity, sexuality, and resistance. As a leading interpreter of border life and culture, poet, storyteller, and essayist Gaspar de Alba explores the borders and limits of place, body, and language through a painful series of moves and losses. She prevails and becomes the forger of her own destiny, her own image on the landscape, the interpreter of her own dreams and history. These vibrant poems and essays of self-creation, even to the basic task of choosing her own name, are a testament to the phoenix-like quality of art: the poet can create beauty out of destruction and desolation.
Rethinking mestizaje and how it functions as an epistemology of colonialism in diverse sites from Aztlán to Manila, and across a range of cultural materials
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