Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture and Chicana/o Sexualities [Paperback]

In Chicana/o popular culture, nothing signifies the working class, highly-layered, textured, and metaphoric sensibility known as rasquache aesthetic more than black velvet art. The essays in this volume examine that aesthetic by looking at icons, heroes, cultural myths, popular rituals, and border issues as they are expressed in a variety of ways. The contributors dialectically engage methods of popular cultural studies with discourses of gender, sexuality, identity politics, representation, and cultural production. In addition to a hagiography of locas santas, the book includes studies of the sexual politics of early Chicana activists in the Chicano youth movement, the representation of Latina bodies in popular magazines, the stereotypical renderings of recipe books and calendar art, the ritual performance of Mexican femaleness in the quincea?era, and mediums through which Chicano masculinity is measured.PART I: A BARRIO ALTAR (ICONS & HEROES) A Chicana Hagiography for the 21st Century: Ana Castillo's Locas Santas; R.Alcal? The Macho Body as Social Malinche; G.S.Estrada In Search of the Authentic Pachuco: An Interpretive Essay; A.Madrid PART II: MYTHIC BARRIOS (CULTURAL MYTHS) Deconstructing the Mythical Homeland: M?xico in Contemporary Chicana Performance; L.Guti?rrez A Poverty of Relations: On Not Making Familia from Scratch, but Scratching Familia; R.Rodr?guez 'Tanto Tiempo Disfrutamos': Chicanas and the Sexual Politics of Chicano Youth Culture in Los Angeles in the 1960s; D.Espinoza The Verse of the Godfather: Unwrapping Masculinity, Familia and Nationalism in Chicano Rap Discourse; R.T.Rodr?guez PART III: BARRIO RITES (POPULA RITUALS) Revisiting the Chavez Ravine: Baseball, Urban Renewal and the Gendered Civic Culture of Postwar Los Angeles; E.Avila 'La Quincea?era': Making Gender and Ethnic Identities; K.M.Davalos Only Cauldrons Know the Secrets of Their Soups: Like Water for Chocolate; M.Segovia Cruising Through Low Rider Culture: Chicana/o Identl#”