Unfolding the City by
The city is not only built of towers of steel and glass; it is a product of culture. It plays an especially important role in Latin America, where urban areas hold a near-monopoly on resources and are home to an expanding population. The essays in this collection assert that women's views of the city are unique and revealing. For the first time, Unfolding the City addresses issues of gender and the urban in literature--particularly lesser-known works of literature--written by Latin American women from Mexico City, Santiago, and Buenos Aires. The contributors propose new mappings of urban space; interpret race and class dynamics; and describe Latin American urban centers in the context of globalization.Contributors: Debra A. Castillo, Cornell U; Sandra Messinger Cypess, U of Maryland; Guillermo Irizarry, U of Massachusetts, Amherst; Naomi Lindstrom, U of Texas, Austin; Jacqueline Loss, U of Connecticut; Dorothy E. Mosby, Mount Holyoke College; Angel Rivera, Worcester Polytechnic Institute; Lidia Santos, Yale U; Marcy Schwartz, Rutgers U; Daniel Noemi Voionmaa, U of Michigan; Gareth Williams, U of Michigan.Anne Lambright is associate professor of modern languages and literature at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Elisabeth Guerrero is associate professor of Spanish at Bucknell University.
Troubling Gender by
Cumbia villera--literally, cumbia from the shantytowns-- is a musical genre quite popular with Argentine youth who frequent urban dance halls. Its songs are known for having highly sexualized lyrics-- about girls dancing provocatively or experiencing erotic pleasure. The songs exhibit the tensions at play in the different ways people relate to this musical genre. In Troubling Gender, noted sociologists Pablo Vila and Pablo Semán scrutinize the music's lyrics and the singers' and dancers' performances. At the same time, the authors conduct in-depth interviews to examine the ways males construct and appropriate cumbia's lyrics, and how females identify, appropriate, and playfully and critically manipulate the same misogynistic songs. Addressing the relationship between this form of music and the wider social, political, and economic changes that influence the lives of urban youth, Troubling Gender argues that the music both reflects and influences the ways in which women's and men's roles are changing in Argentine society.
The Paraguayan Harp by
How did a music instrument transplated to South America by colonial Jesuit missionaries earn the official designation as Paraguay's cultural national symbol? This ethnomusicological and organological study of the Paraguayan diatonic harp in the twentieth century tells its story as an emblematic national musical instrument. First used liturgically by Jesuit missions in colonial times, the transplanted European diatonic harp was transformed and adopted into the folk music vocabulary of Paraguay and the R o de la Plata region. Following the commercial success of Paraguayan harpist F lix P rez Cardozo in the 1930s in Argentina, the instrument's symbolic value as an icon of social, cultural, and national identity was articulated in local traditions such as popular folk music festivals. It received designation of arpa paraguaya (Paraguayan harp) and, in 2010, official recognition as simbolo de la cultura nacional (cultural national symbol). The author's fieldwork in Paraguay and continuous contact with composers, educators, festival organizers, harp performers, researchers, and festival organizers have provided unique insights into the development of the Paraguayan harp tradition as a cultural icon of the nation.
Exoticisation Undressed by
Exoticisation undressed is an innovative ethnography that makes visible the many layers through which our understandings of indigenous cultures are filtered and their inherent power to distort and refract understanding. The book focuses in detail on the clothing practices of the Emberá in Panama, an Amerindian ethnic group, who have gained national and international visibility through their engagement with indigenous tourism. The very act of gaining visibility while wearing indigenous attire has encouraged among some Emberá communities a closer identification with an indigenous identity and a more confident representational awareness. The clothes that the Emberá wear are not simply used to convey messages, but also become constitutive of their intended messages. By wearing indigenous-and-modern clothes, the Emberá-who are often seen by outsiders as shadows of a vanishing world-reclaim their place as citizens of a contemporary nation. Through reflexive engagement, Exoticisation undressed exposes the workings of ethnographic nostalgia and the Western quest for a singular, primordial authenticity, unravelling instead new layers of complexity that reverse and subvert exoticisation.
Ofrenda by
A native of Chile whose art reflects the political turmoil and repression of the 1970s and 1980s in that country, Liliana Wilson incorporates vivid images and themes from that period in her art. In this volume, some of her most representative works will be reproduced, accompanied by biographical background and scholarly interpretation of her art offered by leading names in the field.
Art Against Dictatorship by
Art can be a powerful avenue of resistance to oppressive governments. During the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, some of the country's least powerful citizens--impoverished women living in Santiago's shantytowns--spotlighted the government's failings and use of violence by creating and selling arpilleras, appliquéd pictures in cloth that portrayed the unemployment, poverty, and repression that they endured, their work to make ends meet, and their varied forms of protest. Smuggled out of Chile by human rights organizations, the arpilleras raised international awareness of the Pinochet regime's abuses while providing income for the arpillera makers and creating a network of solidarity between the people of Chile and sympathizers throughout the world. Using the Chilean arpilleras as a case study, this book explores how dissident art can be produced under dictatorship, when freedom of expression is absent and repression rife, and the consequences of its production for the resistance and for the artists. Taking a sociological approach based on interviews, participant observation, archival research, and analysis of a visual database, Jacqueline Adams examines the emergence of the arpilleras and then traces their journey from the workshops and homes in which they were made, to the human rights organizations that exported them, and on to sellers and buyers abroad, as well as in Chile. She then presents the perspectives of the arpillera makers and human rights organization staff, who discuss how the arpilleras strengthened the resistance and empowered the women who made them.
Raul Ruiz's Cinema of Inquiry by
Most widely known for his filmic productions, Ra#65533;l Ruiz (1941-2011) was a highly prolific, erudite, and innovative artist, whose work is located at the intersection of diverse locations, languages, and aesthetic traditions. Ruiz's eclectic body of work includes over one hundred films (among them features, shorts, television serials, and videos), books on the theory of cinema, genre-defying fiction books, plays, a radio show, and a multimedia installation. Ra#65533;l Ruiz's Cinema of Inquiry posits the unity of Ruiz's body of work and investigates the similarities between his very diverse artistic productions. Ruiz's own concept of "cinema of inquiry" provides the lens through which his films and poetics are examined. Ruiz's relevance to cinema and the growing interest in his work are due to his legacy as a global filmmaker. Viewers, filmmakers, and film scholars continue to return to his works because his films consistently pose the question of what cinema can be, especially at a time when cinema is increasingly seen as displaced by television and new media. Ruiz expanded the domain of cinema itself, incessantly probing the interstices between cinema and other arts. Editors Ignacio L#65533;pez-Vicu#65533;a and Andreea Marinescu, with six other scholars, explore different aspects of Ruiz's work, with special attention paid to the transnational aspects of Ruiz's films, critical regionalism, and political and aesthetic interventions. Ra#65533;l Ruiz's Cinema of Inquiry includes close readings of important yet understudied films, as well as two extensive previously unpublished interviews with Ruiz. This comprehensive volume gives voice to a significant filmmaker and artist. Students and scholars of film and media studies will find great value in this collection.
Indigenous Media and Political Imaginaries in Contemporary Bolivia by
Fray Bernardino de Sahagún-INAH Award in Mexico for Best Research Work in Anthropology Gabriela Zamorano Villarreal examines the political dimension of indigenous media production and distribution as a means by which indigenous organizations articulate new claims on national politics in Bolivia, a country experiencing one of the most notable cases of social mobilization and indigenous-based constitutional transformation in contemporary Latin America. Based on fieldwork in Bolivia from 2005 to 2007, Zamorano Villarreal details how grassroots indigenous media production has been instrumental to indigenous political demands for a Constituent Assembly and for implementing the new constitution within Evo Morales's controversial administration. On a day-to-day basis, Zamorano Villarreal witnessed the myriad processes by which Bolivia's indigenous peoples craft images of political struggle and enfranchisement to produce films about their role in Bolivian society. Indigenous Media and Political Imaginaries in Contemporary Bolivia contributes a wholly new and original perspective on indigenous media worlds in Bolivia: the collaborative and decolonizing authorship of indigenous media against the neoliberal multicultural state, and its key role in reimagining national politics. Zamorano Villarreal unravels the negotiations among indigenous media makers about how to fairly depict a gender, territorial, or justice conflict in their films to promote grassroots understanding of indigenous peoples in Bolivia's multicultural society.
Embodied Protests by
Embodied Protests examines how Bolivia's hesitant courtship with globalization manifested in the visceral and emotional diseases that afflicted many Bolivian women. Drawing on case studies conducted among market- and working-class women in the provincial town of Punata, Maria Tapias examines how headaches and debilidad, so-called normal bouts of infant diarrhea, and the malaise oppressing whole communities were symptomatic of profound social suffering. She approaches the narratives of distress caused by poverty, domestic violence, and the failure of social networks as constituting the knowledge that shaped their understandings of well-being. At the crux of Tapias's definitive analysis is the idea that individual health perceptions, actions, and practices cannot be separated from local cultural narratives or from global and economic forces. Evocative and compassionate, Embodied Protests gives voice to the human costs of the ongoing neoliberal experiment.
The Fornes Frame by
A key way to view Latina plays today is through the foundational frame of playwright and teacher Maria Irene Fornes, who has trained a generation of theatre artists and transformed the field of American theatre. Fornes, author of Fefu and Her Friends and Sarita and a nine-time Obie Award winner, is known for her plays that traverse cultural, spiritual, and aesthetic borders. In The Fornes Frame: Contemporary Latina Playwrights and the Legacy of Maria Irene Fornes, Anne García-Romero considers the work of five award-winning Latina playwrights in the early twenty-first century, offering her unique perspective as a theatre studies scholar who is also a professional playwright. The playwrights in this book include Pulitzer Prize-winner Quiara Alegría Hudes; Obie Award-winner Caridad Svich; Karen Zacarías, resident playwright at Arena Stage in Washington, DC; Elaine Romero, member of the Goodman Theatre Playwrights Unit in Chicago, Illinois; and Cusi Cram, company member of the LAByrinth Theater Company in New York City. Using four key concepts--cultural multiplicity, supernatural intervention, Latina identity, and theatrical experimentation--García-Romero shows how these playwrights expand past a consideration of a single culture toward broader, simultaneous connections to diverse cultures. The playwrights also experiment with the theatrical form as they redefine what a Latina play can be. Following Fornes's legacy, these playwrights continue to contest and complicate Latina theatre.
First Peoples by
As a free trade zone and Latin America's most popular destination, Cancn, Mexico, is more than just a tourist town. It is not only actively involved in the production of transnational capital but also forms an integral part of the state's modernization plan for rural, indigenous communities. Indeed, Maya migrants make up over a third of the city's population. A Return to Servitude is an ethnography of Maya migration within Mexico that analyzes the foundational role indigenous peoples play in the development of the modern nation-state. Focusing on tourism in the Yucatin Peninsula, M. Bianet Castellanos examines how Cancn came to be equated with modernity, how this city has shaped the political economy of the peninsula, and how indigenous communities engage with this vision of contemporary life. More broadly, she demonstrates how indigenous communities experience, resist, and accommodate themselves to transnational capitalism. Tourism and the social stratification that results from migration have created conflict among the Maya. At the same time, this work asserts, it is through engagement with modernity and its resources that they are able to maintain their sense of indigeneity and community.
