A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes
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Mythic Imagination and the Actor
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Unfolding the City
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
Pepón Osorio
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Pepón Osorio is an internationally recognized artist whose richly detailed installations challenge the stereotypes and misconceptions that shape our view of social institutions and human relationships. Osorio's colorful, often riotous installations are constructed from found objects and things that he customizes or creates. With a wry sense of humor, he probes sober topics, including prison life, domestic violence, AIDS, and poverty. Osorio's collaborative site-based works develop from his immersion into a community--residents of urban ethnic neighborhoods, employees who provide social services, children in foster care--and the discussions that result. As he addresses difficult themes such as race and gender, death and survival, and alienation and belonging, Osorio asks his audience to reconsider their assumptions and biases. In this book, Jennifer A. González shows that although Osorio draws on his Puerto Rican background and the immigrant experience for inspiration, his artistic statements bridge geographical barriers and class divides. Osorio's installations have been exhibited internationally, and his work is represented at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico in San Juan, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and other major museums. He has received numerous awards, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1999.
Artists from Latin American Cultures
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Latin Americans have long been relegated to the cultural background, obscured by the dominant European culture. This biographical dictionary profiles 75 artists from the United States and 13 nations of Central and South America and the Caribbean, including painters, sculptors, photographers, muralists, printmakers, installation artists, and performance artists. Some of their works recall pre-Columbian times; others confront the cultural imperialism of the U.S. over Latin America; and many explore how the dominant elements of culture can affect identities of class, gender, and sexuality. Profiled artists range from the renowned to the little-known: Frida Kahlo; Tina Modotti; Diego Rivera; Myrna Baez; Raquel Forner; Patrocino Barela; and many more. Color photographs are provided for many of the works. Each entry includes information about the artist's childhood, schooling, creative growth, and artistic styles and themes. Exemplary artworks and influences are described, along with a look at popular and critical responses. Supplemental features include artist cross references, a glossary of essential terms from the art world, and a number of vivid photos portraying the artists in their creative environments.
Our America
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Is Latino art an integral part of modern American art? Presenting over one hundred major artworks from the Smithsonian American Art Museum,Our America seeks to "recalibrate" enduring concepts about American national culture by exploring how one group of artists--those of Latin American descent and heritage--express their relationship to American art, history, and culture. E. Carmen Ramos addresses the whole issue of the definition of "Latino art" and how this emerged within the context of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s as American artists of Latino descent (Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, and, more recently, Dominican) began to give a tangible face to their culture and history. Highlights include an installation altar by Amalia Mesa-Bains, the "recycled" films of Raphael Montañez Ortiz, and a 1960 geometric painting by Carmen Herrera. Other notable artists include Olga Albizu, Melesio "Mel" Casas, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Margarita Cabrera, Enrique Chagoya, Teresita Fernández, Ken Gonzales-Day, Luis Jiménez, Ana Mendieta, Pepón Osorio, Sophie Rivera, Freddy Rodríguez, and John M. Valadez, among many others. Winner of first prize in the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) award for excellence, 2014 Author and curatorE. Carmen Ramos is the Smithsonian American Art Museum's curator of Latino art. She has organized numerous shows, including the fifth biennial at El Museo del Barrio in New York City in 2007. Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, PhD, the "grandfather" of this subject, and formerly associate director for creativity and culture at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, has written and published extensively on US/Latino cultural issues. Accompanies an exhibition with the following venues: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, October 25, 2013-March 2, 2014 The Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University in Miami, FL,March 28, 2014-June 22, 2014 Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, CA, September 21, 2014-January 11, 2015 Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City, UT, February 6, 2015-May 17, 2015 Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock, AR, October 16, 2015-January 17, 2016 Delaware Museum of Art in Wilmington, DE, March 5, 2016-May 29, 2016
Tapestries of Hope, Threads of Love
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This book tells the story of ordinary women living in terror and extreme poverty under General Pinochet's oppressive rule in Chile (1973--1989) and how their lives did and did not change following his reign. These women defied the military dictatorship by embroidering their sorrow on scraps of cloth, using needles and thread as one of the boldest means of popular protest and resistance in Latin America. The arpilleras they made -- patchwork tapestries with scenes of everyday life and memorials to their disappeared relatives -- were smuggled out of Chile and brought to the world the story of their fruitless searches in jails, morgues, government offices, and the tribunals of law for their husbands, brothers, and sons. Marjorie Agosín, herself a native of and exile from Chile, has spent over twenty years interviewing the arpilleristas and following their work. She knows their stories intimately and knows, too, that not one of them has ever found a disappeared relative alive. Still, many of them maintain hope and continue to make their arpilleras. Includes a history of the women's movement, testimonies from the women in their own words, and, for the first time, full-color plates of their beautiful, moving, and ultimately hopeful arpilleras. Anyone interested in the history of contemporary Latin America will want to read this powerful story.
Cecilia Vicuña: about to Happen
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Vicu a makes art of gathered materials from the ocean, the river and the street Beginning and ending at the edge of the ocean, Chilean-born artist and poet Cecilia Vicu a's (born 1948) artist's book serves as both a lament and love letter to the sea. Vicu a collects the detritus that washes up on shore and assembles out of the refuse tiny precarios and basuritas--little sculptures held together with nothing more than string and wire. About to Happen, which accompanies an exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, traces a decades-long practice that has refused categorical distinctions and thrived within the confluences of conceptual art, land art, feminist art, performance and poetry. In an era of increasing climate change and economic disparity, Vicu a's nuanced visual poetics--operating fluidly between concept and craft, text and textile--transforms the discarded into the elemental, paying acute attention to the displaced, the marginalized and the forgotten.
Photography in Argentina - Contradiction and Continuity
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From its independence in 1810 until the economic crisis of 2001, Argentina has been seen, in the national and international collective imaginary, as a modern country with a powerful economic system, a massive European immigrant population, an especially strong middle class, and an almost nonexistent indigenous culture. In some ways, the early history of Argentina strongly resembles that of the United States, with its march to the prairies and frontier ideology, the image of the cowboy as a national symbol (equivalent to the Argentine gaucho), the importance of the immigrant population, and the advanced and liberal ideas of the founding fathers. But did Argentine history truly follow a linear path toward modernization? How did photography help shape or deconstruct notions associated with Argentina? Photography in Argentina examines the complexities of this country's history, stressing the heterogeneity of its realities, and especially the power of constructed pho-tographic images--that is, the practice of altering reality for artistic expression, an important vein in Argentine photography. Influential specialists from Argentina have contributed essays on various topics, such as the shaping of national myths, the adaptation of gesture as related to the "disappeared" during the dictatorship period, the role of contemporary photography in the context of recent sociopolitical events, and the reinterpreting of traditional notions of documentary photography in Argentina and the rest of Latin America.
Making Art Concrete
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In the years after World War II, artists in Argentina and Brazil experimented with geo-metric abstraction and engaged in lively debates about the role of the artwork in society. Some of these artists used novel synthetic materials, creating objects that offered an alternative to established traditions in painting--proposing that these objects become part of everyday, concrete reality. Combining art historical and scientific analysis, experts from the Getty Conservation Institute and Getty Research Institute are collaborating with the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, a world-renowned collection of Latin American art, to research the formal strategies and material decisions of these artists working in the concrete and neo-concrete vein. Making Art Concrete presents works by Lygia Clark, Willys de Castro, Judith Lauand, Raúl Lozza, Hélio Oiticica, and Rhod Rothfuss, among others, with spectacu-lar new photography. The photographs, along with information about the now-invisible processes that determine the appearance of these works, are key to interpreting the artists' technical choices as well as the objects themselves. Indeed, this volume sheds further light on the social, political, and cultural underpinnings of the artists' propositions, making a compelling addition to the field of postwar Latin American art.
Sur Moderno: Journeys of Abstraction
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Presents highlights from the transformative gift of nearly 150 works of modern art from Latin America offered to The Museum of Modern Art by Patricia Phelps de CisnerosSur moderno: Journeys of Abstraction presents a richly illustrated overview of the significant cultural transformations propelled by the abstract and concrete art movements in South America between the mid-1940s and the late 1970s. Published to accompany a major exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, the catalogue features works by artists working in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Venezuela - including Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Jesús Rafael Soto, Alejandro Otero and Tomás Maldonado - who advanced the achievements of geometric abstraction in the early twentieth century, and built a new modern vision of the region.The catalogue highlights a selection of works gifted to MoMA by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros between 1993 and 2016, which had a transformative impact on the Museum's holdings of Latin American art. The Cisneros collection, which includes paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, allows for in-depth study of art produced in the region during this period, allowing the Museum to represent a more comprehensive, plural, and robust narrative of artistic practices that demonstrate the integral role of Latin America in the establishment of modern art.
Julio le Parc
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Julio Le Parc: Form into Action accompanies the first retrospective survey in the United States dedicated to Julio Le Parc (b. 1928, Mendoza, Argentina; lives in Cachan, France), a central and influential figure in participatory Kinetic art. The book explores Le Parc's groundbreaking innovations in the fields of light, movement, and perception, which the artist began soon after his arrival to Paris in 1958 and developed over the course of nearly six decades. With contributing essays in both English and Spanish by Rodrigo Alonso, Estrellita B. Brodsky, Valerie Hillings, and Edward J. Sullivan, the publication examines Le Parc's leadership role as a founder of the artists collaborative Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel (GRAV), his frequent exchanges with members of the Paris avant-garde from the late 1950s on, his influence on other Latin American artists, as well as his writings on art and society. The volume includes a selection of Le Parc's paintings, sculptures, and light installations presented in full-color reproductions as well as an autobiographical chronology written by the artist.
Relational Undercurrents
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Relational Undercurrents accompanies an exhibition curated by Tatiana Flores for the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California, which forms part of the Getty Foundation's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. This initiative examines the artistic legacy of Latin America and U.S. Latinos through a series of exhibitions and related programs. This exhibition catalog and volume edited by Flores and Michelle Ann Stephens calls attention to the artistic production of the Caribbean islands and their diasporas, challenging the conventional geographic and conceptual boundaries of Latin America. The editors offer an "archipelagic model," which proposes a mapping of the Caribbean from the perspective of its islands as distinct from its continental coasts. The exhibition, organized around the four themes of Conceptual Mappings, Perpetual Horizons, Landscape Ecologies, and Representational Acts, highlights thematic continuities in the art of the insular Caribbean, placing Hispanophone artists in visual conversation with those from Anglophone, Francophone, Dutch, and Danish backgrounds. It includes over eighty artists, among them Tania Bruguera, Allora & Calzadilla, Christopher Cozier, Jorge Pineda, Edouard Duval-Carrié, and Ebony G. Patterson. In accompanying essays, curators, critics, and scholars discuss particular artistic traditions in Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Haitian art and theorize the broader decolonial and archipelagic conceptual frameworks within which such works are produced. Relational Undercurrents will be on display that the Museum of Latin American Art from September 2017 through January 2018. Publication by the Museum of Latin American Art in collaboration with Fresco Books / SF Design, LLC. Distributed by Duke University Press.
Radical Women
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This stunning reappraisal offers long overdue recognition to the enormous contribution to the field of contemporary art of women artists in Latin America and those of Latino and Chicano heritage working during a pivotal time in history. Amidst the tumult and revolution that characterized the latter half of the 20th century in Latin America and the US, women artists were staking their claim in nearly every field. This wide ranging volume examines the work of more than 100 female artists with nearly 300 works in the fields of painting, sculpture, photography, video, performance art, and other experimental media. A series of thematic essays, arranged by country, address the cultural and political contexts in which these radical artists worked, while other essays address key issues such as feminism, art history, and the political body. Drawing its design and feel from the radical underground pamphlets, catalogs, and posters of the era, this is the first examination of a highly influential period in 20th-century art history. Published in association with the Hammer Museum.
Vida Americana - Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925-1945
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An in-depth look at the transformative influence of Mexican artists on their U.S. counterparts during a period of social change The first half of the 20th century saw prolific cultural exchange between the United States and Mexico, as artists and intellectuals traversed the countries' shared border in both directions. For U.S. artists, Mexico's monumental public murals portraying social and political subject matter offered an alternative aesthetic at a time when artists were seeking to connect with a public deeply affected by the Great Depression. The Mexican influence grew as the artists José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros traveled to the United States to exhibit, sell their work, and make large-scale murals, working side-by-side with local artists, who often served as their assistants, and teaching them the fresco technique. Vida Americana examines the impact of their work on more than 70 artists, including Marion Greenwood, Philip Guston, Isamu Noguchi, Jackson Pollock, and Charles White. It provides a new understanding of art history, one that acknowledges the wide-ranging and profound influence the Mexican muralists had on the style, subject matter, and ideology of art in the United States between 1925 and 1945.
The Matter of Photography in the Americas
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Latin American and Latino artists have used photography to engage with modern media landscapes and critique globalized economies since the 1960s. But rarely are these artists considered leaders in discussions about the theory and scholarship of photography or included in conversations about the radical transformations of photography in the digital era. The Matter of Photography in the Americas presents the work of more than eighty artists working in Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, South America, and Latino communities in the United States who all have played key roles in transforming the medium and critiquing its uses. Artists like Alfredo Jaar, Oscar Muñoz, Ana Mendieta, and Teresa Margolles highlight photography's ability to move beyond the impulse simply to document the world at large. Instead, their work questions the relationship between representation and visibility. With nearly 200 full-color images, this book brings together drawings, prints, installations, photocopies, and three-dimensional objects in an investigation and critique of the development and artistic function of photography. Essays on key works and artists shed new light on the ways photographs are made and consumed. Pressing at the boundaries of what defines culturally specific, photography-centric artwork, this book looks at how artists from across the Americas work with and through photography as a critical tool.
In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair
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Expanding our understanding of Mexico's important role in the story of modern art and design through the works of six important women artists and designers This stunning book unites for the first time the pioneering work of six artists and designers: Clara Porset, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, Cynthia Sargent, Sheila Hicks. Inspired by both local traditions and modern methods, these women made art that reflected and contributed to Mexico's rich artistic landscape at the height of the modern period. Their work--which included furniture design, jewelry, photography, photomurals, prints, sculpture, and textiles--was rooted in modernism and grounded in abstraction. This constellation of like-minded practitioners shared an affinity for Mexico, a country all lived in or visited between the 1940s and the 1970s. In bringing their works together, this book offers an entirely new lens on modernism in Mexico. Exploring the artistic culture of the country's postrevolutionary period, this book contains reproductions from the exhibition catalogue--no longer in print--that accompanied Clara Porset's groundbreaking 1952 exhibition in Mexico City Art in Daily Life as well as stunning illustrations of each artist's work. Essays written by an international team of esteemed scholars tell a more complete and nuanced story of Mexico's role as a center of modern art and design.
Beatriz González
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One of The New York Times Best Art Books of 2019 Explore the full range of the pioneering work of Colombian artist Beatriz González. At 80, Beatriz González is not only an internationally celebrated Colombian artist, but also a representative of the "radical women" generation from Latin America. Her work spans over six decades and her groundbreaking art has distinct figuration, involving the flattening of forms and use of strong and eccentric color palettes evocative of commercial advertising. Her work often has imagery associated with Western art history as well as mass media common to Colombia in order to shed light on the middleclass notions of taste, class, gender, and ethnicity. This book includes essays that explore González's early work, her late and current work, and her use of photography and archival images. It contextualizes her practice within Colombian history and major events that influenced her work. Filled with illustrations, this book shows the breadth of Beatriz González's oeuvre, which comments on domestic environments and vernacular traditions of her country with self-conscious irony. Published with the Pérez Art Museum Miami
Olga de Amaral
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The book traces Amaral's career over five decades, features more than 40 key pieces of work, and examines the Olga de Amaral's oeuvre through the lens of contemporary and fiber art. Olga de Amaral is one of the world's best-known artists in textile and one of the few South American women to be represented in the Arts and Crafts section at major international applied arts museums. De Amaral's origins are also displayed in her work: taken from the idyllic Columbian landscape and the urban architecture of Bogotá, her palette of colours is woven into monumental installations made of wool, horsehair and nylon. Using appliqués of plastic or gold leaf but also acrylic, the artist achieves new possibilities in design and in-tensity of colour within her textile creations. Her close relation to nature is also found in the title of the book and the accompanying exhibition that will travel the United States: To Weave a Rock, reflecting Olga de Amaral's 'weaving' of landscapes. Some fifty of her finest works from the 1960s to the present day are illustrated in both large-format and detail in the current publication and will be on display in the United States during the coming years -- at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Cran-brook Art Museum; and the Museum of Arts and Design, New York.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at Latino Art
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The essayist and cultural commentator Ilan Stavans and the analytic philosopher Jorge J. E. Gracia share long-standing interests in the intersection of art and ideas. Here they take thirteen pieces of Latino art, each reproduced in color, as occasions for thematic discussions. Whether the work at the center of a particular conversation is a triptych created by the brothers Einar and Jamex de la Torre, Andres Serrano's controversial Piss Christ, a mural by the graffiti artist BEAR_TCK, or Above All Things, a photograph by María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Stavans and Gracia's exchanges inevitably open out to literature, history, ethics, politics, religion, and visual culture more broadly. Autobiographical details pepper Stavans and Gracia's conversations, as one or the other tells what he finds meaningful in a given work. Sparkling with insight, their exchanges allow the reader to eavesdrop on two celebrated intellectuals--worldly, erudite, and unafraid to disagree--as they reflect on the pleasures of seeing.
Aloud!
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A multicultural selection of contemporary poems by Puerto Rican and other poets who meet at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York City.
The Twilight Zone
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* Finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature * An engrossing, incantatory novel about the legacy of historical crimes by the author of Space Invaders It is 1984 in Chile, in the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship. A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and finds a reporter, who records his testimony. The narrator of Nona Fernández's mesmerizing and terrifying novel The Twilight Zone is a child when she first sees this man's face on the magazine's cover with the words "I Tortured People." His complicity in the worst crimes of the regime and his commitment to speaking about them haunt the narrator into her adulthood and career as a writer and documentarian. Like a secret service agent from the future, through extraordinary feats of the imagination, Fernández follows the "man who tortured people" to places that archives can't reach, into the sinister twilight zone of history where morning routines, a game of chess, Yuri Gagarin, and the eponymous TV show of the novel's title coexist with the brutal yet commonplace machinations of the regime. How do crimes vanish in plain sight? How does one resist a repressive regime? And who gets to shape the truths we live by and take for granted? The Twilight Zone pulls us into the dark portals of the past, reminding us that the work of the writer in the face of historical erasure is to imagine so deeply that these absences can be, for a time, spectacularly illuminated.
In the Midst of Winter
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New York Times Bestseller Worldwide bestselling "dazzling storyteller" (Associated Press) Isabel Allende returns with a sweeping novel about three very different people who are brought together in a mesmerizing story that journeys from present-day Brooklyn to Guatemala in the recent past to 1970s Chile and Brazil. In the Midst of Winter begins with a minor traffic accident--which becomes the catalyst for an unexpected and moving love story between two people who thought they were deep into the winter of their lives. Richard Bowmaster--a 60-year-old human rights scholar--hits the car of Evelyn Ortega--a young, undocumented immigrant from Guatemala--in the middle of a snowstorm in Brooklyn. What at first seems just a small inconvenience takes an unforeseen and far more serious turn when Evelyn turns up at the professor's house seeking help. At a loss, the professor asks his tenant Lucia Maraz--a 62-year-old lecturer from Chile--for her advice. These three very different people are brought together in a mesmerizing story that moves from present-day Brooklyn to Guatemala in the recent past to 1970s Chile and Brazil, sparking the beginning of a long overdue love story between Richard and Lucia. Exploring the timely issues of human rights and the plight of immigrants and refugees, the book recalls Allende's landmark novel The House of the Spirits in the way it embraces the cause of "humanity, and it does so with passion, humor, and wisdom that transcend politics" (Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post). In the Midst of Winter will stay with you long after you turn the final page.
Masculine/Feminine
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Nelly Richard is one of the most prominent cultural theorists writing in Latin America today. As a participant in Chile's neo-avantgarde, Richard worked to expand the possibilities for cultural debate within the constraints imposed by the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990), and she has continued to offer incisive commentary about the country's transition to democracy. Well known as the founder and director of the influential Santiago-based journal Revista de crítica cultural, Richard has been central to the dissemination throughout Latin America of work by key contemporary thinkers, including Néstor García Canclini, Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, and Diamela Eltit. Her own writing provides rigorous considerations of Latin American identity, postmodernism, gender, neoliberalism, and strategies of political and cultural resistance. Richard helped to organize the 1987 International Conference on Latin American Women's Literature in Santiago, one of the most significant literary events to take place under the Pinochet dictatorship. Published in Chile in 1993, Masculine/Feminine develops some of the key issues brought to the fore during that landmark meeting. Richard theorizes why the feminist movement has been crucial not only to the liberation of women but also to understanding the ways in which power operated under the military regime in Chile. In one of her most widely praised essays, she explores the figure of the transvestite, artistic imagery of which exploded during the Chilean dictatorship. She examines the politics and the aesthetics of this phenomenon, particularly against the background of prostitution and shantytown poverty, and she argues that gay culture works to break down the social demarcations and rigid structures of city life. Masculine/Feminine makes available, for the first time in English, one of Latin America's most significant works of feminist theory.
Heretics
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In 1939, the Saint Louis sails from Hamburg into Havana's port with hundreds of Jewish refugees seeking asylum from the Nazi regime. From the docks, nine-year-old Daniel Kaminsky watches as the passengers, including his mother, father, and sister, become embroiled in a fiasco of Cuban corruption. But the Kaminskys have a treasure that they hope will save them: a small Rembrandt portrait of Christ. Yet six days later the vessel is forced to leave the harbor with the family, bound for the horrors of Europe. The Kaminskys, along with their priceless heirloom, disappear. Nearly seven decades later, the Rembrandt reappears in an auction house in London, prompting Daniel's son to travel to Cuba to track down the story of his family's lost masterpiece. He hires the down-on-his-luck private detective Mario Conde, and together they navigate a web of deception and violence in the morally complex city of Havana. In Heretics, Leonardo Padura takes us from the tenements and beaches of Cuba to Rembrandt's gloomy studio in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, telling the story of people forced to choose between the tenets of their faith and the realities of the world, between their personal desires and the demands of their times. A grand detective story and a moving historical drama, Padura's novel is as compelling, mysterious, and enduring as the painting at its center.
Lessons on Expulsion
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An award-winning and hard-hitting new voice in contemporary American poetry The first time I ever came the light was weak and carnivorous. I covered my eyes and the night cleared its dumb throat. I heard my mother wringing her hands the next morning. Of course I put my underwear on backwards, of course the elastic didn't work. What I wanted most at that moment was a sandwich. But I just nursed on this leather whip. I just splattered my sheets with my sadness. --from "Poem of My Humiliations" "What is life but a cross / over rotten water?" Poet, novelist, and essayist Erika L. Sánchez's powerful debut poetry collection explores what it means to live on both sides of the border--the border between countries, languages, despair and possibility, and the living and the dead. Sánchez tells her own story as the daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants and as part of a family steeped in faith, work, grief, and expectations. The poems confront sex, shame, race, and an America roiling with xenophobia, violence, and laws of suspicion and suppression. With candor and urgency, and with the unblinking eyes of a journalist, Sánchez roves from the individual life into the lives of sex workers, narco-traffickers, factory laborers, artists, and lovers. What emerges is a powerful, multifaceted portrait of survival.Lessons on Expulsion is the first book by a vibrant, essential new writer now breaking into the national literary landscape.
Peluda
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One of the most original performance poets of her generation, Melissa Lozada-Oliva has captivated crowds across the country and online with her vivid narratives. Humorous and biting, personal and communal, self-deprecating and unapologetically self-loving, peluda (meaning hairy or hairy beast) is the poet at her best. The book explores the relationship between femininity and body hair as well as the intersections of family, class, the immigrant experience, Latina identity, and much more, all through Lozada-Oliva's unique lens and striking voice.
Thunder Shaman
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As a "wild," drumming thunder shaman, a warrior mounted on her spirit horse, Francisca Kolipi's spirit traveled to other historical times and places, gaining the power and knowledge to conduct spiritual warfare against her community's enemies, including forestry companies and settlers. As a "civilized" shaman, Francisca narrated the Mapuche people's attachment to their local sacred landscapes, which are themselves imbued with shamanic power, and constructed nonlinear histories of intra- and interethnic relations that created a moral order in which Mapuche become history's spiritual victors. Thunder Shaman represents an extraordinary collaboration between Francisca Kolipi and anthropologist Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, who became Kolipi's "granddaughter," trusted helper, and agent in a mission of historical (re)construction and myth-making. The book describes Francisca's life, death, and expected rebirth, and shows how she remade history through multitemporal dreams, visions, and spirit possession, drawing on ancestral beings and forest spirits as historical agents to obliterate state ideologies and the colonialist usurpation of indigenous lands. Both an academic text and a powerful ritual object intended to be an agent in shamanic history, Thunder Shaman functions simultaneously as a shamanic "bible," embodying Francisca's power, will, and spirit long after her death in 1996, and an insightful study of shamanic historical consciousness, in which biography, spirituality, politics, ecology, and the past, present, and future are inextricably linked. It demonstrates how shamans are constituted by historical-political and ecological events, while they also actively create history itself through shamanic imaginaries and narrative forms.
My Documents
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Named a best book of 2015 by NPR, The Boston Globe, and Electric Literature. My Documents is the latest work from Alejandro Zambra, the award-winning Chilean writer whose first novel was heralded as the dawn of a new era in Chilean literature, and described by Junot Díaz as ?a total knockout." Now, in his first short story collection, Zambra gives us eleven stories of liars and ghosts, armed bandits and young lovers?brilliant portraits of life in Chile before and after Pinochet. The cumulative effect is that of a novel?or of eleven brief novels, intimate and uncanny, archived until now in a desktop folder innocuously called ?My Documents." Zambra's remarkable vision and erudition is on full display here; this book offers clear evidence of a sublimely talented writer working at the height of his powers.
The Bitch
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2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS TRANSLATED LITERATURE FINALIST In Colombia's brutal jungle, childless Damaris develops an intense and ultimately doomed relationship with an orphaned puppy. "The magic of this sparse novel is its ability to talk about many things, all of them important, while seemingly talking about something else entirely. What are those things? Violence, loneliness, resilience, cruelty. Quintana works wonders with her disillusioned, no-nonsense, powerful prose." Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling "The Bitch is a novel of true violence. Artist that she is, Pilar Quintana uncovers wounds we didn't know we had, shows us their beauty, and then throws a handful of salt into them." Yuri Herrera, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World Colombia's Pacific coast, where everyday life entails warding off the brutal forces of nature. In this constant struggle, nothing is taken for granted. Damaris lives with her fisherman husband in a shack on a bluff overlooking the sea. Childless and at that age "when women dry up," as her uncle puts it, she is eager to adopt an orphaned puppy. But this act may bring more than just affection into her home. The Bitch is written in a prose as terse as the villagers, with stormsâe*both meteorological and emotionalâe*lurking around each corner. Beauty and dread live side by side in this poignant exploration of the many meanings of motherhood and love.
Routledge Companion to Gender, Sex and Latin American Culture
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The Routledge Companion to Gender, Sex and Latin American Culture is the first comprehensive volume to explore the intersections between gender, sexuality, and the creation, consumption, and interpretation of popular culture in the Am¿cas. The chapters seek to enrich our understanding of the role of pop culture in the everyday lives of its creators and consumers, primarily in the 20th and 21st centuries. They reveal how popular culture expresses the historical, social, cultural, and political commonalities that have shaped the lives of peoples that make up the Am¿cas, and also highlight how pop culture can conform to and solidify existing social hierarchies, whilst on other occasions contest and resist the status quo. Front and center in this collection are issues of gender and sexuality, making visible the ways in which subjects who inhabit intersectional identities (sex, gender, race, class) are "othered", as well as demonstrating how these same subjects can, and do, use pop-cultural phenomena in self-affirmative and progressively transformative ways. Topics covered in this volume include TV, film, pop and performance art, hip-hop, dance, slam poetry, gender-fluid religious ritual, theater, stand-up comedy, graffiti, videogames, photography, graphic arts, sports spectacles, comic books, sci-fi and other genre novels, loter¿card games, news, web, and digital media.
Essays on Hilda Hilst
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This book is the first collection of critical essays on Hilda Hilst (1930-2004) published in English. It brings together a variety of perspectives on one of Latin America's most inventive and innovative authors. Nine essays by scholars and translators reflect about various aspects of her work, placing it in the context of Brazil and world literature. During her lifetime, Hilst won several major national literary awards and attracted legions of devoted readers. Her writing spanned styles and genres, encompassing poetry, theatre, and experimental fiction. She was also considered to be "a writer's writer," and her literary achievements eluded both mainstream acclaim and international recognition. In recent years, Hilst's books have enjoyed increased visibility in Brazil and beyond. A host of translators (including three contributors to this volume) have finally made some of her masterpieces available in English. This pioneering collection of essays should excite longtime readers and introduce her to a new audience.
Affectual Erasure
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Comprehensive examination of how Indigenous peoples have been represented in Argentine film.
The Cinema of Cuba
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Contemporary Cuba is opening up to the rest of the world. Its colonial past and the Communist revolution have left a lasting imprint on society, yet there is a tangible sense of rapid change which is reflected in the island's national cinema. New screen technologies and digital distribution media have supported the efficacy and global reach of Cuban filmmakers whose work, somewhat in lieu of adequate distribution and traditional screening facilities in Cuba itself, is often disseminated via 'flash' (USB memory sticks).Channelling an energetic DIY attitude through grassroots movements and ad-hoc resourcefulness, the new filmmakers of Cuba have inspired the editors of this book to embrace their contagious enthusiasm through essays on authentic Cuban cinema. Whilst the book provides a comprehensive overview of the history behind current practices, it also moves beyond this to examine key case studies as well as 'snapshots' of individuals working within the industry today. Chapters celebrate the shared creativity as well as diversity of Cuban cinema, including both productions of the Cuban Film Institute's (ICAIC) as well as those from the industry margins.The films discussed demonstrate a driving cinematic force through social criticism, the emphasis of debate and historical change through film, reassessments of gender relations, the use of new technologies and much more.
Cines de Cuba. Photographs by Carolina Sandretto. Ediz. Illustrata
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In 1953, Cuba had 694 cinemas and theaters. Havana alone had 134, more than New York or Paris. In 2014, documentary photographer Carolina Sandretto set out to find and photograph, with a 1950s' medium-format camera, the remaining cinemas from that golden era. This book is the visual document of her journey. "The book is a voyage around the Island during which I documented what are the cinemas now and how do they look like outside and inside. These buildings, that where once the gathering of the people, have fallen into the oblivion of their own society". Carolina Sandretto
Defiant Itineraries
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How did Caribbean rituals helped form new currents in the performing and visual arts of the United States? This book answers this question through an examination of the Caribbean-inspired dance creations of dancer/choreographer Katherine Dunham and the experimental films of avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren.
Ism, Ism, Ism / Ismo, Ismo, Ismo
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Ism, Ism, Ism / Ismo, Ismo, Ismo is the first comprehensive, United States-based film program and catalogue to treat the full breadth of Latin America's vibrant experimental film production. The exhibition features key historical and contemporary films from Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and the United States. From innovative works by Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica and Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo to the breathtaking yet practically unknown ouevre of queer Ecuadorian filmmaker Eduardo Solá Franco, the exhibition takes both the aficionado and the open-minded viewer on a journey into a wealth of materials culled from the forgotten corners of Latin American film archives. Equally unprecedented in its approach and scope, the accompanying fully bilingual catalogue features major scholars and artists working across nationalities, mediums, and time periods. Lerner and Piazza assemble a mix of original content authored by key curators, scholars, and archivists from Latin America: eighteen essays and articles translated for the first time pertaining to the history of Latin American experimental film, historical image-documents that are fundamental to the history of experimental film in Latin America, and program notes from the exhibition's programs. The collection is an invaluable resource for scholars, curators, artists and others interested in the history of Latin America, modern art, experimental and avant garde film, political and Third Cinema, and other noncommercial cinemas. Published in association with the Los Angeles Filmforum, and as part of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA.
Babel
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From Tijuana to Tokyo: The making of the final film of Iñárritu's acclaimed trilogy Mexican film director Alejandro González Iñárritu, along with top photographers Mary Ellen Mark, Patrick Bard, Graciela Iturbide, and Miguel Rio Branco, bring together their highly perceptive visions on cultural diversity in a book that combines seductive images and firsthand remarks on the unique experience of shooting Babel. Winner of the Best Director prize at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, the film is the third in the director's trilogy started by Amores Perros and 21 Grams. Shot in Morocco, Tijuana, and Tokyo, and involving a multilingual cast lead by Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael García Bernal, and Koji Yakusho, as well non-professional actors from the three countries portrayed, Babel continues the director's quest to explore the effects of loss and grief, and seeks to relate the modern implications of ancient myth on the origins of human inability to successfully communicate. This book is a visual recollection of the parallel stories and real-life characters that revolved around the making of Babel, and the unexpected ways in which fiction and reality collide. Photographs both from the set and the surrounding disparate landscapes are paired with the director's personal commentary on the larger-than-life film shoot. Introduced with essays by novelist and poet Eliseo Alberto and Gonzalez Iñárritu, as well as an interview with the director by Rodrigo García, the result is an engaging book that both complements Babel's powerful statement on the barrier of language, and reveals the fascinating reality of the people and places that inspired the film. The director: Born in Mexico City in 1963, Alejandro González Iñárritu studied filmmaking and theater and composed music for Mexican features before directing and producing his debut feature film, Amores Perros (2000), which was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Foreign Language Film and received over 53 awards from all over the world, including BAFTAs, the Golden Globes, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Edinburgh, San Sebastian, and Toronto. Iñárritu's follow-up film, 21 Grams (2003), which he directed, co-wrote, and produced, starred Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, and Naomi Watts. Both Del Toro and Watts received Oscar nominations for their roles in the film and Penn won the Jury Prize for Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival. Babel, which will be released worldwide in November 2006, garnered the Best Director Prize at the 59th Cannes Film Festival. Iñárritu lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children. Text in English, French, German, and Spanish
Roma
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Acclaimed Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón's most recent project, Roma, is a semi-autobiographical film focusing on a domestic worker for a middle-class family in Mexico City in the 1970s. A visual meditation, a soundscape of the oldest city in the Americas, Roma captures an intimate, unique time and space, where women provided the glue that kept the world together, yet were always invisible and inaudible. A mirror of the city it portrays, Roma is an emotional earthquake, a world about to shatter, held together by the equilibrium, tenderness, and strength of one woman, the beating heart of the story. Film imagery by Alfonso Cuarón Photography by Carlos Somonte Introduction by Valeria Luiselli
Contemporary Latin American Cinema
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This engaging book explores some of the most significant films to emerge from Latin America since 2000, an extraordinary period of international recognition for the region's cinema. Each chapter assesses an individual film, with some contributors considering the reasons for the unprecedented commercial and critical successes of movies such as City of God, The Motorcycle Diaries, Y tu mam tambi n, and Nine Queens, while others examine why equally important films failed to break out on the international circuit. Written by leading specialists, the chapters not only offer textual analysis, but also trace the films' social context and production conditions, as well as critical national and transnational issues. Their well-rounded analyses provide a rich picture of the state of contemporary filmmaking in a range of Latin American countries. Nuanced and thought-provoking, the readings in this book will provide invaluable interpretations for students and scholars of Latin American film. Contributions by: Sarah Barrow, Nuala Finnegan, David William Foster, Miraim Haddu, Geoffrey Kantaris, Deborah Shaw, Lisa Shaw, Rob Stone, Else R. P. Vieira, and Claire Williams.
Spinning Mambo into Salsa
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Arguably the world's most popular partnered social dance form, salsa's significance extends well beyond the Latino communities which gave birth to it. The growing international and cross-cultural appeal of this Latin dance form, which celebrates its mixed origins in the Caribbean and inSpanish Harlem, offers a rich site for examining issues of cultural hybridity and commodification in the context of global migration. Salsa consists of countless dance dialects enjoyed by varied communities in different locales. In short, there is not one dance called salsa, but many.Spinning Mambo into Salsa, a history of salsa dance, focuses on its evolution in three major hubs for international commercial export - New York, Los Angeles, and Miami. The book examines how commercialized salsa dance in the 1990s departed from earlier practices of Latin dance, especially 1950smambo. Topics covered include generational differences between Palladium Era mambo and modern salsa; mid-century antecedents to modern salsa in Cuba and Puerto Rico; tension between salsa as commercial vs. cultural practice; regional differences in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami; the role of theWeb in salsa commerce; and adaptations of social Latin dance for stage performance. Throughout the book, salsa dance history is linked to histories of salsa music, exposing how increased separation of the dance from its musical inspiration has precipitated major shifts in Latin dance practice.As a whole, the book dispels the belief that one version is more authentic than another by showing how competing styles came into existence and contention. Based on over 100 oral history interviews, archival research, ethnographic participant observation, and analysis of Web content and commerce,the book is rich with quotes from practitioners and detailed movement description.
The Gods of Tango
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February 1913: seventeen-year-old Leda, carrying only a small trunk and her father's cherished violin, leaves her Italian village for a new home, and a new husband, in Argentina. Arriving in Buenos Aires, she discovers that he has been killed, but she remains: living in a tenement, without friends or family, on the brink of destitution. Still, she is seduced by the music that underscores life in the city: tango, born from lower-class immigrant voices, now the illicit, scandalous dance of brothels and cabarets. Leda eventually acts on a long-held desire to master the violin, knowing that she can never play in public as a woman. She cuts off her hair, binds her breasts, and becomes "Dante," a young man who joins a troupe of tango musicians bent on conquering the salons of high society. Now, gradually, the lines between Leda and Dante begin to blur, and feelings that she has long kept suppressed reveal themselves, jeopardizing not only her musical career, but her life. Richly evocative of place and time, its prose suffused with the rhythms of the tango, its narrative at once resonant and gripping, this is De Robertis's most accomplished novel yet.
Defiant Itineraries
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How did Caribbean rituals helped form new currents in the performing and visual arts of the United States? This book answers this question through an examination of the Caribbean-inspired dance creations of dancer/choreographer Katherine Dunham and the experimental films of avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren.
The Sweet Penance of Music
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A monumental study of musical practices in 18th century Santiago de Chile, and the only English-language monograph about Chilean colonial music, A Sweet Penance of Music offers a comprehensive view of musicians within the city and their links with other Latin American urban centers in thewider colonial system. Author Alejandro Vera, recent winner of the International Casa de las Americas Musicology Prize for the Spanish edition of his monograph, provides a fascinating account of the quotidian cultural and social significance of music in varying physical spheres - from cathedrals,convents, and monasteries, to private houses and public spaces. He brings to life a city long neglected in the shadow of other colonial centers of economic power, asserting the importance of duality in the period and its music - particularly centering one nun harpist's conception of music as "sweetpenance." Drawing from historical documents and musical scores of the period, A Sweet Penance of Music breaks new ground, laying the foundation for a revisionist approach to the study of music in the colonial Americas.
The Tide Was Always High
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In 1980, the celebrated new wave band Blondie headed to Los Angeles to record a new album and along with it, the cover song "The Tide Is High," originally written by Jamaican legend John Holt. Featuring percussion by Peruvian drummer and veteran LA session musician "Alex" Acu#65533;a, and with horns and violins that were pure LA mariachi by way of Mexico, "The Tide Is High" demonstrates just one of the ways in which Los Angeles and the music of Latin America have been intertwined since the birth of the city in the eighteenth century. The Tide Was Always High gathers together essays, interviews, and analysis from leading academics, artists, journalists, and iconic Latin American musicians to explore the vibrant connections between Los Angeles and Latin America. Published in conjunction with the Getty's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, the book shows how Latin American musicians and music have helped shape the city's culture--from Hollywood film sets to recording studios, from vaudeville theaters to Sunset Strip nightclubs, and from Carmen Miranda to P#65533;rez Prado and Juan Garc#65533;a Esquivel.
Música Típica
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The Panama Canal is a world-famous site central to the global economy, but the social, cultural, and political history of the country along this waterway is little known outside its borders. In Música Típica, author Sean Bellaviti sheds light on a key element of Panamanian culture, namely the story of cumbia or, as Panamanians frequently call it, "música típica," a form of music that enjoys unparalleled popularity throughout Panama. Through extensive archival and ethnographic research, Bellaviti reconstructs a twentieth-century social history that illuminates the crucial role music has played in the formation of national identities in Latin America. Focusing, in particular, on the relationship between cumbia and the rise of populist Panamanian nationalism in the context of U.S. imperialism, Bellaviti argues that this hybrid musical form, which forges links between the urban and rural as well as the modern and traditional, has been essential to the development of a sense of nationhood among Panamanians. With their approaches to musical fusion and their carefully curated performance identities, cumbia musicians have straddled some of the most pronounced schisms in Panamanian society.
Musicians in Transit
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In Musicians in Transit Matthew B. Karush examines the transnational careers of seven of the most influential Argentine musicians of the twentieth century: Afro-Argentine swing guitarist Oscar Alemán, jazz saxophonist Gato Barbieri, composer Lalo Schifrin, tango innovator Astor Piazzolla, balada singer Sandro, folksinger Mercedes Sosa, and rock musician Gustavo Santaolalla. As active participants in the globalized music business, these artists interacted with musicians and audiences in the United States, Europe, and Latin America and contended with genre distinctions, marketing conventions, and ethnic stereotypes. By responding creatively to these constraints, they made innovative music that provided Argentines with new ways of understanding their nation's place in the world. Eventually, these musicians produced expressions of Latin identity that reverberated beyond Argentina, including a novel form of pop ballad; an anti-imperialist, revolutionary folk genre; and a style of rock built on a pastiche of Latin American and global genres. A website with links to recordings by each musician accompanies the book.
Elite Art Worlds
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The Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) in Buenos Aires operated for less than a decade, but by the time of its closure in 1971 it had become the undeniable epicenter of Latin American avant-garde music. Providing the first in-depth study of CLAEM, author Eduardo Herreratells the story of the fellowship program - funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Di Tella family - that, by allowing the region's promising young composers to study with a roster of acclaimed faculty, produced some of the most prominent figures within the art world, including Rafael AponteLedee, Coriun Aharonian, and Blas Emilio Atehortua.Combining oral histories, ethnographic research, and archival sources, Elite Art Worlds explores regional discourses of musical Latin Americanism and the embrace, articulation, and resignification of avant-garde techniques and perspectives during the 1960s. But the story of CLAEM reveals much more:intricate webs of US and Argentine philanthropy, transnational currents of artistic experimentation and innovation, and the role of art in constructing elite identities. By looking at CLAEM as both an artistic and philanthropic project, Herrera illuminates the relationships between foreign policy,corporate interests, and funding for the arts in Latin America and the United States against the backdrop of the Cold War.
Listening in Detail
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Listening in Detail is an original and impassioned take on the intellectual and sensory bounty of Cuban music as it circulates between the island, the United States, and other locations. It is also a powerful critique of efforts to define "Cuban music" for ethnographic examination or market consumption. Contending that the music is not a knowable entity but a spectrum of dynamic practices that elude definition, Alexandra T. Vazquez models a new way of writing about music and the meanings assigned to it. "Listening in detail" is a method invested in opening up, rather than pinning down, experiences of Cuban music. Critiques of imperialism, nationalism, race, and gender emerge in fragments and moments, and in gestures and sounds through Vazquez's engagement with Alfredo Rodríguez's album Cuba Linda (1996), the seventy-year career of the vocalist Graciela Pérez, the signature grunt of the "Mambo King" Dámaso Pérez Prado, Cuban music documentaries of the 1960s, and late-twentieth-century concert ephemera.
Panpipes and Ponchos
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Melodious panpipes and kena flutes. The shimmering strums of a charango. Poncho-clad musicians playing "El Condor Pasa" at subway stops or street corners while selling their recordings. These sounds and images no doubt come to mind for many "world music" fans when they recall their earlyencounters with Andean music groups. Ensembles of this type - known as "Andean conjuntos" or "pan-Andean bands" - have long formed part of the world music circuit in the Global North. In the major cities of Latin America, too, Andean conjuntos have been present in the local music scene for decades,not only in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador (i.e., in the Andean countries), but also in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. It is solely in Bolivia, however, that the Andean conjunto has represented the preeminent folkloric-popular music ensemble configuration for interpreting national musicalgenres from the late 1960s onward.Despite its frequent association with indigenous villages, the music of Andean conjuntos bears little resemblance to the indigenous musical expressions of the Southern Andes. Created by urban criollo and mestizo folkloric artists, the Andean conjunto tradition represents a form of mass-mediatedfolkloric music, one that is only loosely based on indigenous musical practices. Panpipes and Ponchos reveals that in the early-to-mid 20th century, a diverse range of musicians and ensembles, including estudiantinas, female vocal duos, bolero trios, art-classical composers, and mestizo panpipegroups, laid the groundwork for the Andean conjunto format to eventually take root in the Bolivian folklore scene amid the boom decade of the 1960s. Author Fernando Rios analyzes local musical trends in conjunction with government initiatives in nation-building and the ideologies of indigenismo andmestizaje. Beyond the local level, Rios also examines key developments in Bolivian national musical practices through their transnational links with trends in Peru, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and France. As the first book-length study that chronicles how Bolivia's folkloric music movementarticulated, on the one hand, with Bolivian state projects, and on the other, with transnational artistic currents, for the pivotal era spanning the 1920s to 1960s, Panpipes and Ponchos offers new perspectives on the Andean conjunto's emergence as Bolivia's favored ensemble line-up in the field ofnational folkloric-popular music.
Confessions of a Radical Chicano Doo-Wop Singer
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A pioneer of Chicano rock, Rubén Funkahuatl Guevara performed with Frank Zappa, Johnny Otis, Bo Diddley, Tina Turner, and Celia Cruz, though he is best known as the front man of the 1970s experimental rock band Ruben And The Jets. Here he recounts how his youthful experiences in the barrio La Veinte of Santa Monica in the 1940s prepared him for early success in music and how his triumphs and seductive brushes with stardom were met with tragedy and crushing disappointments. Brutally honest and open, Confessions of a Radical Chicano Doo-Wop Singer is an often hilarious and self-critical look inside the struggle of becoming an artist and a man. Recognizing racial identity as composite, contested, and complex, Guevara--an American artist of Mexican descent--embraces a Chicano identity of his own design, calling himself a Chicano "culture sculptor" who has worked to transform the aspirations, alienations, and indignities of the Mexican American people into an aesthetic experience that could point the way to liberation.
Oscar de la Renta
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A full-scale retrospective of Oscar de la Renta's work, this magnificent volume, which accompanies an exhibition at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, features the designs that defined the fashion icon's long career. In this fabulous book, readers will be immersed in the designs that made Oscar de la Renta one of fashion's most influential designers, who dressed celebrities, American First Ladies, and socialites from around the world. Thematic sections will trace de la Renta's journey, from his upbringing in the Dominican Republic; the rise of his career in Spain, where he gained his first commissions; his formative years spent in the world's preeminent fashion houses; and the eventual creation of the company that bears his name. Luxurious color illustrations include images from his historic 1973 fashion show at Versailles, his designs worn from the red carpet to the White House by glamor icons such as Sarah Jessica Parker and Taylor Swift, along with state dinner-worthy creations made exclusively for Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush. In addition, historic images from de la Renta's archives illuminate both the breadth and depth of the designer's work. André Leon Talley's heartfelt introduction looks back on a long and treasured friendship, and the authors examine the designer's artistry and technique, as well as the historical and cultural influences that fostered his visionary work in this elaborate tribute to a singular individual.
Blacktino Queer Performance
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Staging an important new conversation between performers and critics, Blacktino Queer Performance approaches the interrelations of blackness and Latinidad through a stimulating mix of theory and art. The collection contains nine performance scripts by established and emerging black and Latina/o queer playwrights and performance artists, each accompanied by an interview and critical essay conducted or written by leading scholars of black, Latina/o, and queer expressive practices. As the volume's framing device, "blacktino" grounds the specificities of black and brown social and political relations while allowing the contributors to maintain the goals of queer-of-color critique. Whether interrogating constructions of Latino masculinity, theorizing the black queer male experience, or examining black lesbian relationships, the contributors present blacktino queer performance as an artistic, critical, political, and collaborative practice. These scripts, interviews, and essays not only accentuate the value of blacktino as a reading device; they radiate the possibilities for thinking through the concepts of blacktino, queer, and performance across several disciplines. Blacktino Queer Performance reveals the inevitable flirtations, frictions, and seductions that mark the contours of any ethnoracial love affair. Contributors. Jossiana Arroyo, Marlon M. Bailey, Pamela Booker, Sharon Bridgforth, Jennifer Devere Brody, Cedric Brown, Bernadette Marie Calafell, Javier Cardona, E. Patrick Johnson, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, John Keene, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, D. Soyini Madison, Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr., Andreea Micu, Charles I. Nero, Tavia Nyong'o, Paul Outlaw, Coya Paz, Charles Rice-González, Sandra L. Richards, Matt Richardson, Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, Celiany Rivera-Velázquez, Tamara Roberts, Lisa B. Thompson, Beliza Torres Narváez, Patricia Ybarra, Vershawn Ashanti Young
Creating Carmen Miranda
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Carmen Miranda got knocked down and kept going. Filming an appearance on The Jimmy Durante Show on August 4, 1955, the "ambassadress of samba" suddenly took a knee during a dance number, clearly in distress. Durante covered without missing a beat, and Miranda was back on her feet in a matter of moments to continue with what she did best: performing. By the next morning, she was dead from heart failure at age 46. This final performance in many ways exemplified the power of Carmen Miranda. The actress, singer, and dancer pursued a relentless mission to demonstrate the provocative theatrical force of her cultural roots in Brazil. Armed with bare-midriff dresses, platform shoes, and her iconic fruit-basket headdresses, Miranda stole the show in films like That Night in Rio and The Gang's All Here. For American film audiences, her life was an example of the exoticism of a mysterious, sensual South America. For Brazilian and Latin American audiences, she was an icon. For the gay community, she became a work of art personified and a symbol of courage and charisma. In Creating Carmen Miranda, Kathryn Bishop-Sanchez takes the reader through the myriad methods Miranda consciously used to shape her performance of race, gender, and camp culture, all to further her journey down the road to becoming a legend.
Jose, Can You See?
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Sandoval-Sanchez shines his spotlight on the representation and stereotyping of Latinos on stage. In act one he scans the way they are typecast on Broadway and in popular culture, in act two he offers a fresh perspective on how they represent themselves in their own theatrical productions.
Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism
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Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism traces how Latinx theater in the United States has engaged with the policies, procedures, and outcomes of neoliberal economics in the Americas from the 1970s to the present. Patricia A. Ybarra examines IMF interventions, NAFTA, shifts in immigration policy, the escalation of border industrialization initiatives, and austerity programs. She demonstrates how these policies have created the conditions for many of the most tumultuous events in the Americas in the last forty years, including dictatorships in the Southern Co≠ the 1994 Cuban Rafter Crisis; femicides in Juárez, Mexico; the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico; and the rise of narcotrafficking as a violent and vigorous global business throughout the Americas. Latinx artists have responded to these crises by writing and developing innovative theatrical modes of representation about neoliberalism. Ybarra analyzes the work of playwrights María Irene Fornés, Cherríe Moraga, Michael John Garcés, Caridad Svich, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Victor Cazares, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Tanya Saracho, and Octavio Solis. In addressing histories of oppression in their home countries, these playwrights have newly imagined affective political and economic ties in the Americas. They also have rethought the hallmark movements of Latin politics in the United States--cultural nationalism, third world solidarity, multiculturalism--and their many discontents.
Theatre of the sphere : the vibrant being
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The selections highlighted in this section are just the tip of the iceberg! We have lots of DVDs, LPs, and CDs by Latiné artists in the CalArts Library!
Can't find what you want? Contact a librarian at libref@calarts.edu for help finding your favorite artists, composers, performers, and more!
Amores Perros
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Three different people are catapulted into dramatic and unforeseen circumstances in the wake of a terrible car crash: a young punk stumbles into the sinister underground world of dog fighting; an injured supermodel's designer pooch disappears into the apartment's floorboards; and an ex-radical turned hit man rescues a Rotweiler with a gunshot wound.
Pan's labyrinth
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Set in 1944 Spain, against the backdrop of the anti-Franco guerrilla warfare. A young girl goes to live with her mother and her new stepfather on a rural military outpost. Following her discovery of a labyrinth and the local group of resistance fighters, she is involved in a series of strange encounters.
Viridiana
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Novice nun Viridiana does her utmost to maintain her Catholic principles, but her lecherous uncle and a motley assemblage of paupers force her to confront the limits of her idealism
City of God
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Built in the 1960s, Cidade de Deus (City of God) is a sprawling housing project built to keep the poor as far as possible from Rio's glamorous beaches and resorts. By the 1980s, it has degenerated into a war zone so dangerous that visitors from outside risk being shot to death on sight, a poisonous stew of poverty, drugs, and crime. "If you run away, they get you, and if you stay, they get you, too," says Rocket, who wants to be a photographer. Rocket's brother, friends, and neighbors begin with truck stick-ups, which lead to brothel hold-ups that lead to murder that leads to coke dealing that leads to street brawls with armies of gun-toting 11-year-olds. Soon a full-scale gang war rages in the City of God--understandably not covered by wary Rio photojournalists--but just the opportunity Rocket needs to make his move, get a job at a newspaper, and get out.
The selections highlighted in this section are just the tip of the iceberg! We have lots of streaming media by Latiné artists available in the CalArts Library databases!
Can't find what you want? Contact a librarian at libref@calarts.edu for help finding your favorite artists, composers, performers, and more!
