REVIEWS
Ilán Stavans, ed. Quinceañera. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2010. 134
pp.
Nueve interpretaciones de la quinceañera can be found in this edited volume,
part of the Ilan Stavans Latino Civilization Series published by Greenwood Press. The
first section, Preparativos, consists of six previously published essays from the 1990s to
early 2000 that present an academic study of the quinceañera. Most focus on the practice
in the U.S., with the exception of Valentina Napolitano, who documents a quinceañera
in a low-income community in Mexico. Following these essays is a short but welcome
section of three testimonios by noted authors as well as an interview with a dressmaker.
As a set, this collection offers multiple strands of scholarship and frameworks for
understanding quinceañeras.
Some of these essays address the issue of who claims and wants to reclaim the
quinceañera as tradition. First is the origin question: where did it really come from?
What is clear across the essays is that there is no definitive answer to the origin question,
though some have pointed to evidence for both Indigenous and European antecedents.
Particularly interesting in some of these essays was the question of who wants to reclaim
the tradition toward religious, consumerist, or community identity goals. Several articles
discuss the commercialization of the quinceañera by market forces, and the impact this
has on the family and community’s resources. Along these lines, Kristen Deiter’s essay
centers on competing religious and consumerist influences on the practice of
quinceañeras. Framed as a dichotomy of spiritual benefactors grappling against spiritual
detractors, the religious influences hope to reclaim and shape the tradition to further fit
church practices (for instance, as another sacrament). Similarly, U.S. popular consumerist
culture vies to claim the soul of the quinceañera tradition through its super-sizing of
the event and its associated costs.
Perhaps in an attempt to assimilate the quinceañera into U.S. mainstream
cultural understandings, the celebration has been compared to mini-weddings and
Latina-style debutante balls. Though some articles reflect this type of analysis, others
adopt a more nuanced perspective, examining the sense of cultural belonging and
continuity alongside the oppressive gender and class aspects. Ruth Horowitz and Karen
Mary Dávalos in particular examine the creative co-construction of the quinceañera as
evidence of the fluidity of what we consider ritual or tradition. Using a
borderlands/Anzalduan mestizaje lens, Dávalos describes tradition “an open and
sometimes chaotic terrain that is constantly reconfigured in everyday experience” (9).
207
CAMINO REAL
Sara Arcaya offers an example of intergenerational recasting of tradition with her
description of quinceañera celebrations for boys, through the fiesta clavel. Julia Alvarez’s
testimonio represents a reimagining of tradition as she ends her piece with the idea that
her writing itself is a type of quinceañera, with wise women offering consejos as symbolic
damas en la corte. Finally, Judith Ortiz Cofer’s testimonio focused not on the party, but
on the sociocultural, economic and political aspects of the life of a quinceañera as she
recounts a story of a girl who serves as linguistic and cultural translator for her family,
navigating the terrains of public violences.
Underlying many of these pieces is a conceptual sifting of dichotomies, as
authors attempt to make sense of the striking contradictions and ongoing creative coconstructions of ritual and tradition surrounding the quinceañera. The intersecting
dimensions of social class, race, gender, ethnic and cultural identity, are all explored in
relation to the quinceañera. Is it a community effort to embrace cultural continuity, a
reaffirming of Christian values and commitments, a consumerist trap, an effort at
reinforcing patriarchal control of young women’s bodies… some combination of the
above? True to its stated goal, this collection, taken together, complicates rather than
translates, offering different lenses rather than an essentialized image.
Jennifer Ayala
Saint Peter’s College
Mary C. Beltrán. Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes: The Making and Meanings of Film
and TV Stardom. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. 212 pp.
In Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes, Mary C. Beltrán exposes how the racialized
production and publicity of U.S. media industries, in conjunction with social structures,
have shaped the stardom and opportunities of Latina/o actors. Indicating the book’s
broad relevance, Beltrán shows how promotion can reproduce or contest the status of
Latina/os in U.S. society with respect to race, gender, class, national identity, and
citizenship. The author accomplishes these goals through an accessible, clearly-written
book of seven chapters, each respectively devoted to a key transitional period for Latina/o
media representation and a single star: Dolores del Río, Desi Arnaz, Rita Moreno,
Freddie Prinze, Edward James Olmos, Jennifer Lopez, and, in the last chapter, both
Jessica Alba and Rosario Dawson. The book reveals a historical evolution, from silent
cinema to millennial film and television, of Latina/o stars and national identities in the
U.S. media and social imaginations.
208
REVIEWS
In conversation with scholars of Latina/o media and culture, the author makes
an argument about “Hollywood Latinidad,” an imagined characterization of Latina/o
identity constructed by media and advertising industries. Beltrán’s worthy contribution
is her analysis of Latinidad as manufactured by the U.S. film and television industries’
star promotion. Furthermore, the author contends that Hollywood Latinidad is a forum
through which conceptions of Latina/o ethnicity, racialization, and status vis-à-vis
mainstream white Anglo society are strengthened, contested, debated, and given
significance. She thereby accounts for the complex ways that Hollywood’s star
promotion influences and is influenced by racialized social and political economic
structures as well as social perceptions about Latina/os. Star promotion, then, is
intricately related to the citizenship status and work and life opportunities of U.S. peoples
of Latin American descent inside and outside of media industries.
Employing theories of racialization and of media stardom, Beltrán confirms
how star images have bolstered racial classifications and the privileging of whiteness.
Noteworthy is her examination of how Latina/o mestizaje, or racial hybridity, has been
a source of bewilderment that Hollywood has had to continuously negotiate in light of
the U.S. black-white racial binary. Racialization helps explain what Beltrán identifies
as the evolving ambivalent position of Latina/os: while Latina/os have had some
opportunities as stars playing complex, leading characters, they have had to endure
stereotypes, trivialization, and barriers to membership in Hollywood’s star system and
creative labor force. This situation, Beltrán demonstrates, reflects the ambivalent racial
and social standing of Latina/os in society at large.
Latino/a Stars takes us behind-the-scenes of star production and promotion.
Through extensive materials obtained through impressive archival research, the author
weaves her narrative with promotional posters, publicity stills, film exhibitors’ press books,
and studio-produced biographies. She examines the activities of talent managers as well
as the creative agency of actors in the construction of their own star images. Beltrán
also conducted interviews, completed an internship at a trade journal, and participated
in Latina/o advocacy events. However, Latina/o Stars is not an examination of the daily
workings and processes of the media industries. Also very present are secondary
accounts, box office figures, ratings, and press reviews. Publicity in this book is accurately
defined as not only the activities of industry promotion proper but also the creative
agency of stars and the discursive work of the press. Despite these slight criticisms, the
array of materials and sources is a strength, as Beltrán herself convincingly points out
that stardom is an intricate phenomenon that necessitates multiple methods.
In the final analysis, Beltrán has given us a thoroughly-researched, in-depth
historical account with explanatory power on the manufacture and publicity of Latina/o
209
CAMINO REAL
stars, the ambivalent racial position and shifting opportunities of Latina/o actors, and
the interaction of industrial and social conditions in the evolution of the racial and social
status of Latina/o stars and citizens.
Chad Thomas Beck
Randolph College
Juan J. Alonzo. Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes: The Ambivalence of Mexican
American Identity in Literature and Film. Tucson: The University of Arizona
Press, 2009. 196 pp.
Juan J. Alonzo’s Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes arrives at a moment when
Mexico is celebrating the Bicentennial of Independence from Spain (1810) and the
Centennial of the Mexican Revolution (1910), two of the three events that shaped
Mexico and established a relationship with its northern neighbor. The third event was
the war between the United States and Mexico (1846-1848). The Revolution of 1910
marked the beginning of migrations of Mexicans to the U.S. and the beginning of
cultural, political, and economic conflicts. Alonzo analyzes the troubled relationship
between the U.S. and Mexico based on the Revolution. During the twentieth century,
Mexico was seen by U.S. writers and filmmakers through the lens of the Revolution.
This is one of Alonzo’s central arguments, which leads one to conclude that Badmen is
not titled correctly. It is not an analysis of Mexican American identity in literature and
film; it mostly concerns Mexican stereotypes based on the Revolution.
In his Introduction “Ambivalence and Contingency in the Representation of
Mexican Identity,” Alonzo writes “While my study comments upon Mexican American
representation in its variety of forms, my analysis will focus on the production and
contestation of Mexican masculinity as it appears in several significant cinematic and
literary incarnations, namely in the characters of the ‘greaser,’ bandit revolutionary,
‘badman,’ and social deviant” (3). These stereotypes first surfaced in 1840s conquest
fiction. They were a vilification of a conquered people. The term “greaser” for a Mexican
male abounds in literature of different genres. Scholars such as Raymund D. Paredes,
Arnoldo de León, José Saldívar, Ramón Saldívar, and this reviewer in my Narratives of
Greater Mexico (UT Press, 2005), have returned to this nineteenth century racist
literature. Alonzo draws on Homi Bhabha’s view of stereotypes on understanding “the
processes of subjectification made possible (and plausible) through stereotypical discourse”
(cited by Alonzo 6). Following Bhabha, it is Alonzo’s task to understand the formation
210
REVIEWS
and transformation of Mexican subjects in film and literature though, I should add, that
the mode of production and reception of film versus literature is unique to each genre.
Film is a popular medium and we remain uncertain on the exact force of stereotypical
images on the American public. And in several key moments, Alonzo reads literature
against film. The stereotype is never completely static or one-dimensional; it changes
in the course of representation. Alonzo utilizes Bhabha’s notion of ambivalence and
contingency as he analyzes Mexican stereotypes in classic Western films and literature.
Historical records show that a common form of white supremacist justice
against African Americans and Mexicans was the lynching party. Chapter 1, “The
Greaser in Stephen Crane’s Mexican Stories and D.W. Griffith’s Early Westerns,” opens
with a scene from Griffith’s The Greaser’s Gauntlet (1908) as Alonzo describes how with
stark realism a greaser is hung by a tree and in the nick of time is saved from certain
death. Alonzo returns to the first decades of the twentieth century, when views of a still
largely unsettled west and U.S. Mexican populations came from the east coast. How to
understand conquered Mexican populations, Alonzo argues, was the task of Griffith’s
early New York silent films through the figure of the greaser. Mexicans appeared
regularly in Griffith’s films (1907-1910) and the greaser was portrayed as a treacherous,
lustful scoundrel. However, Alonzo redeems Griffith, well known for his negative
representation of African Americans in Birth of a Nation (1915). The greaser represented
with all the negative stereotypical attributes taken from nineteenth century literature is
in the end given human depth. In The Greaser’s Gauntlet, the wrongfully accused José,
the greaser, is saved by Mildred. In Stephen Crane’s short story “One Dash Horses”
(1895-96), another José is central to Crane’s ambivalent relationship to Mexicans. The
Anglo American Richardson is juxtaposed against José, his Mexican servant, and a
Mexican bandit. While traveling through Mexico, José saves Richardson’s life. Crane
distances himself from the racist dime novel with its white male hero and in his Mexican
stories, Anglo-American and Mexican alike exhibit both valor and fear in lifethreatening situations.
In Chapter 2 “Greasers, Bandits, and Revolutionaries: The Conflation of
Mexican Identity, 1910-20,” Alonzo establishes the Mexican Revolution as central to
the depiction of Mexican masculinity. The Hollywood western would have as its stock
evil character the bandit revolutionary. Francisco Villa’s incursion into the U.S., his 1916
raid on Columbus, New Mexico, sealed the fate for the bandit revolutionary in the figure
of Villa. The sombrero, the mustache, the grimacing menace, and the bandoleers would
be characteristic of the Mexican bandit. Villa –Dead or Alive (1916) made clear the
enemy. After 1910, early Western actors Bronco Billy Anderson, William S. Hart and
211
CAMINO REAL
Tom Mix, would be pitted against the Mexican bandit. Against this negative cinematic
representation, Alonzo reads Jack London’s “The Mexican” (1913) in which Mexican
Felipe Rivera journeys to the U.S. as a prize fighter to raise money to supply arms for
his Revolutionary faction. The little swarthy Mexican defeats the larger Anglo American
fighter amidst the racist crowd. For London, Rivera is the Revolution incarnate.
In Chapter 3 “The Western’s Ambivalence and the Mexican Badman,” Alonzo
looks at Porter Emerson Browne’s New York play The Badman (1923) and its two film
versions with Walter Huston (1930) and Wallace Beery (1941). The “badman” of the
play, Pancho Lopez, is a bandit modeled after Pancho Villa, who though a murderer also
satirizes American values and rules of propriety. The play established the broken
English-Spanish spoken by the Mexican character and the expression of evil, the sneer.
Chapters 4, 5 and 6 present detailed analysises of U.S. films and Chicano films
and literature. Chapter 4 “Stereotype, Idealism, and Contingency in the Revolutionary’s
Depiction” develops directly from the Mexican Revolutionary hero, from Pancho Villa
to the good Revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, to Américo Paredes’s novel The Shadow
(1998). Now here in filmmaker and writer there is a purpose for a Mexican character
beyond the stereotypes inherited from the nineteenth century. Though Villa remained
a buffoon –Wallace Beery in Viva Villa! (1934)– Zapata emerged as Hollywood’s hero
due to Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata! (1952) with Marlon Brando. Viva Zapata!, with
screenplay by John Steinbeck, depicts an idealist Zapata betrayed by the Revolution.
Zapata is an American seeking a democratic society. Alonzo analyzes the film against
the McCarthy era. It would have been useful to reference these portrayals with Chicano
literature. The Villa character was central to Teatro Campesino’s Los Vendidos (1967),
where stereotypical Mexican images from the past are presented for examination. The
Revolucionario is presented in the Beery mode, fat, filthy, and lustful. He is ridiculed
and rejected within the play. Because Alonzo notes that for Kazan and Steinbeck,
Zapata represented U.S. ideals, one of them being fidelity to one woman, reference to
Sandra Cisneros’s short story “Eyes of Zapata” (1991) where a different Zapata emerges
may have been useful.
Chapter 4 ends with Américo Paredes’s 1955 novel The Shadow (1998).
Chapter 5 “Gregorio Cortez in the Chicano/a Imaginary and American Popular
Culture” is devoted entirely to Paredes. I will take these together. The Shadow is set in
Mexico twenty years after the Revolution. This novel does not resemble Hollywood’s
depictions of the Revolutionary. Paredes’ novel is like Mexican novels Pedro Páramo
(1955) and La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962). Paredes understood this. To his credit,
Alonzo reads The Shadow as a novel of Mexico though I beg to differ when Alonzo
212
REVIEWS
writes “The Shadow departs radically from accepted notions of a unified Chicano/a
subject in resistance to Anglo-American hegemony” (108). This is to spare Paredes from
Renato Rosaldo’s critique of the Chicano warrior hero in his Culture and Truth: “Once
a figure of masculine heroics and resistance to white supremacy, the Chicano warrior
hero now has faded away in a manner linked… to the demise of a self-enclosed,
patriarchal, ‘authentic’ Chicano culture” (cited by Alonzo 108). There is nothing Chicano
about this novel. This section of Chapter 4 on The Shadow seems out of place with the
U.S. films produced for a U.S. audience.
The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1982) was the first “Chicano” film and established
an acting career for Edward James Olmos. The viewer could criticize Olmos’ portrayal
of Gregorio Cortez. This is the central focus of Chapter 5. It is well known that Paredes
criticized Olmos’s portrayal of Cortez as a “scared little peon” (see my “Interview with
Américo Paredes,” Nepantla 1.1 [2000]:197-228). This was the stereotype received by
film viewers. Cortez was a Mexican who migrated to work in Texas. Paredes’s book
and film depict Cortez as a peaceful Mexican who is wrongly accused and rides toward
the border to escape a lynching party. This is hardly the “Chicano Warrior Hero.” He
was a vaquero (clearly different from a peon) who shoots a sheriff in self defense. “El
Corrido de Gregorio Cortez” which Paredes included in his study presents a man who
shot in self defense, “que la defensa es permitida.” This line from the corrido of 1901
leads back to Mexican legal concepts inherited from the history of colonialism in New
Spain. Paredes was writing a brief on behalf of Mexicans, as he told me in 1996
(“Interview with Américo Paredes”). The verse is not suggestive of the warrior hero and
Cortez depicted by Olmos as a scared peon is not consistent with the historical record
that Paredes brought to his book. And all of this cultural context, Texas white supremacy,
the segregated white and Mexican worlds, the racist descriptions of the Mexican greaser
are absent from the film. Alonzo presents Paredes’ unpublished comments on a possible
film version of With His Pistol in His Hand sent to him in 1976. Paredes commented
extensively and did not want a Mexican hero nor did he want negative stereotypes of
Texas lawmen.
Alonzo ends his book in the shadow of Américo Paredes, and finally offers an
analysis of Mexican American identity through the works of filmmaker Jim Mendiola
and poet Evangelina Vigil. Both Texas artists serve Alonzo well, as he reads Vigil’s now
famous poem “With a Polka in His Hand” (1985) and Mendiola’s film Come and Take
it Day (2002). Other scholars have read Vigil’s poem, and here Alonzo references
through Vigil resistance by a San Antonio old-timer who carries “un radio de transistor”
blasting a polka. The viejito, acknowledges Vigil, is a Mexican American from south
213
CAMINO REAL
Texas with his own form of resistance. Vigil ends her poem with “and I think of Gregorio
Cortez / and Américo Paredes / y en que la defensa cultural es permitida / and that calls
for a drink / and another toast.” For Mendiola, Alonzo offers a brief history of Chicano
cinema ending with what he terms “the fourth phase.” In Mendiola’s film, main
characters claim Gregorio Cortez as part of their genealogy. However, upon researching
records, characters discover that they are actually descendants of Jesús González, El Teco,
the Mexican who turned in Gregorio Cortez to Anglo Texan authorities. The Chicana
and Chicano depictions of Mexican masculinity in Chapter 6 “Reformulating Hybrid
Identities and Re-inscribing History in Contemporary Chicano/a Literature and Film”
are vastly different from the greaser in the films of D.W. Griffith.
Alonzo offers much for students of film. He begins with U.S. films and the
depiction of Mexican stereotypes based largely on the Mexican Revolution. In Chapters
4 through 6, Alonzo takes up another argument as a response to Rosaldo’s view of
Chicano heroism in With His Pistol in His Hand. I should stress that Paredes did not
write about “Chicano” culture nor a “Chicano” warrior hero and that one is hard pressed
to find many instances of unified or univocal representations of Chicano/a subjects in
Chicana and Chicano literature. Also, we hope that less images of Mexicans as social
deviants would be available to the U.S. public.
Héctor Calderón
University of California, Los Angeles
Luis Alvarez. The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During World
War II. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. 336 pages.
In a book that clearly explains the cultural and political contexts in which zoot
suiters emerged on both coasts, Luis Alvarez thoughtfully explores a popular culture
phenomenon through the lens of dignity. In The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and
Resistance During World War II, he is careful to point out throughout the book that while
zoot suiters may not have directly challenged or impacted “long-standing structures of
domination,” their struggle for dignity in public spaces is still worthy of documentation.
As a result, his methodology is primarily based on oral histories, newspaper accounts
and government records.
In choosing personal dignity as the unifying trope for his study, The Power of
the Zoot is able to traverse the boundaries of the institutional and the personal, official
214
REVIEWS
and personal historical accounts, while also leaving room for contradictions and
heterogeneity. Alvarez writes that his “…understanding of dignity is deeply influenced
by the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico … [who] located dignity at the center of their
oppositional politics” (248, n19). He structures his book by first describing how nonwhite
U.S. citizens were discriminated against in the wartime economy while being exhorted
to fight for democracy abroad in “Dignity Denied: Youth in the Early War Years.” He
carefully documents how juvenile delinquency was racialized and branded a threat to
the nation’s security. In “The Struggle for Dignity: Zoot Style during World War II” he
illustrates the various ways in which youth on the East and West Coast contested this
denial in public spaces with not only their clothing and speech, but also in their
transgression of gender norms and racial boundaries. In the third part, “Violence and
National Belonging on the Home Front,” Alvarez describes the violence used by local
authorities and servicemen to strip the dignity of zoot suiters in Los Angeles leading
up to the Zoot Suit Riots, as well as the response of the police and press after the fact.
He then looks at urban race riots that occurred throughout the summer of 1943,
considering how the violence indicated “the inequality of wartime society” (234). In the
epilogue “From Zoot Suits to Hip-Hop,” the connections between zoot suiters and
current hip-hop culture are explored, and Alvarez argues that “[t]he interracial and
gendered struggles for dignity by zoot suiters set the stage for the evolution of youth
culture in the years that followed” (238).
The Power of the Zoot is incredibly comprehensive, yet Alvarez successfully
adheres to Paul Gilroy’s call, in Small Acts (1993), to “preserve the tension between
broadly defined political imperatives and the non-negotiable autonomy of cultural
expression” (qtd. in Alvarez 246, n6). For example, he notes that in order to afford a zoot
suit, most youth needed jobs that existed because of the war, and several zoot suiters
voluntarily joined the military. Alvarez also acknowledges the role of social reformers
and civil rights groups in fighting overt racial discrimination while showing that their
focus on the mainstream press “excus[ing] police departments, mayors’ offices, and state
legislators” was a middle-class effort to Americanize and assimilate (73). Alvarez also
continually refers to participants in zoot suit culture who have often been overlooked
by scholars: women, white youth and Asian American zoot suiters. While he does detail
the elements of style and speech connected with the zoot suit, Alvarez demythologizes
it by acknowledging its multiple significations: “[t]he zoot suit … was not inherently
political but acquired meaning from its historical context” (85).
215
CAMINO REAL
The Power of the Zoot is written clearly yet without simplifying the historical
processes and individuals involved, making it an appropriate text for scholars of youth
culture as well as a classroom text for an undergraduate or graduate course.
Beth Hernández-Jason
University of California, Merced
Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, eds. The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History
and Culture in the United States. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. 584 pp.
In recent decades we have witnessed an outpouring of new research on Africandescended communities throughout Latin America and the United States. Due to the
growing number of Latin@ immigrants in the U.S., scholars have turned their attention
to the study of Afro-Latin@ identity as a minority discourse within the global Latin@
community. In this book, professors Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores offer a
varied collection of over sixty multi-genre entries, distributed among ten interrelated
sections that include essays, short stories, poems, book excerpts and testimonies about
the history and socio-cultural experience of Afro-Latin@s in the U.S. These texts are
organized by various themes that encompass categories such as history and historical
figures, race relations, cultural expression, image and representation, and Afro-Latinas.
Afro-Latin@s constitute a particular community in their own right who bridge
various communities (African American and Latin@). Even though the term AfroLatin@ is of recent vintage, the presence of Afro-Latin@s in the U.S. reaches far back
to the exploration and conquest of North America. Historically speaking, the AfroLatin@ presence in the region predates English settlements and the foundation of the
U.S. as a nation. The earliest Africans in North America were settlers, explorers, and
soldiers serving the Spanish Crown. As Peter Woods describes in his contribution, AfroLatin@s played an important role in the settlement of St. Augustine in 1565. In the
Southwest, Estevanico, who was initially part of the failed Pánfilo Narváez expedition
to the coast of Florida that began Cabeza de Vaca’s trek to Mexico, eventually became
part of Fray Marcos de Niza’s 1539 expedition to what are now parts of Arizona and
New Mexico in search of the legendary city of Cíbola.
Despite the early presence of Afro-Latin@s in what is now the U.S., it isn’t until
th
the 19 and 20th centuries that their (hi)stories begin to surface with the immigration of
blacks from Cuba, Puerto Rico, The Dominican Republic, Central America and the
216
REVIEWS
coastal areas of Colombia and Venezuela. At the end of the 19th century there was strong
cultural and political unity among all Cubans and Latin@s in Florida, mainly along
national and linguistic lines but the impact of post-Restructuration, Jim Crow laws and
anti-black racism pushed the Afro-Latin@ community to establish ties with other groups,
especially the African American community. In the 20th century, as Jiménez Román and
Flores put it, “The main locus of Afro Latino social life shifts from Florida to New York
City, and from the Cuban diaspora to that of the Puerto Ricans” (6). The cultural
problematic between the African American and Afro-Latin@ communities is embodied
by Arturo Alfonso Schomburg to whom an entire section of The Afro-Latin@ Reader is
dedicated. His experience as a black Puerto Rican dealing with racial discourse in the
U.S. and his ability to navigate the color line is similar to other Afro-Caribbean
personalities such as Melba Alvarado, Graciela, Minnie Miñoso, Mario Bauzá, Rafael
Hernández, Jesús Colón and Piri Thomas, all of whom are discussed in, or contribute to,
the reader. As is the case for U.S. Latin@s, some reference to homelands is ever present
in the lives of Afro-Latin@s and their testimonies, a subject specifically discussed in the
section titled “Living Afro Latinidades”. This transnational discourse resists the limitation
of Afro-Latin@s to the confines of the U.S. Nevertheless this transnational dimension
doesn’t have to be romanticized due to the incipient racism that the black community
faces in Latin America. The experience of racism by Afro-Latin@s within the Latino
community in the U.S. is still prevalent in the 21st century, a sad state of affairs for this
minority whose public images are misrepresented and perceived as not fully Latin@ (in
some cases, not fully African-American either). One may ask if this form of racial
segregation of Afro-Latin@s by the Latin@ community can be explained as a product
of their own frustration as being ostracized by the white (Anglo) community.
Afro-Latin@ creativity and cultural resiliency are apparent in popular music,
evident in the section dedicated to the roots of salsa. This phenomenon was notable
since the early decades of the twentieth century, illustrated by the incorporation of
Rafael Hernández and other boricuas into the Hellfighters Regiment Band during World
War I. The collaboration of Mario Bauzá and Dizzy Gillespie in the creation of the
Afro-Cuban jazz, Cubop in the late 40s and the work of David García gave rise to the
story of New York’s Latin Music that culminated with the salsa boom of the 70s.
Furthermore, the influence of Mexican music and dance by Afro-Cuban son and African
influenced instruments has had a deep impact on the Chicano culture throughout the
20th and into the 21st century.
The relation between Latin@ and African American communities is central to
the understanding of Afro-Latin@s in the U.S. Inasmuch as the experience of Afro217
CAMINO REAL
Latin@s is common to other members of the African diaspora, it may have been useful
to expand the scope of Afro-Latin@s to include more members of immigrant
communities that have come to the U.S. via Brazil and Haiti, for instance. Due to the
shifting definition of what is an Afro-Latin@, the concept should be more inclusive and
not only limited to Mexico, Central & South America and the Spanish-Speaking
Caribbean. The Afro-Latin@ Reader offers excellent material for the understanding of
the complexity and enriching world of the Afro-Latin@ community in the U.S.
Alain Lawo-Sukam
Texas A&M University
Juan Javier Pescador. Crossing Borders with the Santo Niño de Atocha.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009. 280 pp.
Crossing Borders with the Santo Niño de Atocha by Juan Javier Pescador offers a
thoroughly researched and informative analysis of the historical development and
contemporary usage of the Mexican popular devotion to the Holy Child Jesus. Crossing
Borders makes a significant contribution to the growing body of literature on Latino/a
religiosity that critically analyzes the creative reinventions and adaptations that Latino
peoples continue to construct as they seek spiritual and emotional support in increasingly
precarious anti-Latino environments. Through the weaving of extensive international
archival research, both civic and ecclesiastical, with transnational ethnographic
observations (including his own familial experiences), material religion (primarily
retablos and miracle narratives) and popular culture, Pescador tells the intriguing story
of how the ever-growing devotion to the autonomous Santo Niño de Atocha evolved over
more than five centuries to the “contemporary metamorphosis of the Holy Child as a
border-crossing religious symbol for the immigrant experience and the Mexican and
Chicano communities in the United States” (xii). The author’s astute analysis maps out
the making of a holy icon that is truly indigenous to the Americas as his distinct identity
emerges from the social and political context of the new republic of Mexico in the early
19th century. Pesacador’s research and lively narrative reveals the devotional
transformation from a localized and laity controlled devotion to Our Lady of Atocha
with the princely Holy Child Jesus on the outskirts of Madrid, Spain in the 15th century,
to Our Lady of Atocha with prince child completely appropriated and reconstructed by
the Spanish crown in the 16th century, to an autonomous Holy Child icon during the
218
REVIEWS
waning days of the Spanish empire in Mexico, to the diffusion of his veneration by the
“underclass and the lower class” (xv) between northern Mexico and the Southwest of
the U.S. along the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro in the 19th century, with a radical
change in age and appearance along the way, and ultimately to the young male icon of
today making visible a people made politically and socially invisible. Pescador’s
insider/outsider perspective offers unique scholarly attention to the powerful dynamics
of how popular devotions evolve over time, geography, and socio-political contexts.
Each of the four chapters considers a specific historical period in which
significant changes to the devotion and the representation of the autonomous image of
the Santo Niño occur. What is most intriguing is how the devotion to Our Lady of
Atocha with child, who had been transplanted to northern Mexico by an elite Spaniard
in 1704, experienced a radical shift as the newly independent and liberal Mexican
population in Plateros, Zacatecas reconstructed the devotion to an autonomous and
wandering Holy Child; a child independent from his mother. As the new Republic of
Mexico was moving into independence from its colonial mother, the devotion to the
male child mirrored a society in flux, a society learning to be on its own. Change and
growth did not come peacefully and amidst political and civic unrest, a weakened
ecclesiastical institution, an economic boom in state controlled mining, and a
demographic surge in post-independent northern Mexico, devotion to the male child
expanded. A process of reappropriation took place and “Mexican families from Zacatecas
to New Mexico transformed and recreated a colonial icon originally meant to inculcate
Spanish colonial values in them. They turned it into a meaningful symbol to facilitate
their way out from the post-Spanish colonial era” (75). The devotion spread further
when in 1848 the printing and wide distribution of a Nueva Novena to the Holy Child
with his image as an independent older boy wearing sandals and traveling attire and
bearing food and water further mirrored the increased migrations, regional and national
chaos impacted most certainly by the U.S. war on Mexico.
Pesacador investigates further the spread of the devotion into northern New
Mexico in the mid 1800s and refutes previous scholarship that identified the Medina
Chapel (originally a Penitente morada) in Chimayó, New Mexico as the birthplace of
the devotion in that region. As a frequent visitor to Chimayó myself, I welcome
Pescador’s sound research that shows the devotion actually began at Chimayó’s Santuario
del Señor de Esquipulas, but was shifted in 1929 to the Medina Chapel when the
Diocese of Santa Fe reigned in the popular devotion to Santo Niño.
Bringing the reader up to the present, Pescador examines carefully how the
Santo Niño and several other popular saints ( Juan Soldado, San Simón, and Pedrito
219
CAMINO REAL
Jaramillo, and la mera mera, Our Lady of Guadalupe), continue to migrate north and
“shapeshift” to address the changing needs of immigrant and native born Latino descent
populations in the Americas. He also considers how “border-crossing public ritual” like
the Via Crucis and the pilgrimages of Our Lady of Guadalupe as the Migrant Virgin,
“confers upon the experiences of Mexicanos in the United States a spiritual dimension
frequently denied” (197). This well-crafted book generously invites both academic and
lay readers to better understand “the transformative ability” that both mortal and deified
border crossers have “to adapt and respond to new situations and challenges” (200).
Lara Medina
California State University Northridge
Phillip J. Williams, Manuel A. Vázquez, and Timothy J. Steigenga, eds. A Place
to be: Brazilian, Guatemalan, and Mexican Immigrants in Florida’s New
Destinations. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2009. 228 pp.
This collection centres on the more recent communities of Mexicans,
Guatemalans, and Brazilian immigrants who settle in new geographical destinations in
the South of Florida. The chapters go well beyond traditional explorations of
transnationalism, as sustained and substantial social and economic networks and relations
across national and political borders. The authors highlight the “bifocal” orientation of
these communities in maintaining significant connections with their societies of origin,
while carving new social spaces within their new social and geographic contexts.
Attention is given to the particular geographical and ethnocultural characteristics,
familial connections, friendships, religious linkages, and adopted strategies through
which these immigrant communities transpose elements of their original home, country,
culture, and society in order to make sense of their experience of migration and adapt in
a new hostile environment.
Three are the key issues that emerge repeatedly in this collection. One,
immigrant communities and the kinds of transnational relations and networks they create
are diverse, complex, ambiguous, and must be understood in light of the groups’ unique
geographic regions, social landscape, development of social capital, and ethnocultural
composition. They share some parallels but they differ greatly in the kinds of
transnational relations they create and develop. Two, collective mobilization happens
more effectively when communities are organized around multi-ethnic labour agendas.
220
REVIEWS
Emphasis on ethnic homogeneity may prove to be counterproductive to address issues
of social injustice. Three, and most important, religion plays a central role for many
immigrants. The studies show that religious affiliation functions in multiple ways.
Together with home and family, the church is presented as one of those spaces where
people find various kinds of support including work. It can also be a source of exploitation
in inter-ethnic connections and shared religious affiliation. Religion can serve as the
bridging force connecting transmigrant communities and communities of origin.
The studies dispel the notion that recent immigrants are more prone to religious
devotion. More established immigrants tend to be more engaged in institutional religion,
while more recent arrivals display informal connections; individual personal spiritualities
characterize how many interact with religion. They also dispel the idea that these
communities are generally religiously homogeneous. A decreasing Catholicism shares
the religious landscape with an increasing Evangelicalism / Pentecostalism, strong
Charismatic movement, Spiritualists, and Afro-religions. Most surprising is the reported
increase in number of people who do not profess religious affiliation. As suggested in
the conclusion, the variants are many and call for further studies beyond traditional
analysis of transnationalism, and which take seriously the inter-ethnic, inter-cultural,
and inter-religious encounters between immigrant communities of different generations.
The authors unveil how immigrant communities and transnational networks
weave the ambiguous and uneven topography of religious affiliations with the multiple
factors of gender and ethnonational and cultural identity. The attention given to everyday
lived religion is one of the outstanding features here. The results impede easy conclusions
in understanding immigrant communities, yet they give us a glance of the complexity
of the settlement process immigrants undergo.
Finally, some difficulties do arise with the ways immigrant communities are
studied here without examining the historical circumstances that caused them to migrate.
Allusions are made to the motivations for leaving their countries; home, family, and
personal advance are proposed as key reasons. However, there is little that points to the
local socio-political, cultural and economic conditions that forced them to leave their
families behind, break with the only world they knew, and risk the journey into the U.S.
This, I believe, can shed further light in understanding the behaviour of immigrant
collectives. Overall, this collection is a necessary critical piece pushing forward the study
of transnational networks and immigrant communities.
Néstor Medina
University of Toronto
221
CAMINO REAL
Roberto Avant-Mier. Rock the Nation: Latin/o Identities and the Latin Rock
Diaspora. New York: Continuum Press, 2010. 240 pp.
This new book by Communication Studies scholar Roberto Avant-Mier
provides the most comprehensive compilation of examples of the Latin/o American
presence in Anglo rock available in print today. And what a compelling list this is. AvantMier presents the Latin/o connections of countless artists and bands, including Led
Zeppelin, The Clash, Joan Baez, The Ramones, Buddy Holly, The Doors, The White
Stripes, Spoon, Robert Johnson, and Frank Zappa. The study builds upon a rich body
of literature on the subject; Rock the Nation is heir to John S. Roberts in its goal of
underscoring the “Latin Tinge” in Anglo rock, and to George Lipsitz in its attempt to
unearth the multicultural and hybrid genealogies of rock.
The core of Rock the Nation consists of five chapters, three of which have already
appeared in print. Chapter 1 takes as a point of departure the phenomenon of border
radio, a group of high-powered Northern Mexican stations that could be heard across
the border, to present multiple examples of Mexicans and Mexican Americans who were
involved in and had an impact on the blues, country, and early rock and roll. This first
chapter also documents the presence of Mexican music, particularly mariachi trumpets,
in the recordings of myriad Anglo artists, from Johnny Cash to Beck Hanson. Chapter
2 focuses on the 1940s and early 1950s pachuco or zoot suiter, the Mexican American
version of the African American hepcat. The author suggests that Mexican American
pachuco slang, dress, and music, most conspicuously expressed by Don Tosti and Lalo
Guerrero, had a strong impact on 1950s Anglo rock and roll culture. Chapter 3 proposes
to re-write the history of 1960s garage rock taking into account the multiple and
important contributions of Mexican Americans. Chapter 4 recounts the history of early
rock and roll in Mexico, a story told through the writings of one particular chronicler,
journalist and author José Agustín. Chapter 5 begins with an overview of Argentine
rock history from the 1960s through the 1980s, and continues with a history of more
recent rock in Spanish.
Readers may notice that despite its subtitle (Latin/o Identities and the Latin
Rock Diaspora), the book focuses mostly on rock in Mexico and the United States. There
are brief references to bands from Colombia and Chile, and a cursory overview of rock
in Argentina (summarized from research by Pablo Vila, properly acknowledged), but
they are not extensive enough to allow the author to theorize about the Latin/o
experience broadly defined. Indeed, there is a general, problematic tendency in the book
222
REVIEWS
to extrapolate from the Mexican experience to speak about all Latinos. The author
sometimes uses the terms Mexican and Latin/o interchangeably, as when he describes
styles such as “cumbia, ranchera, conjunto norteño, tejano, and combinations thereof ”
(34) as “regional Latin,” as opposed to “regional Mexican” music. When describing the
evolution of the terminology used to market Spanish-language rock (from “rock en tu
idioma” to “rock en Español” to the later “Latin Alternative”), the author again
generalizes from the Mexican and United States cases in claiming that this terminology
was in use “throughout Latin America” (160ff ). In fact, these terms were not used as
marketing categories in the Southern Cone. This U.S.-centric perspective is particularly
frustrating in a chapter that purports to analyze rock and punk as “transnational”
phenomena (Chapter 5).
One of the book’s goals is to rewrite rock and roll history with Latin/o
Americans at the center. This laudable project, it seems, is already underway. Current
rock textbooks designed for college-level courses, such as John Covach’s What’s That
Sound? (Norton, 2009) and Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman’s American Popular
Music: The Rock Years (OUP, 2005), include a handful of the key examples discussed in
Rock The Nation. Rock en Español artists like Café Tacuba, Fabulosos Cadillacs, and Julieta
Venegas, who Avant-Mier claims “remain ignored and seen as worthless by monolingual
and ethnocentric journalists and cultural analysts in the mainstream” (175), in actuality
receive regular coverage in Billboard Magazine, National Public Radio, and in major
newspapers such as the Los Angeles and New York Times. The author makes reference
to these sources throughout the book, belying his claim about the absence of Rock en
Español in the mainstream media.
The book succeeds in presenting a comprehensive review of recent scholarship
and journalism on the Mexican influence in Anglo rock and its subgenres. Many parts
of the book read like an annotated bibliography, with extensive sections summarizing
the work of scholars and journalists who have studied the “Latin Tinge” phenomenon,
such as John S. Roberts, Ned Sublette, George Lipsitz, Josh Kun, and Ed Morales. The
author’s musical observations are also largely borrowed from the secondary literature, as
are his extensive lists of Anglo artists with Latin/o connections.
For the most part, the book does not enter into critical dialogue with this
literature. Except for the inflammatory writing of Samuel P. Huntington, all other
sources, including rock criticism, rock biographies, CD liner notes, and academic
monographs remain unchallenged. Without a thorough engagement with primary
sources, the author is unable to take a critical stance towards the work of journalists, CD
compilators, and scholars. When Avant-Mier departs from the literature to provide his
223
CAMINO REAL
own readings, statements become tentative and speculative. Consider the following
quote, from a paragraph that makes the claim that early Heavy Metal band Black
Sabbath may have Latin “traces”:
[‘Laguna Sunrise’ and ‘Fluff ’] are probably best described as simple acousticelectric guitar instrumentals, but given the band’s proclivities for harder, louder,
electric-guitar sounds, the context for these songs (i.e., the band’s location in
Los Angeles) suggests inspiration by Spanish-guitar sounds, boleros, or similar
sounds that can be heard in Mexican folk music. (135)
While Rock the Nation does not provide much in the way of new perspectives
or interpretations, it will be useful as an overview of the current scholarship on a rich
topic in need of further elaboration and study.
Daniel Party
Saint Mary’s College
Notre Dame, Indiana
Patricia Gándara and Frances Contreras. The Latino Education Crisis: The
Consequences of Failed Social Policies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2009. 415 pp.
Authors Gándara and Contreras take on a formidable task in their book, The
Latino Education Crisis: The Consequences of Failed Social Policies, to provide a
comprehensive account of the educational and social conditions and prospects of the
Latino community. The urgency of the situation facing Latinos — and, as they argue,
the nation — is reminiscent of the calls for alarm and investment raised by HayesBautista, Schink, and Chapa over two decades ago in The Burden of Support: Young
Latinos in an Aging Society (Stanford UP, 1988). However, what distinguishes this book
is the manner in which Gándara and Contreras use their vast empirical work in
education to situate the “crisis” within a much broader context of contemporary social
policy dynamics and American anti-immigrant politics.
The opening chapters of The Latino Education Crisis meticulously discuss the
social and educational conditions that have evolved over time to produce a rather firmly
established and predictably limited status among the Latino population. The key
224
REVIEWS
argument that Gándara and Contreras build through this volume is that the crisis facing
Latinos is longstanding but not insurmountable if we engage in a more comprehensive
treatment of the situation through policies that pursue a broader human development
approach. As the argument unfolds in the first chapters, readers are presented with
extensive documentation of the economic, health, educational, and political conditions
that shape and influence the life chances of Latino youth. Indeed, the data the authors
present substantiates the urgency of their message, and for readers who are yet unfamiliar
with the specific historical legacies of Latino communities in the U.S., the book is
especially useful in its portrayal of the numerous ways in which this population has been
systematically marginalized. In addition, the authors assert that the particular impact of
poverty and social isolation among Latinos has produced a situation that necessitates a
re-thinking of how we view education as a social institution charged with ameliorating
these effects and reversing the trends of undereducation and disenfranchisement. And,
as the authors further argue, schools alone cannot address the full spectrum of needs
that emerge for Latinos in the U.S. in their pursuit of education and social mobility.
Having set the stage for their analysis of the crisis and the possibilities that exist
for addressing it, the book continues in the second half with a unique approach among
policy researchers: Although the chapters continue to offer extensive documentation
drawing from the authors’ own investigations, they are powerful in humanizing the issues
with rich descriptions of students’ experiences that further illuminate the complexity of
the challenge. Moreover, the authors draw out important considerations of the strengths
represented by Latino youth and their communities, which resonates with the
perspectives that have been offered in other volumes that examine the PK-12 and
postsecondary journeys of this population, such as García’s Hispanic Education in the
United States: Raíces y Alas (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001) or Yosso’s Critical Race
Counterstories Along the Chicana/Chicano Educational Pipeline (Routledge, 2006).
While Gándara and Contreras do not approach their book through a lens of
critical theory, their analyses and recommendations are definitely informed by an
acknowledgment of the forces of institutional racism and classism that combine to shape
the long-term trajectories of Latino students and their communities. A particular gem
in demonstrating this sensibility is Chapter 4, “Is Language the Problem?,” where the
authors provide a thorough and disturbing account of the language and immigration
politics that have continued to haunt efforts to use educational institutions to intervene
positively in the lives of English language learners. Indeed, part of the difficulty of such
a volume is the translation of these dynamics for a policy research audience that may
find critical theoretical arguments too distinct from conventional approaches to facilitate
225
CAMINO REAL
cross-fertilization and dialogue. Gándara and Contreras have presented a perspective
that allows us to see the individual agency of Latino students in their educational pursuits
(i.e., “beating the odds” as discussed in Chapter 6), while also revealing elements of our
educational and other social institutions that require considerable overhaul if we are to
realize the vision of educational and social mobility in the U.S. that is inclusive of
Latinos. One comes away from having read The Latino Education Crisis with both a
sobering view of the obstacles that remain and a deep appreciation for the tenacity of
educators, advocates, and the youth themselves in persisting toward a goal of full access
and meaningful participation in American society.
Gloria M. Rodríguez
University of California, Davis
Gabriela F. Arredondo. Mexican Chicago: Race, Identity, and Nation (1916-1939).
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. 272 pp.
In Mexican Chicago Arrendondo explores the history of the immigrant Mexican
community of Chicago in the early twentieth-century. Chicago, at the time, was a major
receiving city for international immigration from the many nations of the world and
became a polyglot industrial city producing finished goods, becoming a major processor
and trading center for raw materials and commodities. Like other immigrant workers,
Mexicans came to Chicago to do the hard labor required in the city’s rail yards, meat
packing plants, and steel mills, which stretched from the city center into Gary, Indiana.
This diverse patchwork of urban ethnic neighborhoods is the backdrop for Arrendondo’s
book.
Arrendondo frames her book around the interconnected web of tensions faced
by Mexican immigrants in Chicago. Her book argues that some Mexicans did not want
to become American citizens. Not treated as “white” people in Chicago, yet not exposed
to the worst racism faced by African-Americans, some Mexicans felt U.S. citizenship had
little to offer them. Moreover, Mexican nationalism colored the feelings of many others.
Interestingly, women seemed to see more benefit to life in the United States than did
men, as they were happy to take advantage of social programs and protections offered to
women and the greater degree of social freedom. Mexicans are, in Arrendondo’s telling,
a racialized, yet in-between people living in a netherworld between citizen and noncitizen, white and non-white in a city where ethnicity and whiteness are entwined.
226
REVIEWS
Mexicans faced segregation in this city of immigrants. In some cases, there were
efforts to segregate Mexicans as undesirable, and in others, it seems that reformers
separated Mexicans in order to protect them from violence at the hands of other
immigrants. Mexicans were clearly racialized as Arrendondo shows, and it appears that
they dealt with this in a multiplicity of ways. Some retained their Mexican identities
and did so by refusing U.S. citizenship and continuing to celebrate Mexican holidays
and the speaking of Spanish, with much support from the Mexican Consulate in
Chicago. In fact, the Consulate was central in creating and promoting in print and in
public a Mexican identity among immigrants. When the depression hit, and nativists
sought to deport or remove Mexicans, the consulate, assisted in bringing Mexicans back
to Mexico. By boarding trains to Mexico during the Great Depression, many of those
non-citizens coerced into accepting charity funded repatriation or those choosing freely,
gave up the legal right to return to the United States. Mexicans, unlike other immigrant
workers, were North Americans, and for those who chose to remain Mexican citizens,
there was always the threat of deportation or repatriation using the very rail lines that
might have brought them from Mexico in the first place.
Arredondo’s book reveals the many contradictions of the immigrant generation
in Chicago. It would have been instructive had Arrendondo provided more information
on how Mexican experiences differed from those of other immigrants in Chicago. While
religion enters into the discourse throughout the text in helpful ways, it would also have
been helpful to know more about inter-religious competition and cooperation in the
heavily Catholic immigrant neighborhoods of Chicago. Arrendondo’s fine book is an
important contribution to our understanding of the long-term Mexican origin
community in Chicago, which in the first decade of twenty-first century, is now one of
the largest and most diverse concentrations of Mexican ancestry people outside of
Mexico or the United States Southwest.
Marc S. Rodríguez
University of Notre Dame
227