Mexican American Religions

Mexican American Religions
Author: Gastón Espinosa
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 455
Release: 2008-07-08
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0822388952

This collection presents a rich, multidisciplinary inquiry into the role of religion in the Mexican American community. Breaking new ground by analyzing the influence of religion on Mexican American literature, art, activism, and popular culture, it makes the case for the establishment of Mexican American religious studies as a distinct, recognized field of scholarly inquiry. Scholars of religion, Latin American, and Chicano/a studies as well as of sociology, anthropology, and literary and performance studies, address several broad themes. Taking on questions of history and interpretation, they examine the origins of Mexican American religious studies and Mario Barrera’s theory of internal colonialism. In discussions of the utopian community founded by the preacher and activist Reies López Tijerina, César Chávez’s faith-based activism, and the Los Angeles-based Católicos Por La Raza movement of the late 1960s, other contributors focus on mystics and prophets. Still others illuminate popular Catholicism by looking at Our Lady of Guadalupe, home altars, and Los Pastores dramas (nativity plays) as vehicles for personal, social, and political empowerment. Turning to literature, contributors consider Gloria Anzaldúa’s view of the borderlands as a mystic vision and the ways that Chicana writers invoke religious symbols and rhetoric to articulate a moral vision highlighting social injustice. They investigate the role of healing, looking at it in relation to both the Latino Pentecostal movement and the practice of the curanderismo tradition in East Los Angeles. Delving into to popular culture, they reflect on Luis Valdez’s video drama La Pastorela: “The Shepherds’ Play,” the spirituality of Chicana art, and the religious overtones of the reverence for the slain Tejana music star Selena. This volume signals the vibrancy and diversity of the practices, arts, traditions, and spiritualities that reflect and inform Mexican American religion. Contributors: Rudy V. Busto, Davíd Carrasco, Socorro Castañeda-Liles, Gastón Espinosa, Richard R. Flores, Mario T. García, María Herrera-Sobek, Luís D. León, Ellen McCracken, Stephen R. Lloyd-Moffett, Laura E. Pérez, Roberto Lint Saragena, Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, Kay Turner

Living Shrines

Living Shrines
Author: Marie Romero Cash
Publisher:
Total Pages: 136
Release: 1998
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

The tradition of home shrines first began evolving in the American Southwest during the Mexican colonial period, when priests often travelled to homes to perform mass, novenas, baptisms, and marriages, a practice that continues today. This colourful book features the personal altars of mostly Hispanic families living in the towns and villages of northern New Mexico. Most are devoutly Catholic, and although Roman Catholic dogma does not officially recognise home shrines, the altar tradition for most Hispanos is a sign of being 'Catholic from the heart'. Their private altars allow for devotion in daily life, a practice embraced by those of all beliefs who desire personal sacred places to meditate, pray, or reflect. These portraits will serve as an inspiration for even the least devout among us desiring more spirituality in our lives.

The Virgin of El Barrio

The Virgin of El Barrio
Author: Kristy Nabhan-Warren
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2005-05-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0814758800

In 1998, a Mexican American woman named Estela Ruiz began seeing visions of the Virgin Mary in south Phoenix. The apparitions and messages spurred the creation of Mary’s Ministries, a Catholic evangelizing group, and its sister organization, ESPIRITU, which focuses on community-based initiatives and social justice for Latinos/as. Based on ten years of participant observation and in-depth interviews, The Virgin of El Barrio traces the spiritual transformation of Ruiz, the development of the community that has sprung up around her, and the international expansion of their message. Their organizations blend popular and official Catholicism as well as evangelical Protestant styles of praise and worship, shedding light on Catholic responses to the tensions between popular and official piety and the needs of Mexican Americans.

The Church in the Barrio

The Church in the Barrio
Author: Roberto R. Treviño
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN: 080782996X

In a story that spans from the early 20th century to the 1970s, Trevino discusses how an intertwining of ethnic identity and Catholic faith equipped Mexican Americans in Houston to overcome adversity and find a place for themselves in the Bayou City. He explores Mexican American Catholic life from the most private and mundane, such as home altar worship and everyday speech and behavior, to the most public and dramatic, such as neighborhood processions and civil rights protest marches.

Home Altars of Mexico

Home Altars of Mexico
Author: Ramón A. Gutiérrez
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1997
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780826317858

For over a decade, Dana Salvo has traveled throughout the central highlands and southern states of Mexico with artist Dawn Southworth and their young children, Jahna and Simone. They have visited the Purepechan Indians in Michoacan, the Chamulan and Zinacantan tribes in Chiapas, the Maya of the Yucatan peninsula, and several other isolated groups in the countryside. Welcomed into the homes of these rural peoples as few outsiders have been before, Salvo was permitted the rare privilege of photographing the home environments of these families. Central to each interior was the altarcito, or home altar. These dazzling large-format color photographs depict the altars in all their glory and meticulous detail. The essays provide the cultural and historic background to the practice of constructing domestic altars, linking the ancient traditions with modern customs.

Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master’s House

Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master’s House
Author: Alicia Gaspar de Alba
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2010-07-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0292788983

In the early 1990s, a major exhibition Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985 toured major museums around the United States. As a first attempt to define and represent Chicano/a art for a national audience, the exhibit attracted both praise and controversy, while raising fundamental questions about the nature of multiculturalism in the U.S. This book presents the first interdisciplinary cultural study of the CARA exhibit. Alicia Gaspar de Alba looks at the exhibit as a cultural text in which the Chicano/a community affirmed itself not as a "subculture" within the U.S. but as an "alter-Native" culture in opposition to the exclusionary and homogenizing practices of mainstream institutions. She also shows how the exhibit reflected the cultural and sexual politics of the Chicano Movement and how it serves as a model of Chicano/a popular culture more generally. Drawing insights from cultural studies, feminist theory, anthropology, and semiotics, this book constitutes a wide-ranging analysis of Chicano/a art, popular culture, and mainstream cultural politics. It will appeal to a diverse audience in all of these fields.

Subject to Display

Subject to Display
Author: Jennifer A. Gonzalez
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2011-03-04
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0262516020

An exploration of the visual culture of “race” through the work of five contemporary artists who came to prominence during the 1990s. Over the past two decades, artists James Luna, Fred Wilson, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Pepón Osorio, and Renée Green have had a profound impact on the meaning and practice of installation art in the United States. In Subject to Display, Jennifer González offers the first sustained analysis of their contribution, linking the history and legacy of race discourse to innovations in contemporary art. Race, writes González, is a social discourse that has a visual history. The collection and display of bodies, images, and artifacts in museums and elsewhere is a primary means by which a nation tells the story of its past and locates the cultures of its citizens in the present. All five of the American installation artists González considers have explored the practice of putting human subjects and their cultures on display by staging elaborate dioramas or site-specific interventions in galleries and museums; in doing so, they have created powerful social commentary of the politics of space and the power of display in settings that mimic the very spaces they critique. These artists' installations have not only contributed to the transformation of contemporary art and museum culture, but also linked Latino, African American, and Native American subjects to the broader spectrum of historical colonialism, race dominance, and visual culture. From Luna's museum installation of his own body and belongings as “artifacts” and Wilson's provocative juxtapositions of museum objects to Mesa-Bains's allegorical home altars, Osorio's condensed spaces (bedrooms, living rooms; barbershops, prison cells) and Green's genealogies of cultural contact, the theoretical and critical endeavors of these artists demonstrate how race discourse is grounded in a visual technology of display.