Artisans of Trabajo Rústico, Volume 19

Artisans of Trabajo Rústico, Volume 19
Author: Patsy Pittman Light
Publisher:
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2021-06
Genre:
ISBN: 9781623497668

As documented in Patsy Pittman Light's award-winning book, Capturing Nature, Mexican artisan Dionicio Rodríguez arrived in San Antonio in the 1920s and created concrete bus stop shelters, park benches, footbridges, and other structures in the style known as faux bois, or trabajo rústico. Following on the success of that previous work, Light, with photographer and artist Kent Rush, presents a comprehensive look at the legacy of Rodríguez as reflected in the works of those whom he trained, mentored, or influenced. Rodríguez captured nature in his work, but he also continues to capture our imagination. Drawing these artistic creations out of the urban landscape, Artisans ofTrabajo Rústico makes the nearly invisible fully visible to the critic, the historian, and especially to the casual viewer. Light asserts that San Antonio has the largest concentration of this art form in the country and includes copious full-color photography of the work of Rodríguez and other artisans. This handsomely illustrated and painstakingly documented work offers the broadest possible panorama for the craft and endearing familiarity of this form. Inspired by nature, built by hand, and placed in the service of the public, these "rustic works" continue to provide enjoyment, convenience, and a touch of artistic elegance to public and private landscapes in San Antonio and beyond. Light and Rush's work affords a fresh and wide-ranging look at this important artisanal tradition.

Artisans of Trabajo Rústico

Artisans of Trabajo Rústico
Author: Patsy Pittman Light
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2022-01-04
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1623499135

As documented in Patsy Pittman Light’s award-winning book, Capturing Nature, Mexican artisan Dionicio Rodríguez arrived in San Antonio in the 1920s and created concrete bus stop shelters, park benches, footbridges, and other structures in the style known as faux bois, or trabajo rústico. Following on the success of that previous work, Light, with photographer and artist Kent Rush, presents a comprehensive look at the legacy of Rodríguez as reflected in the works of those whom he trained, mentored, or influenced. Rodríguez captured nature in his work, but he also continues to capture our imagination. Drawing these artistic creations out of the urban landscape, Artisans of Trabajo Rústico makes the nearly invisible fully visible to the critic, the historian, and especially to the casual viewer. Light asserts that San Antonio has the largest concentration of this art form in the country and includes copious full-color photography of the work of Rodríguez and other artisans. This handsomely illustrated and painstakingly documented work offers the broadest possible panorama for the craft and endearing familiarity of this form. Inspired by nature, built by hand, and placed in the service of the public, these “rustic works” continue to provide enjoyment, convenience, and a touch of artistic elegance to public and private landscapes in San Antonio and beyond. Light and Rush’s work affords a fresh and wide-ranging look at this important artisanal tradition.

Capturing Nature

Capturing Nature
Author: Patsy Pittman Light
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2007
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1585446106

Over a period of some twenty years, Mexican-born artisan Dionicio Rodríguez created imaginative sculptures of reinforced concrete that imitated the natural forms and textures of trees and rocks. He worked in eight different states from 1924 through the early 1950s but spent much of his early career in San Antonio, where several of his creations have become beloved landmarks. More than a dozen of Rodríguez’s works have been included on the National Register of Historic Places. Patsy Pittman Light has spent a decade documenting the trabajo rústico (“rustic work”) of Rodríguez, along with its antecedents in Europe and Mexico, and the subsequent work of those Rodríguez trained in San Antonio. Rodríguez’s unique and unusual art will fascinate those new to it and delight those to whom it is familiar. San Antonio sites such as the bus stop on Broadway, the faux bois bridge in Brackenridge Park, and the “rocks” on the Miraflores Gate at the San Antonio Museum of Art, along with the Old Mill at T. R. Pugh Memorial Park in North Little Rock and Memorial Park Cemetery in Memphis, are just a few of the locations covered in this volume celebrating the life and work of a Latino artisan. Students and devotees of Texas and Southwestern art will welcome this book and its long-overdue appreciation of this artist. Additionally, this book will commend itself to those interested in Latino studies, art history, and folklore.

Brackenridge

Brackenridge
Author: Lewis F. Fisher
Publisher: Trinity University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2022-10-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1595349677

Brackenridge Park began its life as a heavily wooded, bucolic driving park at the turn of the twentieth century. Over the next 120 years it evolved into the sprawling, multifaceted jewel San Antonians enjoy today, home to the San Antonio Zoo, the state’s first public golf course, the Japanese Tea Garden, the Sunken Garden Theater, and the Witte Museum. The land that Brackenridge Park occupies, near the San Antonio River headwaters, has been reinvented many times over. People have gathered there since prehistoric times. Following the city’s founding in 1718, the land was used to channel river water into town via a system of acequias; its limestone cliffs were quarried for building materials; and it was the site of a Civil War tannery, headquarters for two military camps, a plant nursery, and a racetrack. The park continues to be a site of national acclaim even while major sections have fallen into disrepair. The more than 400 acres that constitute San Antonio’s flagship urban park are made up of half a dozen parcels stitched together over time to create an uncommon varied landscape. Uniquely San Antonian, Brackenridge is full of romantic wooded walks and whimsical public spaces drawing tourists, locals, wildlife, and waterfowl. Extensively researched and illustrated with some two hundred archival photographs and vintage postcards, Brackenridge: San Antonio’s Acclaimed Urban Park is the first comprehensive look at the fascinating story of this unique park and how its diverse layers evolved to create one of the city’s foremost gathering places.

Modernity and Colombian Identity in the Music of Carlos Vives y La Provincia

Modernity and Colombian Identity in the Music of Carlos Vives y La Provincia
Author: Manuel Sevilla
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2020-07-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 179362142X

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, a great number of TV shows and music acts blossomed in Colombia, all of which resorted to regional identity as the narrative core for a renewed idea of national identity. Among them was “Clasicos de la provincial,” an album by Colombian singer Carlos Vives and his band La Provincia (1993), which marked the beginning of a successful career that has spanned nearly three decades. Vives´s work not only earned much deserved recognition in the musical industry from the beginning, but most importantly, has come to be renowned as a landmark in the cultural history of Colombia. This book is the first in-depth analysis focused on the creation and production process of Vives´s work, its main musical and literary features, and its influence on other musicians and in the construction of a narrative about national identity that is still relevant today. More than fifty interviews with Vives and members of the band, musicians, journalists, radio programmers, musical producers, and other key players of the process, together with an extensive review of hundreds of documents, are the sources for this book, which earned its authors a national award in Colombia (2015).

Journey on the Estrada Real

Journey on the Estrada Real
Author: Glenn Alan Cheney
Publisher: Academy Chicago Publishers, Limited
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2004
Genre: Travel
ISBN:

Life along the Estrada Real is still very much in the 19th century. Women cook meals on wood stoves. Men go about their business on horseback. Mules carry firewood and such. People will invite a stranger into the house and offer him food. Cheney's book is a unique look at the cradle of Brazilian culture. This isn't the Brazil of beaches, rain forests, and slum-infected cities. It's a place where tradition, architecture, food, music, and values go back hundreds of years. But the quiet, rural life along the Estrada Real is under assault from global culture, a concern Cheney grapples with as he makes what may be the last observations of a dying way of life. The book includes photographs taken along the Estrada Real.

The New Gendered Plundering of Africa

The New Gendered Plundering of Africa
Author: Carmela Grillone
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2019-04-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1527533190

This ethnographic study on Nigerian street prostitution in Italy transforms the understanding of the phenomenon of prostitution, questions the impact of European and Italian migration and prostitution laws on human rights, and investigates the legal, political and socio-economic conditions that create a permissive environment for trafficking. Precious first-person accounts by Nigerian women give a privileged perspective on tortures and inhumane treatment prevalent in the migratory route from Africa to the European “promised land”, culminating in the daily experience of self-destruction in Italy. Neither the Palermo Protocol nor the current European, Italian and Nigerian prosecution and protection policies, still based on gender-imbalanced philosophies, are able to restore the requisite freedom and rights. This book is the result of research mainly conducted in the migration landmarks of the Sicilian capital: namely, the port, nightlife streets, refugee camps, hospitals, African churches, Nigerian ghettos, and the prison. Sicily, the world capital of the mafia, is the main European docking area of the current African migration wave and represents the geopolitical middle-ground between the opulent and the plundered world.

Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development

Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development
Author: Allen F. Isaacman
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2013-04-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0821444506

Cahora Bassa Dam on the Zambezi River, built in the early 1970s during the final years of Portuguese rule, was the last major infrastructure project constructed in Africa during the turbulent era of decolonization. Engineers and hydrologists praised the dam for its technical complexity and the skills required to construct what was then the world’s fifth-largest mega-dam. Portuguese colonial officials cited benefits they expected from the dam—from expansion of irrigated farming and European settlement, to improved transportation throughout the Zambezi River Valley, to reduced flooding in this area of unpredictable rainfall. “The project, however, actually resulted in cascading layers of human displacement, violence, and environmental destruction. Its electricity benefited few Mozambicans, even after the former guerrillas of FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique) came to power; instead, it fed industrialization in apartheid South Africa.” (Richard Roberts) This in-depth study of the region examines the dominant developmentalist narrative that has surrounded the dam, chronicles the continual violence that has accompanied its existence, and gives voice to previously unheard narratives of forced labor, displacement, and historical and contemporary life in the dam’s shadow.

Oddball Michigan

Oddball Michigan
Author: Jerome Pohlen
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2014-05-01
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 1613748965

There's more to Michigan than beautiful forests, shuttered factories, and miles and miles of stunning shoreline. Armed with this offbeat travel guide, you'll soon discover the strange underbelly of the Great Lakes State. Michigan has monuments to fluoridation, snurfing, the designer of the Jefferson nickel, and the once-famous Mr. Chicken, as well as festivals honoring tulips, Christmas pickles, and a 38-acre fungus. It's where you'll find the World's Largest Lugnut, the Nun Doll Museum, Joe's Gizzard City, the Teenie-Weenie Pickle Barrel Cottage, Howdy Doody, and Thomas Edison's last breath. The state also has its share of weird history—it's where Harry Houdini perished on Halloween night in 1926, where skater Tanya Harding's posse whacked Nancy Kerrigan, and where the Kellogg brothers invented popular breakfast cereals and less-popular yogurt enemas. Along with humorous histories and witty observations, Oddball Michigan provides addresses, websites, hours, fees, and driving directions for each of its 450 entries.

Telling Border Life Stories

Telling Border Life Stories
Author: Donna M Kabalen de Bichara
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2013-05-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1603448047

Voices from the borderlands push against boundaries in more ways than one, as Donna M. Kabalen de Bichara ably demonstrates in this investigation into the twentieth-century autobiographical writing of four women of Mexican origin who lived in the American Southwest. Until recently, little attention has been paid to the writing of the women included in this study. As Kabalen de Bichara notes, it is precisely such historical exclusion of texts written by Mexican American women that gives particular significance to the reexamination of the five autobiographical works that provide the focus for this in-depth study. “Early Life and Education” and Dew on the Thorn by Jovita González (1904–83), deal with life experiences in Texas and were likely written between 1926 and the 1940s; both texts were published in 1997. Romance of a Little Village Girl, first published in 1955, focuses on life in New Mexico, and was written by Cleofas Jaramillo (1878–1956) when the author was in her seventies. A Beautiful, Cruel Country, by Eva Antonio Wilbur-Cruce (1904–98), introduces the reader to history and a way of life that developed in the cultural space of Arizona. Created over a ten-year period, this text was published in 1987, just eleven years before the author’s death. Hoyt Street, by Mary Helen Ponce (b. 1938), began as a research paper during the period of the autobiographer’s undergraduate studies (1974–80), and was published in its present form in 1993. These border autobiographies can be understood as attempts on the part of the Mexican American female autobiographers to put themselves into the text and thus write their experiences into existence.