Bringing Aztlan to Mexican Chicago

Bringing Aztlan to Mexican Chicago
Author: Jose Gamaliel Gonzalez
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2010-10-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252090144

Bringing Aztlán to Mexican Chicago is the autobiography of Jóse Gamaliel González, an impassioned artist willing to risk all for the empowerment of his marginalized and oppressed community. Through recollections emerging in a series of interviews conducted over a period of six years by his friend Marc Zimmerman, González looks back on his life and his role in developing Mexican, Chicano, and Latino art as a fundamental dimension of the city he came to call home. Born near Monterey, Mexico, and raised in a steel mill town in northwest Indiana, González studied art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame. Settling in Chicago, he founded two major art groups: El Movimiento Artístico Chicano (MARCH) in the 1970s and Mi Raza Arts Consortium (MIRA) in the 1980s. With numerous illustrations, this book portrays González's all-but-forgotten community advocacy, his commitments and conflicts, and his long struggle to bring quality arts programming to the city. By turns dramatic and humorous, his narrative also covers his bouts of illness, his relationships with other artists and arts promoters, and his place within city and barrio politics.

Defending Their Own in the Cold

Defending Their Own in the Cold
Author: Marc Zimmerman
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2011-09-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252093496

Defending Their Own in the Cold: The Cultural Turns of U.S. Puerto Ricans explores U.S. Puerto Rican culture in past and recent contexts. The book presents East Coast, Midwest, and Chicago cultural production while exploring Puerto Rican musical, film, artistic, and literary performance. Working within the theoretical frame of cultural, postcolonial, and diasporic studies, Marc Zimmerman relates the experience of Puerto Ricans to that of Chicanos and Cuban Americans, showing how even supposedly mainstream U.S. Puerto Ricans participate in a performative culture that embodies elements of possible cultural "Ricanstruction." Defending Their Own in the Cold examines various dimensions of U.S. Puerto Rican artistic life, including relations with other ethnic groups and resistance to colonialism and cultural assimilation. To illustrate how Puerto Ricans have survived and created new identities and relations out of their colonized and diasporic circumstances, Zimmerman looks at the cultural examples of Latino entertainment stars such as Jennifer Lopez and Benicio del Toro, visual artists Juan Sánchez, Ramón Flores, and Elizam Escobar, as well as Nuyorican dancer turned Midwest poet Carmen Pursifull. The book includes a comprehensive chapter on the development of U.S. Puerto Rican literature and a pioneering essay on Chicago Puerto Rican writing. A final essay considers Cuban cultural attitudes towards Puerto Ricans in a testimonial narrative by Miguel Barnet and reaches conclusions about the past and future of U.S. Puerto Rican culture. Zimmerman offers his own "semi-outsider" point of reference as a Jewish American Latin Americanist who grew up near New York City, matured in California, went on to work with and teach Latinos in the Midwest, and eventually married a woman from a Puerto Rican family with island and U.S. roots.

Intersecting Tango

Intersecting Tango
Author: Adriana J. Bergero
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
Total Pages: 492
Release: 2010-06-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780822973393

In the early part of the twentieth century, Buenos Aires erupted from its colonial past as a city in its own right, expressing a unique and vibrant cultural identity.Intersecting Tango engages the city at this key moment, exploring the sweeping changes of 1900-1930 to capture this culture in motion through which Buenos Aires transformed itself into a modern, cosmopolitan city. Taking the reader through a dazzling array of sites, sources, and events, Bergero conveys the city in all its complexity. Drawing on architecture and gendered spaces, photography, newspaper columns, schoolbooks, "high" and "low" literature, private letters, advertising, fashion, and popular music, she illuminates a range of urban social geographies inhabited by the city's defining classes and groups. In mining this vast material, Bergero traces the profound change in social fabric by which these diverse identities evolved, through the processes of modernization and its many dislocations, into a new national identity capable of embodying modernity. In her interdisciplinary study of urban development and cultural encounters with modernity, Bergero leads the reader through the city's emergence, collecting her investigations around the many economic, social, and gender issues remarkably conveyed by the tango, the defining icon of Buenos Aires. Multifaceted and original, Intersecting Tango is as rich and captivating as the dance itself.

Struggles for Recognition

Struggles for Recognition
Author: Juan Sebastián Ospina León
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2021-03-16
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0520305434

Struggles for Recognition traces the emergence of melodrama in Latin American silent film and silent film culture. Juan Sebastián Ospina León draws on extensive archival research to reveal how melodrama visualized and shaped the social arena of urban modernity in early twentieth-century Latin America. Analyzing sociocultural contexts through film, this book demonstrates the ways in which melodrama was mobilized for both liberal and illiberal ends, revealing or concealing social inequities from Buenos Aires to Bogotá to Los Angeles. Ospina León critically engages Euro-American and Latin American scholarship seldom put into dialogue, offering an innovative theorization of melodrama relevant to scholars working within and across different national contexts.

El Salvador at War

El Salvador at War
Author: Marc Zimmerman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 328
Release: 1988
Genre: El Salvador
ISBN:

In this latest of three volumes depicting the Central American peoples¿ struggle for self-determination, Marc Zimmerman weaves revolutionary poetry, testimonial chronology, and analysis in a rich portrayal of a nation; this book is both poetry anthology and prose history. Probing the causes of repression, insurrection, and U.S. intervention, this book presents the endurance and aspirations of the Salvadoran people as they attempt to transform their world.

Beyond the Reconquista: New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711-1085)

Beyond the Reconquista: New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711-1085)
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2020-04-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004423877

Beyond the Reconquista: New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711-1085) offers an exciting series of essays by leading scholars in Hispanic Studies from across North America and Europe. At its heart is the Reconquista, without doubt the most important and enduring theme of Iberian historiography of the Middle Ages. The innovative studies collected herein, which treat a diverse array of subjects via forensic analyses of charters, chronicles and coins, shed new light on crucial aspects of medieval Iberian socio-economic, political and cultural history. The result is a collection of essays which marks a decisive and bold turning of the page in Iberian medieval studies, as the reality and ideal of Reconquest come under hitherto unparalleled scrutiny. Contributors are Graham Barrett, Jeffrey Bowman, Alberto Canto, Nicola Clarke, Wendy Davies, Julio Escalona, Jonathan Jarrett, Eduardo Manzano Moreno, Iñaki Martín Viso and Lucy K. Pick. See inside the book.

Cecilia Valdés or El Angel Hill

Cecilia Valdés or El Angel Hill
Author: Cirilo Villaverde
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 545
Release: 2005-09-29
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0199725233

Cecilia Valdés is arguably the most important novel of 19th century Cuba. Originally published in New York City in 1882, Cirilo Villaverde's novel has fascinated readers inside and outside Cuba since the late 19th century. In this new English translation, a vast landscape emerges of the moral, political, and sexual depravity caused by slavery and colonialism. Set in the Havana of the 1830s, the novel introduces us to Cecilia, a beautiful light-skinned mulatta, who is being pursued by the son of a Spanish slave trader, named Leonardo. Unbeknownst to the two, they are the children of the same father. Eventually Cecilia gives in to Leonardo's advances; she becomes pregnant and gives birth to a baby girl. When Leonardo, who gets bored with Cecilia after a while, agrees to marry a white upper class woman, Cecilia vows revenge. A mulatto friend and suitor of hers kills Leonardo, and Cecilia is thrown into prison as an accessory to the crime. For the contemporary reader Helen Lane's masterful translation of Cecilia Valdés opens a new window into the intricate problems of race relations in Cuba and the Caribbean. There are the elite social circles of European and New World Whites, the rich culture of the free people of color, the class to which Cecilia herself belonged, and then the slaves, divided among themselves between those who were born in Africa and those who were born in the New World, and those who worked on the sugar plantation and those who worked in the households of the rich people in Havana. Cecilia Valdés thus presents a vast portrait of sexual, social, and racial oppression, and the lived experience of Spanish colonialism in Cuba.

Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions

Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions
Author: John Beverley
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2014-02-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0292762283

“This book began in what seemed like a counterfactual intuition . . . that what had been happening in Nicaraguan poetry was essential to the victory of the Nicaraguan Revolution,” write John Beverley and Marc Zimmerman. “In our own postmodern North American culture, we are long past thinking of literature as mattering much at all in the ‘real’ world, so how could this be?” This study sets out to answer that question by showing how literature has been an agent of the revolutionary process in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. The book begins by discussing theory about the relationship between literature, ideology, and politics, and charts the development of a regional system of political poetry beginning in the late nineteenth century and culminating in late twentieth-century writers. In this context, Ernesto Cardenal of Nicaragua, Roque Dalton of El Salvador, and Otto René Castillo of Guatemala are among the poets who receive detailed attention.

Argentina Noir

Argentina Noir
Author: Cynthia Schmidt-Cruz
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2019-02-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1438473036

An engaging and insightful guide to Argentine crime fiction since 2000. Argentina Noir offers a guide to Argentine crime fiction, with a focus on works published since the year 2000. It argues that the novela negra, or crime novel, has become the favored genre for many writers to address the social malaise brought about by changes linked to globalization and market-driven economic policies. Cynthia Schmidt-Cruz presents close readings and original interpretations of eleven novels, all set in or around Buenos Aires, and explores the ways these texts adapt major motifs, figures, and literary techniques in Hispanic crime fiction in order to give voice to wide-ranging social critiques. Schmidt-Cruz addresses such topics as organized crime and institutional complicity, corruption during the presidency of Carlos Menem (1989–1999), terrorist attacks on Jewish institutions in Buenos Aires and the mysterious death of Alberto Nisman, and the winners and the losers of neoliberal structural changes. With a solid underpinning in sociological studies and criticism of the genre and its historical context, Argentina Noir reveals how these novels are renovating the genre to engage pressing issues confronting not only Argentina but also countries throughout Latin America and around the globe. “This is a very significant contribution to the field. It is a full and illustrative, as well as authoritative, guide to crime fiction and the novela negra in Argentina in the twenty-first century, with a particular focus on the literature’s social and political thematics.” — Philip Swanson, author of The New Novel in Latin America: Politics and Popular Culture after the Boom