Title: Learning from experience: minority identities, multicultural struggles 
Author: Moya, Paula M. L
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Literature | American Studies | Ethnic Studies | Chicano  Studies | Gender Studies | Social and Political Thought | Politics | Social Theory | Immigration
Publisher's Description: In Learning from Experience, Paula Moya offers an alternative to some influential philosophical assumptions about identity and experience in contemporary literary theory. Arguing that the texts and lived experiences of subordinated people are rich sources of insight about our society, Moya presents a nuanced universalist justification for identity-based work in ethnic studies. This strikingly original book provides eloquent analyses of such postmodernist feminists as Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Norma Alarcón, and Chela Sandoval, and counters the assimilationist proposals of minority neoconservatives such as Shelby Steele and Richard Rodriguez. It advances realist proposals for multicultural education and offers an understanding of the interpretive power of Chicana feminists including Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Helena María Viramontes. Learning from Experience enlarges our concept of identity and offers new ways to situate aspects of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation in discursive and sociopolitical contexts.   [brief]
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Title: Refried Elvis: the rise of the Mexican counterculture 
Author: Zolov, Eric
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Latin American History | Popular Culture | Chicano  Studies | Latin American Studies | Contemporary Music
Publisher's Description: This powerful study shows how America's biggest export, rock and roll, became a major influence in Mexican politics, society, and culture. From the arrival of Elvis in Mexico during the 1950s to the emergence of a full-blown counterculture movement by the late 1960s, Eric Zolov uses rock and roll to illuminate Mexican history through these charged decades and into the 1970s. This fascinating narrative traces the rechanneling of youth energies away from political protest in the wake of the 1968 student movement and into counterculture rebellion, known as La Onda (The Wave). Refried Elvis accounts for the events of 1968 and their aftermath by revealing a mounting crisis of patriarchal values, linked both to the experience of modernization during the 1950s and 1960s and to the limits of cultural nationalism as promoted by a one-party state.Through an engrossing analysis of music and film, as well as fanzines, newspapers, government documents, company reports, and numerous interviews, Zolov shows how rock music culture became a volatile commodity force, whose production and consumption strategies were shaped by intellectuals, state agencies, transnational and local capital, musicians, and fans alike. More than a history of Mexican rock and roll, Zolov's study demonstrates the politicized nature of culture under authoritarianism, and offers a nuanced discussion of the effects of cultural imperialism that deepens our understanding of gender relations, social hierarchies, and the very meanings of national identity in a transnational era.   [brief]
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Title: Rethinking the borderlands: between Chicano culture and legal discourse 
Author: Gutiérrez-Jones, Carl Scott
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: American Studies | Chicano  Studies | Literature | Language and Linguistics | Law | Social and Political Thought | Rhetoric | Postcolonial Studies | United States History | United States History
Publisher's Description: Challenging the long-cherished notion of legal objectivity in the United States, Carl Gutiérrez-Jones argues that Chicano history has been consistently shaped by racially biased, combative legal interactions. Rethinking the Borderlands is an insightful and provocative exploration of the ways Chicano and Chicana artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers engage this history in order to resist the disenfranchising effects of legal institutions, including the prison and the court.Gutiérrez-Jones examines the process by which Chicanos have become associated with criminality in both our legal institutions and our mainstream popular culture and thereby offers a new way of understanding minority social experience. Drawing on gender studies and psychoanalysis, as well as critical legal and race studies, Gutiérrez-Jones's approach to the law and legal discourse reveals the high stakes involved when concepts of social justice are fought out in the home, in the workplace and in the streets.   [brief]
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Title: Tijuana: stories on the border 
Author: Campbell, Federico
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Literature | Chicano  Studies | Ethnic Studies | Latin American Studies | Literature in Translation
Publisher's Description: Tijuana is a haunting collection of stories and a novella, all set in the shadowy borderlands between Mexico and the United States. A fresh and evocative voice, Federico Campbell traces many kinds of borders - geographical, psychological, cultural, spiritual - and the "halfway beings" that inhabit them.The novella, "Everything About Seals," is both a passionate love story and a deeply disquieting chronicle of romantic obsession. The narrative voices in Campbell's stories are many-sided, moving from the brash teenager whose gang's symbol is the Mobil Oil flying horse to the confused law student who no longer knows whether his cultural allegiance is to Mexico City or to Los Angeles.Campbell has captured here the ambivalent, fascinating ties between Mexico and the U.S., ties ranging from Hollywood movies to Mexican folklore. The first English-language translation of his work, Tijuana will be welcomed by general readers as well as literary critics, anthropologists, historians, and those interested in the culture of the border.   [brief]
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