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(Ef)Facing The Face Of Nationalism: Wrestling Masks In Chicano And Mexican Performance Art , Robert Neustadt

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Masks serve as particularly effective props in contemporary Mexican and Chicano performance art because of a number of deeply rooted traditions in Mexican culture. This essay explores the mask as code of honor in Mexican culture, and foregrounds the manner in which a number of contemporary Mexican and Chicano artists and performers strategically employ wrestling masks to (ef)face the mask-like image of Mexican or U.S. nationalism. I apply the label "performance artist" broadly, to include musicians and political figures that integrate an exaggerated sense of theatricality into their performances. Following the early work of Roland Barthes, I read performances as …

Reviews Of Recent Publications

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Alonso, Carlos J. The Burden of Modernity: The Rhetoric of Cultural Discourse in Spanish America Reviewed by Melvin S. Arrington, Jr.

Kolocotroni, Vassiliki, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou, eds, Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents Reviewed by Gerd Bayer

Motte, Warren. Small Worlds: Minimalism in Contemporary French Literature Reviewed by William Cloonan

Melton, Judith M. The Face of Exile: Autobiographical Journeys Reviewed by Claude P. Desmarais

Redding, Arthur. Raids on Human Consciousness: Writing, Anarchism, and Violence Reviewed by Gail Finney

Chambers, Ross. Facing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author Reviewed by Melissa A. Fitch

Marx-Scouras, Danielle. …

Crossing Laterally Into Solidarity In Montserrat Fontes's Dreams Of The Centaur , J. Douglas Canfield

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Fontes's novel begins with a corrido announcing typical themes of murder and revenge. But the novel has from the outset been interimplicated in a history of the persecution of the Yoeme (Yaquis) at the turn into the twentieth century. Its three main protagonists become mavericks on the border, as they cross ultimately not only into safety in Arizona but into solidarity with the oppressed. Such crossings are existential, resulting in new identities that eschew racial or ethnic purity but instead embrace mixed ethnicity, or mestizaje (to borrow key concepts from Anzaldúa). Such crossings are lateral, non-hierarchic. But Fontes does not …

Introduction , Charles Tatum

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Contemporary cultural critics have theorized the multiple aspects of "location" in many different ways…

"Pesadillas De La Noche, Amanecer De Silencio": Miguel Méndez And Margarita Oropeza, Debra A. Castillo

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In many border-related discussions—whether philosophical, anthropological, critical, or fictional—there are typical themes or narrative tics: allusions to the flexible geography that makes the border region both an isolated territory and an analogue for the postmodern condition, the puzzlement over how to understand the role of the "maquiladoras" 'assembly plants' and the area's industrial boom, the awareness of a vast movement of people both north and south, a persistent and nagging phobia about feminization, and about female sexuality. In this paper I will explore these concerns with reference to two novels: Arizonan Miguel Méndez's well-known 1974 novel Peregrinos de Aztlán (Pilgrims …

Borders Of The Self In Alfredo Véa's The Silver Cloud Café , Roberto Cantú

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

I am proposing an analysis of a novel by Alfredo Véra, Jr., The Silver Cloud Café (1996). As the author of a narrative trilogy that includes La Maravilla (1993), and Gods Go Begging (1999), Véa has produced, in The Silver Cloud Café, a novel that is central to the trilogy's interpretation. In my analysis, I discuss how Véa's novels question borders of the self—understood as ethnic or racial—through notions of a personal education (in La Maravilla, Alberto's; in The Silver Cloud Café, Zeferino's) in which characters count on the pedagogical guidance of Yaqui shamans, manongs from the …

John Rechy: Bodies And Souls And The Homoeroticization Of The Urban Quest, David William Foster

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

It has been difficult for John Rechy to become established in the canon of Chicano literature, in large part because of the homophobia that held sway during the formative period of Chicano literary criticism. However, now recognized as a founding figure of U.S. homoerotic writing, Rechy is also widely recognized as important to the Chicano literary tradition. This study focuses on the importance of Rechy less as a gay writer than to explore the ways in which his great Los Angeles novel, Bodies and Souls (1983), explores the conflicts between sexuality and the emotionally and physically deadening effects of modern …

Border Crossings: Images Of The Pachuco In Mexican Literature, Javier Durán

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This study suggests that an analysis of the image of the pachuco in Mexican literature can provide useful insights about the role and position of subaltern expressions as they become integrated into a larger mapping of cultural production. The paper argues that the pachuco's representation in Mexican culture undergoes a series of transformations that ultimately materialize in a symbolic entity which functions as a buffer mechanism of inclusion and/or exclusion. The pachuco is then a contra modern element that becomes de-territorialized from both Mexican and U.S. culture due to its aesthetic and linguistic hybridity which becomes a menace for essentialist …

Hegemony And Identity: The Chicano Hybrid In Francisco X. Alarcón's Snake Poems , George Hartley

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Snake Poems renegotiates power relations between the discourse of Spanish imperialism and Aztec poetic practice. Alarcón's extended poem enacts a process of ethnic, cultural, and spiritual identification through a confrontation between texts—Alarcón's original poems, passages of commentary from the Spanish Inquisitor Hernando Ruíz de Alarcón's treatise on Aztec spells and invocations, and the Aztec spells themselves in the original Náhuatl, the Aztec language. Each of these three layers of text represents a unique and competing people, ideology, and culture, and it is the clash and the hybrid fusion of these distinct discourses that Alarcón the poet stages in Snake Poems …

Reading The Other Side Of The Story: Ominous Voice And The Sociocultural And Political Implications Of Luis Spota's Murieron A Mitad Del Río , Francisco Manzo-Robledo

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

It is always contoversial to proclaim a literary work, at face value, as a sociocultural study of a particular society. It is even more controversial when one deals with a hybrid work, combining factors from two completely distinct societies. Yet, there are some literary works that seem to call for exactly this type of analysis, presenting a range of ideas which in retrospect reveal origins of significant sociocultural trends. Such is the case of Luis Spota's Murieron a mitad del río (1948). This novel presents a panorama of ancestral problems in the life of thousands of immigrants and inhabitants of …

Hybridity And The Space Of The Border In The Writing Of Norma Elia Cantú, Ellen Mccracken

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The creative and scholarly writing of Norma Elia Cantú focuses centrally on the tensions of borders that are eroding yet firmly in place. Cantú's border pivots on the geographic space in which Mexico and the United States physically intersect, yet she probes at the same time several of the other tenuous cultural borders that postmodernity has brought into focus. Transcending distinctions between genres, languages, and cultures, Cantú undertakes innovative genre hybridity, visual-verbal hybridity, and the recombination of distinct cultural codes. Whether writing cultural criticism, autobioethnography, creative fiction, or poetry, Cantú locates herself at the intersection of the geographical and epistemological …