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Full-Text Articles in American Studies
(Ef)Facing The Face Of Nationalism: Wrestling Masks In Chicano And Mexican Performance Art , Robert Neustadt
(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 …
Crossing Laterally Into Solidarity In Montserrat Fontes's Dreams Of The Centaur , J. Douglas Canfield
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
Introduction , Charles Tatum
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Contemporary cultural critics have theorized the multiple aspects of "location" in many different ways…
Crossing The Great Divide: Rewritings Of The U.S.-Mexican Encounter In Walter Abish And Richard Rodríguez , Maarten Van Delden
Crossing The Great Divide: Rewritings Of The U.S.-Mexican Encounter In Walter Abish And Richard Rodríguez , Maarten Van Delden
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In a 1978 essay on the relationship between Mexico and the United States, Octavio Paz suggested that the two countries were separated by a "perhaps insuperable" divide. Yet two recent works—Richard Rodríguez's collection of essays Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (1992) and Walter Abish's novel Eclipse Fever (1993)—offer evidence of a changing outlook on the U.S.-Mexican encounter. Abish and Rodríguez build upon the storehouse of images of the irreconcilable differences between the two nations. However, insofar as they play with and question these images, they draw attention to the unstable, fluctuating nature of the U.S.-Mexican encounter …
To Arrive Is To Begin: Benjamin Sáenz's Carry Me Like Water And The Pilgrimage Of Origin In The Borderlands , Alberto López Pulido
To Arrive Is To Begin: Benjamin Sáenz's Carry Me Like Water And The Pilgrimage Of Origin In The Borderlands , Alberto López Pulido
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This essay examines the "pilgrimage of origin" as presented in Benjamin Sáenz's novel Carry Me Like Water. As is the case with other ethnic literature, Carry Me Like Water teaches us that we must first go back before we can move forward and transform our lives. By pilgrimage of origin I make reference to a journey where participants are required to return to the past and the familiar. Unlike the more commonly described linear pilgrimage experience where participants are required to travel beyond the range of their familiar space, the pilgrimage of origin obligates participants to return to their …
Hybridity And The Space Of The Border In The Writing Of Norma Elia Cantú, Ellen Mccracken
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 …