Alvarado, Jimmy (2012). Backyard Brats and Eastside Punks: A History of East LA's Punk Scene. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v37 n2 p157-180 Fall. Music history and punk rock have long had an uneasy relationship because historians often fail to take two major factors into account when approaching the subject matter. One: punk's raison d'etre is to subvert much that music historians rely on in order to deem a particular performer or group significant. And two: punk is a living, thriving subculture that not only didn't "die" in 1977/83/86 or thereafter, but continues to reinvent and reinvigorate itself every few years. Still, many try to find rock stars in a world that disdains rock stars, doesn't assess a performer's worth by the number of units shifted, and hides its best purveyors in the deepest recesses of the underground. As can be expected, the resulting efforts often miss the point and are not unlike looking at a Seurat painting and being so obsessed with the dots that one fails to see the sailboat. True, Sex Pistols, Ramones, and Dead Kennedys were crucial to punk's genesis, but how about the contributions of… [Direct]

Vargas, Dan (2012). No Cover. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v37 n2 p181-203 Fall. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Dan Vargas spent his twenties going to punk shows at King's Palace, Club 88, the Cathay de Grand, the Vex, the Starwood, the Hong Kong Cafe, Base's Hall, and the Masque. He has produced for several bands and is currently a songwriter and singer for an LA rock band. In this article, he reflects on the "original" sound of the early punk rock bands, and how well this music has held up over time. As part of this reflection, he resurrects an article he wrote over thirty years ago about four "punk" bands that were just starting out in East Los Angeles. Their music was energetic, honest, and played like it mattered. This original article was never published, although a few copies were made for the bands, and it was at this time that Vargas began producing and managing some of the bands he had written about. Vargas contends that it has taken the world 30 years or so to "catch up on the sounds," and now there appears to be… [Direct]

Sanchez, Marta (2012). On Faith, Dreams, and Art. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v37 n2 p207-217 Fall. As a child, the author saw that art held a daily purpose for her family. It inspired her grandmother to worship and communicate to God and her many saints. This art uplifted them with spiritual, miraculous images that taught them morals based on the narratives of the image. The first work of art she owned was a painting given to her by her Tia Cecilia. It was a five-by-seven-inch canvas board painting of Jesus. She chose it from the many small paintings being sold by a street vendor passing by her grandmother's home on Rivas Street in San Antonio. When she shared it with her parish priest he told her not to pray to the painting, but directly to the Lord. These early everyday experiences of icons led her to create images that held a purpose culturally, as well as for art's sake. She believed that by doing this she could help decode their history and demystify her culture, which she saw so often misrepresented in the '60s in television, books, and the popular media as a whole. Her art… [Direct]

Barrera, Magdalena L. (2012). Domestic Dramas: Mexican American Music as an Archive of Immigrant Women's Experiences, 1920s-1950s. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v37 n1 p7-35 Spr. Mexican women's working and romantic lives were frequent subject matter in early-twentieth-century Mexican American music. Surprisingly, this trend is rendered nearly invisible by the corpus of scholarly work that focuses on the male-centered \heroic corrido,\ particularly the class and race conflicts represented in that \masculine\ genre. This interdisciplinary analysis reveals that the music of what can be called \domestic drama\–popular Mexican American folksongs that comment on women, work, and marriage–offers rich evidence of how Mexican communities debated immigrant women's increased personal freedoms in the United States. Beneath the songwriters' often humorous language and playful melodies lies tremendous anxiety about women's sexuality and growing visibility in the larger Mexican American community. This essay explores the challenges of using the music of domestic drama to understand immigrant women's experiences from the 1920s to the 1950s. It demonstrates that lyrics… [Direct]

Beltran, Cristina (2012). Racial Shame and the Pleasure of Transformation: Richard Rodriguez's Queer Aesthetics of Assimilation. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v37 n1 p37-64 Spr. This essay analyzes Latino conservative thought by rethinking the logics of assimilation through a simultaneous exploration of aesthetic possibility and negative affect. Focusing on the writings of Richard Rodriguez, the essay considers how creative forms of self-individuation and political agency cannot easily be decoupled from negative forms of identification and disidentification. Highlighting the interplay Rodriguez stages between shame, stigma, appropriation, pleasure, and play, the essay turns to queer theory and theories of affect as a way to more fully understand the latent intensities and political logics that operate in Rodriguez's queer-yet-conservative depictions of assimilation. In seeking to give an account of queer affect in Rodriguez, the essay attends to the many ways that \the deployment of sexuality intersects with the deployment of race.\ This reading of racialized sexuality works to resist a priori assumptions that such forms of intersectionality are necessarily… [Direct]

Thananopavarn, Susan (2012). Conscientizacion of the Oppressed Language and the Politics of Humor in Ana Castillo's \So Far from God\. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v37 n1 p65-86 Spr. This essay explores the relationship between Ana Castillo's novel \So Far from God\ (1993) and her development of an activist poetics inspired by Paulo Freire's influential 1970 treatise \Pedagogy of the Oppressed.\ \So Far from God\ may be understood as the practical application of Castillo's theory of \conscienticized poetics\; that is, the novel seeks to inspire political activism through a distinctive narrative style that relies on language strategies such as humor, revisioned cultural myths, and bilingual wordplay. The novel's humor is especially important to understanding Castillo's poetics, as she uses \outrageous\ events to convey (and provoke) outrage about issues as serious as war, environmental racism, patriarchal violence, and AIDS…. [Direct]

Revilla, Anita Tijerina (2012). What Happens in Vegas Does "Not" Stay in Vegas: Youth Leadership in the Immigrant Rights Movement in Las Vegas, 2006. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v37 n1 p87-115 Spr. Students calling themselves the Las Vegas Activist Crew shut down the city's famed Strip on May 1, 2006, with an immigrant rights protest that was one of the largest demonstrations in Nevada's history. This research analyzes the ways that students engage in activism to improve their own social conditions and those of their communities. The theoretical framework for the study is critical race theory and Latina/o critical theory in education, which examine the intersection of race with ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, language, immigration status, culture, and color. Data for this study were collected over five years, starting with the immigrant rights mobilization of 2006 and continuing to the present. A multitiered approach was used, including participatory action research, one-on-one interviews, and focus group interviews. This research reveals the importance of youth leadership and contests deficit thinking about Latina/o students. It supports the notion that advocacy for… [Direct]

McMahon, Marci R. (2011). Self-Fashioning through Glamour and Punk in East Los Angeles: Patssi Valdez in Asco's "Instant Mural" and "A La Mode". Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v36 n2 p21-49 Fall. Patssi Valdez, one of the most influential yet understudied female artists of the Chicana/o movement, was the only original and long-term female member of the 1970s art collective Asco. Through the visual discourses of pachuca glamour and punk, Valdez negotiated and exploited the gendered ideologies that visually put her at the center of the group. She used self-fashioning, or the intersection of dress with bodily performance, to respond to gendered ideologies of domesticity and a racialized public/private sphere that she confronted as a working-class Chicana in the 1960s and 1970s. Members of Asco were drawn together not only by their mutual interest in visual art and performance but also by a shared sensibility in fashion and dress; it was the sense of each of them becoming a work of art that led the group to extend their work into performance. Yet since fashion is often considered a superficial activity carried out by women and pitted against the serious male world of ideas, it… [Direct]

Cordova, Ruben C. (2011). The Cinematic Genesis of the Mel Casas Humanscape, 1965-1967. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v36 n2 p51-87 Fall. The 153 paintings that San Antonio-based artist Mel Casas calls Humanscapes were inspired by a glimpse of a drive-in movie screen. This article treats the first three years of work on this series, a period in which the artist referenced cinematic settings and audiences while registering aspects of the sexual revolution. Marshall McLuhan's "Mechanical Bride" (1951) deeply influenced the analysis of media imagery and technology that is evident in these paintings. In addition to contemporary cultural influences, the early phase of the Humanscape series also drew on the same artistic influences, namely surrealism and Dada, that shaped the work of other pop artists. By the end of 1967, Casas included parts of signs within his paintings. These signs led to freestanding, independent texts that doubled as subtitles. By juxtaposing punning texts and images, Casas broke from the explicit cinematic setting. Interviews with Casas and statements by the artist assist in discerning the… [Direct]

Szeghi, Tereza M. (2011). The Vanishing Mexicana/o: (Dis)Locating the Native in Ruiz de Burton's \Who Would Have thought It?\ and \The Squatter and the Don\. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v36 n2 p89-120 Fall. This article complements the existing body of Ruiz de Burton scholarship by providing the first sustained examination of her literary representations of American Indians in both \Who Would Have Thought It?\ (1872) and \The Squatter and the Don\ (1885), and by exploring how these representations serve her broader aims of social and political reform. The presence of American Indians in the novels, however marginal, and Ruiz de Burton's rendering of them as savage, powerless, and justly shut out from the social and political life of the nation are critical to the author's aims. Accounting for the absence and strategic appearance of American Indians in the novels reveals the complexities of Ruiz de Burton's manipulations of racial hierarchies as well as the ways in which she connects racial identity to rightful land ownership and social status. Ruiz de Burton reframes popular accounts of American Indians–including the captivity narrative and the myth of the Vanishing Indian–as a means… [Direct]

Barvosa, Edwina (2011). Mestiza Consciousness in Relation to Sustained Political Solidarity: A Chicana Feminist Interpretation of the Farmworker Movement. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v36 n2 p121-154 Fall. Two of the most significant themes in Chicana feminist thought are the character of mestiza consciousness and the view that political solidarity–that is, the uniting of diverse people in common cause–should build upon diversity among peoples rather than on a single shared identity. Numerous Chicana and Latina feminists have connected these two themes by emphasizing the role that inner diversity can play in political solidarity. However, questions remain as to the exact relationship between identity, the multiple identities within mestiza consciousness, and the everyday tasks of building political solidarity. This essay asks how the multiple identities within subjectivity can play a role in creating diverse yet cohesive political coalitions or movements. I first survey the concepts of mestiza consciousness and solidarity as Chicana feminists have articulated them in recent decades. Next, I employ these concepts in a case study analysis of the organizing strategies of the… [Direct]

O'Leary, Anna Ochoa; Romero, Andrea J. (2011). Chicana/o Students Respond to Arizona's Anti-Ethnic Studies Bill, SB 1108: Civic Engagement, Ethnic Identity, and Well-Being. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v36 n1 p9-36 Spr. Arizona Senate Bill 1108, the "anti-ethnic studies bill," proposed to eliminate ethnic studies programs and ethnic-based organizations from state-funded education. Along with other anti-immigrant legislation, this bill is creating an oppressive climate of discrimination against individuals of Mexican descent in Arizona. This study investigates the impact of SB 1108 on the mental well-being of Mexican-descent undergraduate students and examines protective factors such as ethnic identity, civic engagement, and individual coping responses (engaged and disengaged). Ninety-nine undergraduates who self-identified as Mexican, Mexican American, or Chicana/o completed an online survey. Pearson product-moment correlation analysis indicates that greater stress due to SB 1108 was significantly associated with lower self-esteem and more depressive symptoms. Engaged coping responses to SB 1108 protected students' self-esteem even at high levels of stress; in contrast, students who felt… [Direct]

Delgadillo, Theresa (2011). The Ideal Immigrant. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v36 n1 p37-67 Spr. The public discourse about immigration in the United States has long been fraught with xenophobia and racism. Since 9/11, moreover, the immigration issue has been firmly linked to questions of national security in the public imagination. In this recent period, the state has asserted extraordinary controls over immigrants and citizens that affect the discourse of immigration and the very notion of citizenship. How do representations and self-representations of Latina/os in the United States address this political and social climate? And how do new delimitations of citizenship, narratives of national security, and debates around immigration influence our self-representation? This essay examines recent literary and visual self-constructions by Latina/os in two photographic narratives, \Americanos\ and \Mexican Chicago\ and a book of essays titled \The New Americans\. Locating these texts at the juncture of the immigration debate, institutionalization of Latina/o histories and… [Direct]

Armbruster-Sandoval, Ralph (2011). The Life of the Party: Alice McGrath, Multiracial Coalitions, and the Struggle for Social Justice. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v36 n1 p69-98 Spr. This essay explores the life of Alice Greenfield McGrath, a key player in the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee and a longtime activist whose involvement in social justice issues spanned eight decades. While best known for her role in the Sleepy Lagoon case in the 1940s, Alice fought the "good fight" for virtually her entire life, supporting the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, joining the Communist Party in the 1930s, organizing delegations to Nicaragua in the 1980s, and defending civil liberties and constitutional rights under the "war on terror." Controversy continues to surround the racial and gender composition of the Sleepy Lagoon defense committees and the central role of McGrath, a white Jewish woman. Following Alice's lead, I suggest that rather than seeing these organizations as a one-person effort, it is more fruitful to see them as they were: multiracial coalitions that successfully brought about limited social change. Throughout her… [Direct]

French, Lydia A. (2011). "Woman Hollering Creek" a Traves de la Musica: Articulating Mexicanidad to Pochismo. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v36 n1 p99-127 Spr. This essay intervenes in contemporary scholarship on Sandra Cisneros's "Woman Hollering Creek" (1991) by examining the canciones she uses as epigraphs and their relationship to the multiple nationalisms that Chicana/os actively negotiate. I argue that Cisneros's decision to include powerfully nationalist Mexican cancion traditions directs the reader-listener to the role that mexicanidad plays in the collection's stories and in Chicana/o nationalism and identity more generally. This examination of the songs reveals Cisneros's critique of a wholesale adoption of discourses of Mexico that depict mexicanidad as either romanticized or despised, representations she regards as potentially flattening. The stories draw out the complex dimensions of class, race, gender, and generational difference that color each of the songs in its lyrical effect, musical genesis, and performance. Cisneros's deft and sophisticated treatment of the relationship between song and story resonates in… [Direct]

Spener, David (2010). Movidas Rascuaches: Strategies of Migrant Resistance at the Mexico-U.S. Border. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v35 n2 p9-36 Fall. In the field of Chicana/o arts and letters, "rasquachismo" refers to the celebration of the sensibility of "los de abajo" (the underdogs), whose resourcefulness and ingenuity permit them to overcome adversity by stitching together the tools needed to survive from whatever materials they have at hand. In this article, I apply the concept of rasquachismo to interpreting the clandestine border-crossing strategies that Mexican migrants pursue as a way of resisting intensive efforts by the U.S. government to police their movements. More specifically, I describe the types of "movidas rascuaches" (rascuache maneuvers) practiced by migrants whom I encountered as I conducted ethnographic fieldwork along the South Texas-Northeast Mexico border in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Drawing upon the theoretical reflections of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, I argue that the rasquache sensibility forms an integral part of the habitus of Mexican migrants that… [Direct]

Galindo, Rene (2010). Repartitioning the National Community: Political Visibility and Voice for Undocumented Immigrants in the Spring 2006 Immigration Rights Marches. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v35 n2 p37-64 Fall. The historic immigration rights marches of 2006 placed the plight of undocumented immigrants in the national spotlight. Competing interpretations of the marches focused in part on the waving of Mexican flags by marchers. While some English-language media critics saw the flags as expressing political disloyalty to the United States, the marchers and Spanish-language media said they stood for cultural identity and familial pride. Both of these interpretations obscured the political agency of the marchers, who sought to create visibility and political presence for undocumented immigrants and oppose their criminalization and political exclusion. This essay uses a performance perspective to analyze the Mexican flag as a visual symbol of the political agency, voice, and visibility of undocumented immigrants. Images of the flag in the media served as proxy for the visual emergence of undocumented immigrants from the \shadows of society\ onto the national broadcast/political stage. Negative… [Direct]

Navarro, Sharon A. (2010). Shaking Hands and Kissing Babies: The Intersectionality of Ethnicity, Class, and Gender, and Latina Women's Decisions to Run for Judicial Office. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v35 n2 p65-87 Fall. Women often enter judiciary positions through the trial courts, particularly county courts, because they see these courts as a stepping-stone to higher judicial office. As the eligibility pool of experienced female Hispanic lawyers expands, Hispanic women are increasingly taking seats on trial court benches. What political and demographic shifts have fostered this change? Does the intersectionality of ethnicity, class, and gender play any role in shaping Hispanic women's run for the judiciary? I examine the political and personal experiences of three Hispanic women who ran for and won judgeships at the county court-at-law level in Bexar County, Texas. My findings suggest that Hispanic women experience, and often overcome, the triple barriers of ethnicity, class, and gender as they struggle for political incorporation via the judiciary, particularly at the county court level…. [Direct]

Hernandez, Jose Angel (2010). Contemporary Deportation Raids and Historical Memory: Mexican Expulsions in the Nineteenth Century. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v35 n2 p115-142 Fall. The contemporary situation in the United States with respect to Mexican migrants has reached a level of intensity that harkens back to the mass expulsions of the 1930s and the 1950s, when millions were forcefully removed south across the border. Recent deportation raids have targeted food processing plants and other large businesses hiring migrant workers from Mexico and Central America. By portraying the current raids as something new, the U.S. media decontexualizes them and strips them of historical memory. In fact, the current raids can be reconstructed and historicized to the moment when Euro-American settlers first encountered Mexicans in the early 1800s. Evidence taken primarily from Mexican archives reveals that expulsions first occurred in the mid-1830s and continued throughout the nineteenth century, especially in areas where local populations were demographically overwhelmed. This period has traditionally been overlooked by U.S., Chicana/o, and Mexican historiographers… [Direct]

Blackwell, Maylei (2010). Lideres Campesinas: Nepantla Strategies and Grassroots Organizing at the Intersection of Gender and Globalization. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v35 n1 p13-47 Spr. Based on a collaborative ethnography with Lideres Campesinas, a state-wide farmworker women's organization in California, this essay explores how activists have created multi-issued organizing strategies grounded in family structures and a community-based social world. Building on Gloria Anzaldua's theory of nepantla, it illustrates how campesina organizers create sources of empowerment from their binational life experiences and new forms of gendered grassroots leadership that navigate the overlapping hybrid hegemonies produced by U.S., Mexican, and migrant relations of power. The author argues that immigrant women's organizing challenges the racialized and gendered forms of structural violence exacerbated by neoliberal globalization and serves as an unrecognized source of transnational feminist theorizing…. [Direct]

Ramirez, Pablo A. (2010). Toward a Borderlands Ethics: The Undocumented Migrant and Haunted Communities in Contemporary Chicana/o Fiction. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v35 n1 p49-67 Spr. By reading Helena Maria Viramontes's "Cariboo Cafe" and Daniel Chacon's "Godoy Lives," this essay argues that Chicana/o fiction articulates what I call a "borderlands ethics." Both Viramontes and Chacon give the undocumented migrant the power to merge the United States and Latin America, self and other, citizen and noncitizen. These mergers demonstrate how a borderlands ethical stance can produce new unauthorized truths and relations outside the law and beyond national borders. However, these stories of ghostly kinship also produce a political imperative: to resurrect borderlands relations and experiences in the public sphere. Through the trope of haunting and an engagement with a borderlands ethics, "The Cariboo Cafe" and "Godoy Lives" help us understand that maintaining a Latina/o ethnic identity is not a simple act of preservation; it is an ethico-political project that challenges the United States to form new visions of democracy… [Direct]

Lopez, Layza; Munguia, Edgar; Santa Ana, Otto (2010). Framing Peace as Violence: Television News Depictions of the 2007 Police Attack on Immigrant Rights Marchers in Los Angeles. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v35 n1 p69-101 Spr. This study examines two successive days of U.S. television news coverage of the May 1, 2007, immigration rights rally in Los Angeles. As thousands of demonstrators appealed peacefully for comprehensive immigration policy reform, they were assailed by 450 police officers firing munitions and using truncheons. We evaluated fifty-one television news reports from three networks and five local stations using three complementary analyses (framing, visual coding, and critical spoken discourse analysis). News reporters on the ground at the time framed the events as a police attack. On the following day, however, news media blamed the victims by reframing the event as a violent provocation. We argue that the television news seized political agency and manipulated public opinion about domestic immigration policy…. [Direct]

Hartley, George (2010). The Curandera of Conquest: Gloria Anzaldua's Decolonial Remedy. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v35 n1 p135-161 Spr. In this essay I argue that the primary role that Gloria Anzaldua creates for herself as a writer and activist is that of the curandera of conquest, the healer of \la herida abierta\ (the open wound) created by the borders imposed by capitalism, nationalism, imperialism, sexism, homophobia, and racism. After examining Anzaldua's \Prietita and the Ghost Woman\ as both an illustration (in content) and an example (in enactment) of her practice as a curandera, I provide a brief overview of curanderismo and key developments in the theories of decolonization within global indigenous studies since the turn of the twenty-first century. I read Anzaldua's decolonizing work as a companion to this recent decolonization move within indigenous theory and practice…. [Direct]

Huber, Lindsay Perez; Malagon, Maria C.; Solorzano, Daniel G. (2009). Struggling for Opportunity: Undocumented AB 540 Students in the Latina/o Education Pipeline. CSRC Research Report. Number 13. UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center (NJ1) Assembly Bill 540 (AB 540) was passed into law by the California state legislature in October 2001 and was implemented on January 1, 2002. Under AB 540, an undocumented student pays resident (in-state) fees at California's public colleges and universities if the student 1) attended a high school in California for at least three years (schooling does not have to be consecutive); 2) graduated from a California high school or received an equivalent degree (GED); and 3) files an affidavit with the institution stating that she or he will apply for legal permanent residency as soon as she or he is eligible. The legislation affects all public institutions of higher education in the state: the University of California (UC), California State University (CSU), and California Community College (CCC) systems. Although AB 540 creates broader access to higher education by offering in-state tuition to undocumented students, for many low-income undocumented students, even in-state tuition is a… [PDF]

Tace Hedrick (2009). Queering the Cosmic Race: Esotericism, Mestizaje, and Sexuality in the Work of Gabriela Mistral and Gloria Anzaldua. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v34 n2 p 67-98 Fall. Despite their differences in place and time, the woman-centered Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral and the Chicana lesbian feminist writer Gloria Anzaldua both looked to a transnational intellectual American history that frequently connected discourses of esotericism, indigenismo, and mestizaje. My comparative approach shows how both women used these discourses as a way to reconceptualize the subjectivity of the queer, indigenous-identified mestiza in a modern world. Notions of a new cosmic consciousness achieved via racial synthesis echo through twentieth-century Latin American and Chicana/o texts; theosophical ideas about race and spirit were deeply influential in Mistral's writing and beliefs, and theosophy in turn informed the New Age feminist spirituality that helped shape Anzaldua's work. Outlining a history of the connections between these esoteric beliefs and those of mestizaje, and indigenismo, I show how Mistral and, later, Anzaldua inherited and rewrote these notions by… [Direct]

Duran, Robert J. (2009). The Core Ideals of the Mexican American Gang Living the Presentation of Defiance. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v34 n2 p99-134 Fall. Current approaches to designing antigang policies overemphasize the notion that criminality is the defining characteristic of gangs and that solutions require a get-tough approach. As an ex-gang member, I conducted a five-year ethnographic study and a fourteen-year informal study of Mexican American street gangs in two Southwestern states to understand the persistence of gangs. I found that the obstacles that have been imposed on low-income, ethnic minority neighborhoods have led to an adaptive strategy for survival in which gangs play a central, albeit destructive, role. Gangs maintain their cohesiveness and longevity through four core ideals: displaying loyalty, responding courageously to external threats, promoting and defending gang status, and maintaining a stoic attitude toward the negative consequences of gang life. State-sponsored opposition to gangs only further solidifies these ideals. Pragmatic solutions will require rechanneling the collective energy of current and former… [Direct]

Wilson, Tamar Diana (2009). Anti- and Pro-Immigrant Entrepreneurs Labeling Theory Revisited. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v34 n2 p135-154 Fall. Almost forty years ago, noted immigration scholar Jorge A. Bustamante published an article in the \American Journal of Sociology\ applying Howard Becker's labeling theory to the phenomenon of deviantizing and stigmatizing the undocumented. While immigration laws and some of the players involved have changed since his article was published, labeling theory remains an ideal tool for analyzing anti-immigrant and pro-immigrant postulates, arguments, and policies. This essay revisits labeling theory, as seen through Bustamante's lens, in order to understand the debates around the undocumented over the past two decades. Three types of \moral entrepreneurs\ advocating for and against the undocumented worker are examined: the nativist, the economic, and the humanitarian. An expanded moral entrepreneurship model can illuminate social processes affecting a vulnerable population through the insertion of a moral argument component and in this way may act as a catalyst for positive social change…. [Direct]

Sisk, Christina L. (2009). Toward a Trans(National) Reading of Ramon "Tianguis" Perez's "Diario de un mojado". Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v34 n1 p13-34 Spr. In Ramon "Tianguis" Perez's "Diario de un mojado", Perez identifies primarily as a "mojado" and a "macuiltianguense" (a person from San Pablo de Macuiltianguis, Oaxaca). The concept of community as elaborated in the diary incorporates macuiltianguenses on both sides of the border. This essay argues that Perez's transnational community must be understood within a framework that addresses both Mexican and U.S. national identities and nation-states. Although the main focus is "Diario de un mojado", the essay also includes a brief analysis of "Diary of a Guerrilla" as a way to place Perez's migration into context. In these texts, Perez does not undo national identities completely; rather, he dialogues with the dominant discourse of "mexicanidad" because he sees that it comes into conflict with his indigenous Zapotec identity, and he specifically rejects a U.S. national identity. The processes that Perez describes can… [Direct]

Jones, Jessica E. (2009). Spatializing Sexuality in Jaime Hernandez's "Locas". Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v34 n1 p35-64 Spr. Focusing on Jaime Hernandez's "Locas: The Maggie and Hopey Stories," part of the "Love and Rockets" comic series, I argue that the graphic landscape of this understudied comic offers an illustration of the theories of space in relation to race, gender, and sexuality that have been critical to understandings of Chicana sexuality. Set in a barrio outside Los Angeles, the comic allows us to understand how this particular urban space shapes the body as both material form and surface entity. It writes a queer Chicana sexuality into visibility, yet refuses to reify it, and thus avoids many of the pitfalls of identity politics. While the heterosexual, patriarchal norms that govern the barrio space attempt to write Hopey and Maggie's queer bodies into the margins of the neighborhood, the girls' bodies also queer the space, disrupting the codes that govern it and remapping the barrio. Attending to both the sociopolitical context of the strip and the formal conventions of… [Direct]

Rudolph, Jennifer Domino (2009). Identity Theft: Gentrification, Latinidad, and American Girl Marisol Luna. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v34 n1 p65-91 Spr. Released by Mattel in 2005, American Girl doll Marisol Luna quickly provoked controversy. The doll's accompanying narrative depicts her Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen as "dangerous" and recounts her family's move to the suburbs. Pilsen, located just south and west of downtown Chicago, has a long history as a Mexican (im)migrant port of entry. Many Latinos, particularly in Pilsen, perceive the doll and her narrative as a misrepresentation of their community that obscures the economic reality of gentrification and the displacement of poor residents of color. The resulting protest against the doll both exemplifies the contested nature of ownership of space and serves as a lens through which to examine the potential benefits and limitations of "latinidad," or unity among Latinos, in Chicago and elsewhere. Marisol Luna functions as a cultural text on which Latinos, as individuals and as a group, can articulate contestatory ethnic identities and negotiate their place… [Direct]