(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]
(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]
(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]
(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]
(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]
(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]
(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]
(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]
(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]
(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]
(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]
(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]
(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]
(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]
(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]