Cover for CANTÚ: Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change. Click for larger image

Chicana Traditions

Continuity and Change
Awards and Recognition:

Winner of the Susan Koppelman Award given by the Joint Women's Caucus of the Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association, 2003. A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2003.

The first anthology to focus specifically on the topic of Chicana expressive culture, Chicana Traditions features the work of native scholars: Chicanas engaged in careers as professors and students, performing artists and folklorists, archivists and museum coordinators, and community activists.

Blending narratives of personal experience with more formal, scholarly discussions, Chicana Traditions tells the insider story of a professional woman mariachi performer and traces the creation and evolution of the escaramuza charra(all-female precision riding team) within the male-dominated charreada,or Mexican rodeo. Other essays cover the ranchera (country or rural) music of the transnational performer Lydia Mendoza, the complex crossover of Selena's Tejano music, and the bottle cap and jar lid art of Goldie Garcia. Framed by the Chicana feminist concept of the borderlands, a formative space where cultures and identities converge, Chicana Traditions offers a lively commentary on how women continue to invent, reshape, and transcend their traditional culture.

"A fascinating read which spans the gap between Chicana literary and art criticism."--Enrique R. Lamadrid, author of Nuevo México Profundo

"Those who want to avoid the cliches of tradition vs. modernity or the implicit dichotomies set up by opposing culture to feminism will find that this rich set of essays opens the doors to a broad range of options inherent in Mexican American traditions as well as to its restraints."--Beverly Stoeltje, associate professor of folklore and ethnomusicology at Indiana University

Norma E. Cantú, a professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio, is the author of Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera. Olga Nájera-Ramírez, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, is the author of La Fiesta de los Tastoanes: Critical Encounters in a Mexican Festival Performance.

To order online:
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/78mrx9tk9780252070129.html

To order by phone:
(800) 621-2736 (USA/Canada)
(773) 702-7000 (International)

Related Titles

previous book next book
Dancing across Borders

Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos

Edited by Olga Nájera-Ramírez, Norma E. Cantú, and Brenda M. Romero

Kings for Three Days

The Play of Race and Gender in an Afro-Ecuadorian Festival

Jean Muteba Rahier

Latin American Migrations to the U.S. Heartland

Changing Social Landscapes in Middle America

Edited by Linda Allegro and Andrew Grant Wood

Immigrant Women Workers in the Neoliberal Age

Edited by Nilda Flores-González, Anna Romina Guevarra, Maura Toro-Morn, and Grace Chang

Eating Together

Food, Friendship, and Inequality

Alice P. Julier

Palomino

Clinton Jencks and Mexican-American Unionism in the American Southwest

James J. Lorence

Pretty Good for a Girl

Women in Bluegrass

Murphy Hicks Henry

Exporting Perilous Pauline

Pearl White and the Serial Film Craze

Edited by Marina Dahlquist

Friday Night Fighter

Gaspar "Indio" Ortega and the Golden Age of Television Boxing

Troy Rondinone

Black Flag Boricuas

Anarchism, Antiauthoritarianism, and the Left in Puerto Rico, 1897-1921

Kirwin R. Shaffer