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Ilán Stavans, ed. Quinceañera. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2010. 134pp.

Nueve interpretaciones de la quinceañera can be found in this edited volume,

part of the Ilan Stavans Latino Civilization Series published by Greenwood Press. The

first section, Preparativos, consists of six previously published essays from the 1990s to

early 2000 that present an academic study of the quinceañera. Most focus on the practice

in the U.S., with the exception of Valentina Napolitano, who documents a quinceañera

in a low-income community in Mexico. Following these essays is a short but welcome

section of three testimonios by noted authors as well as an interview with a dressmaker.

As a set, this collection offers multiple strands of scholarship and frameworks for

understanding quinceañeras.

Some of these essays address the issue of who claims and wants to reclaim the

quinceañera as tradition. First is the origin question: where did it really come from?

What is clear across the essays is that there is no definitive answer to the origin question,

though some have pointed to evidence for both Indigenous and European antecedents.

Particularly interesting in some of these essays was the question of who wants to reclaim

the tradition toward religious, consumerist, or community identity goals. Several articles

discuss the commercialization of the quinceañera by market forces, and the impact this

has on the family and community’s resources. Along these lines, Kristen Deiter’s essay

centers on competing religious and consumerist influences on the practice of

quinceañeras. Framed as a dichotomy of spiritual benefactors grappling against spiritual

detractors, the religious influences hope to reclaim and shape the tradition to further fit

church practices (for instance, as another sacrament). Similarly, U.S. popular consumerist

culture vies to claim the soul of the quinceañera tradition through its super-sizing of

the event and its associated costs.

Perhaps in an attempt to assimilate the quinceañera into U.S. mainstream

cultural understandings, the celebration has been compared to mini-weddings and

Latina-style debutante balls. Though some articles reflect this type of analysis, others

adopt a more nuanced perspective, examining the sense of cultural belonging and

continuity alongside the oppressive gender and class aspects. Ruth Horowitz and Karen

Mary Dávalos in particular examine the creative co-construction of the quinceañera as

evidence of the fluidity of what we consider ritual or tradition. Using a

borderlands/Anzalduan mestizaje lens, Dávalos describes tradition “an open and

sometimes chaotic terrain that is constantly reconfigured in everyday experience” (9).

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Sara Arcaya offers an example of intergenerational recasting of tradition with her

description of quinceañera celebrations for boys, through the fiesta clavel. Julia Alvarez’s

testimonio represents a reimagining of tradition as she ends her piece with the idea that

her writing itself is a type of quinceañera, with wise women offering consejos as symbolic

damas en la corte. Finally, Judith Ortiz Cofer’s testimonio focused not on the party, but

on the sociocultural, economic and political aspects of the life of a quinceañera as she

recounts a story of a girl who serves as linguistic and cultural translator for her family,

navigating the terrains of public violences.

Underlying many of these pieces is a conceptual sifting of dichotomies, as

authors attempt to make sense of the striking contradictions and ongoing creative co-

constructions of ritual and tradition surrounding the quinceañera. The intersecting

dimensions of social class, race, gender, ethnic and cultural identity, are all explored in

relation to the quinceañera. Is it a community effort to embrace cultural continuity, a

reaffirming of Christian values and commitments, a consumerist trap, an effort at

reinforcing patriarchal control of young women’s bodies… some combination of the

above? True to its stated goal, this collection, taken together, complicates rather than

translates, offering different lenses rather than an essentialized image.

Jennifer Ayala

Saint Peter’s College

Mary C. Beltrán. Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes: The Making and Meanings of Filmand TV Stardom. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. 212 pp.

In Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes, Mary C. Beltrán exposes how the racialized

production and publicity of U.S. media industries, in conjunction with social structures,

have shaped the stardom and opportunities of Latina/o actors. Indicating the book’s

broad relevance, Beltrán shows how promotion can reproduce or contest the status of

Latina/os in U.S. society with respect to race, gender, class, national identity, and

citizenship. The author accomplishes these goals through an accessible, clearly-written

book of seven chapters, each respectively devoted to a key transitional period for Latina/o

media representation and a single star: Dolores del Río, Desi Arnaz, Rita Moreno,

Freddie Prinze, Edward James Olmos, Jennifer Lopez, and, in the last chapter, both

Jessica Alba and Rosario Dawson. The book reveals a historical evolution, from silent

cinema to millennial film and television, of Latina/o stars and national identities in the

U.S. media and social imaginations.

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In conversation with scholars of Latina/o media and culture, the author makes

an argument about “Hollywood Latinidad,” an imagined characterization of Latina/o

identity constructed by media and advertising industries. Beltrán’s worthy contribution

is her analysis of Latinidad as manufactured by the U.S. film and television industries’

star promotion. Furthermore, the author contends that Hollywood Latinidad is a forum

through which conceptions of Latina/o ethnicity, racialization, and status vis-à-vis

mainstream white Anglo society are strengthened, contested, debated, and given

significance. She thereby accounts for the complex ways that Hollywood’s star

promotion influences and is influenced by racialized social and political economic

structures as well as social perceptions about Latina/os. Star promotion, then, is

intricately related to the citizenship status and work and life opportunities of U.S. peoples

of Latin American descent inside and outside of media industries.

Employing theories of racialization and of media stardom, Beltrán confirms

how star images have bolstered racial classifications and the privileging of whiteness.

Noteworthy is her examination of how Latina/o mestizaje, or racial hybridity, has been

a source of bewilderment that Hollywood has had to continuously negotiate in light of

the U.S. black-white racial binary. Racialization helps explain what Beltrán identifies

as the evolving ambivalent position of Latina/os: while Latina/os have had some

opportunities as stars playing complex, leading characters, they have had to endure

stereotypes, trivialization, and barriers to membership in Hollywood’s star system and

creative labor force. This situation, Beltrán demonstrates, reflects the ambivalent racial

and social standing of Latina/os in society at large.

Latino/a Stars takes us behind-the-scenes of star production and promotion.

Through extensive materials obtained through impressive archival research, the author

weaves her narrative with promotional posters, publicity stills, film exhibitors’ press books,

and studio-produced biographies. She examines the activities of talent managers as well

as the creative agency of actors in the construction of their own star images. Beltrán

also conducted interviews, completed an internship at a trade journal, and participated

in Latina/o advocacy events. However, Latina/o Stars is not an examination of the daily

workings and processes of the media industries. Also very present are secondary

accounts, box office figures, ratings, and press reviews. Publicity in this book is accurately

defined as not only the activities of industry promotion proper but also the creative

agency of stars and the discursive work of the press. Despite these slight criticisms, the

array of materials and sources is a strength, as Beltrán herself convincingly points out

that stardom is an intricate phenomenon that necessitates multiple methods.

In the final analysis, Beltrán has given us a thoroughly-researched, in-depth

historical account with explanatory power on the manufacture and publicity of Latina/o

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stars, the ambivalent racial position and shifting opportunities of Latina/o actors, and

the interaction of industrial and social conditions in the evolution of the racial and social

status of Latina/o stars and citizens.

Chad Thomas Beck

Randolph College

Juan J. Alonzo. Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes: The Ambivalence of MexicanAmerican Identity in Literature and Film. Tucson: The University of ArizonaPress, 2009. 196 pp.

Juan J. Alonzo’s Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes arrives at a moment when

Mexico is celebrating the Bicentennial of Independence from Spain (1810) and the

Centennial of the Mexican Revolution (1910), two of the three events that shaped

Mexico and established a relationship with its northern neighbor. The third event was

the war between the United States and Mexico (1846-1848). The Revolution of 1910

marked the beginning of migrations of Mexicans to the U.S. and the beginning of

cultural, political, and economic conflicts. Alonzo analyzes the troubled relationship

between the U.S. and Mexico based on the Revolution. During the twentieth century,

Mexico was seen by U.S. writers and filmmakers through the lens of the Revolution.

This is one of Alonzo’s central arguments, which leads one to conclude that Badmen is

not titled correctly. It is not an analysis of Mexican American identity in literature and

film; it mostly concerns Mexican stereotypes based on the Revolution.

In his Introduction “Ambivalence and Contingency in the Representation of

Mexican Identity,” Alonzo writes “While my study comments upon Mexican American

representation in its variety of forms, my analysis will focus on the production and

contestation of Mexican masculinity as it appears in several significant cinematic and

literary incarnations, namely in the characters of the ‘greaser,’ bandit revolutionary,

‘badman,’ and social deviant” (3). These stereotypes first surfaced in 1840s conquest

fiction. They were a vilification of a conquered people. The term “greaser” for a Mexican

male abounds in literature of different genres. Scholars such as Raymund D. Paredes,

Arnoldo de León, José Saldívar, Ramón Saldívar, and this reviewer in my Narratives of

Greater Mexico (UT Press, 2005), have returned to this nineteenth century racist

literature. Alonzo draws on Homi Bhabha’s view of stereotypes on understanding “the

processes of subjectif ication made possible (and plausible) through stereotypical discourse”

(cited by Alonzo 6). Following Bhabha, it is Alonzo’s task to understand the formation

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and transformation of Mexican subjects in film and literature though, I should add, that

the mode of production and reception of film versus literature is unique to each genre.

Film is a popular medium and we remain uncertain on the exact force of stereotypical

images on the American public. And in several key moments, Alonzo reads literature

against film. The stereotype is never completely static or one-dimensional; it changes

in the course of representation. Alonzo utilizes Bhabha’s notion of ambivalence and

contingency as he analyzes Mexican stereotypes in classic Western films and literature.

Historical records show that a common form of white supremacist justice

against African Americans and Mexicans was the lynching party. Chapter 1, “The

Greaser in Stephen Crane’s Mexican Stories and D.W. Griffith’s Early Westerns,” opens

with a scene from Griffith’s The Greaser’s Gauntlet (1908) as Alonzo describes how with

stark realism a greaser is hung by a tree and in the nick of time is saved from certain

death. Alonzo returns to the first decades of the twentieth century, when views of a still

largely unsettled west and U.S. Mexican populations came from the east coast. How to

understand conquered Mexican populations, Alonzo argues, was the task of Griffith’s

early New York silent films through the figure of the greaser. Mexicans appeared

regularly in Griffith’s films (1907-1910) and the greaser was portrayed as a treacherous,

lustful scoundrel. However, Alonzo redeems Griffith, well known for his negative

representation of African Americans in Birth of a Nation (1915). The greaser represented

with all the negative stereotypical attributes taken from nineteenth century literature is

in the end given human depth. In The Greaser’s Gauntlet, the wrongfully accused José,

the greaser, is saved by Mildred. In Stephen Crane’s short story “One Dash Horses”

(1895-96), another José is central to Crane’s ambivalent relationship to Mexicans. The

Anglo American Richardson is juxtaposed against José, his Mexican servant, and a

Mexican bandit. While traveling through Mexico, José saves Richardson’s life. Crane

distances himself from the racist dime novel with its white male hero and in his Mexican

stories, Anglo-American and Mexican alike exhibit both valor and fear in life-

threatening situations.

In Chapter 2 “Greasers, Bandits, and Revolutionaries: The Conflation of

Mexican Identity, 1910-20,” Alonzo establishes the Mexican Revolution as central to

the depiction of Mexican masculinity. The Hollywood western would have as its stock

evil character the bandit revolutionary. Francisco Villa’s incursion into the U.S., his 1916

raid on Columbus, New Mexico, sealed the fate for the bandit revolutionary in the figure

of Villa. The sombrero, the mustache, the grimacing menace, and the bandoleers would

be characteristic of the Mexican bandit. Villa –Dead or Alive (1916) made clear the

enemy. After 1910, early Western actors Bronco Billy Anderson, William S. Hart and

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Tom Mix, would be pitted against the Mexican bandit. Against this negative cinematic

representation, Alonzo reads Jack London’s “The Mexican” (1913) in which Mexican

Felipe Rivera journeys to the U.S. as a prize fighter to raise money to supply arms for

his Revolutionary faction. The little swarthy Mexican defeats the larger Anglo American

fighter amidst the racist crowd. For London, Rivera is the Revolution incarnate.

In Chapter 3 “The Western’s Ambivalence and the Mexican Badman,” Alonzo

looks at Porter Emerson Browne’s New York play The Badman (1923) and its two film

versions with Walter Huston (1930) and Wallace Beery (1941). The “badman” of the

play, Pancho Lopez, is a bandit modeled after Pancho Villa, who though a murderer also

satirizes American values and rules of propriety. The play established the broken

English-Spanish spoken by the Mexican character and the expression of evil, the sneer.

Chapters 4, 5 and 6 present detailed analysises of U.S. films and Chicano films

and literature. Chapter 4 “Stereotype, Idealism, and Contingency in the Revolutionary’s

Depiction” develops directly from the Mexican Revolutionary hero, from Pancho Villa

to the good Revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, to Américo Paredes’s novel The Shadow

(1998). Now here in filmmaker and writer there is a purpose for a Mexican character

beyond the stereotypes inherited from the nineteenth century. Though Villa remained

a buffoon –Wallace Beery in Viva Villa! (1934)– Zapata emerged as Hollywood’s hero

due to Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata! (1952) with Marlon Brando. Viva Zapata!, with

screenplay by John Steinbeck, depicts an idealist Zapata betrayed by the Revolution.

Zapata is an American seeking a democratic society. Alonzo analyzes the film against

the McCarthy era. It would have been useful to reference these portrayals with Chicano

literature. The Villa character was central to Teatro Campesino’s Los Vendidos (1967),

where stereotypical Mexican images from the past are presented for examination. The

Revolucionario is presented in the Beery mode, fat, filthy, and lustful. He is ridiculed

and rejected within the play. Because Alonzo notes that for Kazan and Steinbeck,

Zapata represented U.S. ideals, one of them being fidelity to one woman, reference to

Sandra Cisneros’s short story “Eyes of Zapata” (1991) where a different Zapata emerges

may have been useful.

Chapter 4 ends with Américo Paredes’s 1955 novel The Shadow (1998).

Chapter 5 “Gregorio Cortez in the Chicano/a Imaginary and American Popular

Culture” is devoted entirely to Paredes. I will take these together. The Shadow is set in

Mexico twenty years after the Revolution. This novel does not resemble Hollywood’s

depictions of the Revolutionary. Paredes’ novel is like Mexican novels Pedro Páramo

(1955) and La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962). Paredes understood this. To his credit,

Alonzo reads The Shadow as a novel of Mexico though I beg to differ when Alonzo

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writes “The Shadow departs radically from accepted notions of a unified Chicano/a

subject in resistance to Anglo-American hegemony” (108). This is to spare Paredes from

Renato Rosaldo’s critique of the Chicano warrior hero in his Culture and Truth: “Once

a figure of masculine heroics and resistance to white supremacy, the Chicano warrior

hero now has faded away in a manner linked… to the demise of a self-enclosed,

patriarchal, ‘authentic’ Chicano culture” (cited by Alonzo 108). There is nothing Chicano

about this novel. This section of Chapter 4 on The Shadow seems out of place with the

U.S. films produced for a U.S. audience.

The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1982) was the first “Chicano” film and established

an acting career for Edward James Olmos. The viewer could criticize Olmos’ portrayal

of Gregorio Cortez. This is the central focus of Chapter 5. It is well known that Paredes

criticized Olmos’s portrayal of Cortez as a “scared little peon” (see my “Interview with

Américo Paredes,” Nepantla 1.1 [2000]:197-228). This was the stereotype received by

film viewers. Cortez was a Mexican who migrated to work in Texas. Paredes’s book

and film depict Cortez as a peaceful Mexican who is wrongly accused and rides toward

the border to escape a lynching party. This is hardly the “Chicano Warrior Hero.” He

was a vaquero (clearly different from a peon) who shoots a sheriff in self defense. “El

Corrido de Gregorio Cortez” which Paredes included in his study presents a man who

shot in self defense, “que la defensa es permitida.” This line from the corrido of 1901

leads back to Mexican legal concepts inherited from the history of colonialism in New

Spain. Paredes was writing a brief on behalf of Mexicans, as he told me in 1996

(“Interview with Américo Paredes”). The verse is not suggestive of the warrior hero and

Cortez depicted by Olmos as a scared peon is not consistent with the historical record

that Paredes brought to his book. And all of this cultural context, Texas white supremacy,

the segregated white and Mexican worlds, the racist descriptions of the Mexican greaser

are absent from the film. Alonzo presents Paredes’ unpublished comments on a possible

film version of With His Pistol in His Hand sent to him in 1976. Paredes commented

extensively and did not want a Mexican hero nor did he want negative stereotypes of

Texas lawmen.

Alonzo ends his book in the shadow of Américo Paredes, and finally offers an

analysis of Mexican American identity through the works of filmmaker Jim Mendiola

and poet Evangelina Vigil. Both Texas artists serve Alonzo well, as he reads Vigil’s now

famous poem “With a Polka in His Hand” (1985) and Mendiola’s film Come and Take

it Day (2002). Other scholars have read Vigil’s poem, and here Alonzo references

through Vigil resistance by a San Antonio old-timer who carries “un radio de transistor”

blasting a polka. The viejito, acknowledges Vigil, is a Mexican American from south

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Texas with his own form of resistance. Vigil ends her poem with “and I think of Gregorio

Cortez / and Américo Paredes / y en que la defensa cultural es permitida / and that calls

for a drink / and another toast.” For Mendiola, Alonzo offers a brief history of Chicano

cinema ending with what he terms “the fourth phase.” In Mendiola’s film, main

characters claim Gregorio Cortez as part of their genealogy. However, upon researching

records, characters discover that they are actually descendants of Jesús González, El Teco,

the Mexican who turned in Gregorio Cortez to Anglo Texan authorities. The Chicana

and Chicano depictions of Mexican masculinity in Chapter 6 “Reformulating Hybrid

Identities and Re-inscribing History in Contemporary Chicano/a Literature and Film”

are vastly different from the greaser in the films of D.W. Griffith.

Alonzo offers much for students of film. He begins with U.S. films and the

depiction of Mexican stereotypes based largely on the Mexican Revolution. In Chapters

4 through 6, Alonzo takes up another argument as a response to Rosaldo’s view of

Chicano heroism in With His Pistol in His Hand. I should stress that Paredes did not

write about “Chicano” culture nor a “Chicano” warrior hero and that one is hard pressed

to find many instances of unified or univocal representations of Chicano/a subjects in

Chicana and Chicano literature. Also, we hope that less images of Mexicans as social

deviants would be available to the U.S. public.

Héctor Calderón

University of California, Los Angeles

Luis Alvarez. The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During WorldWar II. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. 336 pages.

In a book that clearly explains the cultural and political contexts in which zoot

suiters emerged on both coasts, Luis Alvarez thoughtfully explores a popular culture

phenomenon through the lens of dignity. In The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and

Resistance During World War II, he is careful to point out throughout the book that while

zoot suiters may not have directly challenged or impacted “long-standing structures of

domination,” their struggle for dignity in public spaces is still worthy of documentation.

As a result, his methodology is primarily based on oral histories, newspaper accounts

and government records.

In choosing personal dignity as the unifying trope for his study, The Power of

the Zoot is able to traverse the boundaries of the institutional and the personal, official

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and personal historical accounts, while also leaving room for contradictions and

heterogeneity. Alvarez writes that his “…understanding of dignity is deeply influenced

by the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico … [who] located dignity at the center of their

oppositional politics” (248, n19). He structures his book by first describing how nonwhite

U.S. citizens were discriminated against in the wartime economy while being exhorted

to fight for democracy abroad in “Dignity Denied: Youth in the Early War Years.” He

carefully documents how juvenile delinquency was racialized and branded a threat to

the nation’s security. In “The Struggle for Dignity: Zoot Style during World War II” he

illustrates the various ways in which youth on the East and West Coast contested this

denial in public spaces with not only their clothing and speech, but also in their

transgression of gender norms and racial boundaries. In the third part, “Violence and

National Belonging on the Home Front,” Alvarez describes the violence used by local

authorities and servicemen to strip the dignity of zoot suiters in Los Angeles leading

up to the Zoot Suit Riots, as well as the response of the police and press after the fact.

He then looks at urban race riots that occurred throughout the summer of 1943,

considering how the violence indicated “the inequality of wartime society” (234). In the

epilogue “From Zoot Suits to Hip-Hop,” the connections between zoot suiters and

current hip-hop culture are explored, and Alvarez argues that “[t]he interracial and

gendered struggles for dignity by zoot suiters set the stage for the evolution of youth

culture in the years that followed” (238).

The Power of the Zoot is incredibly comprehensive, yet Alvarez successfully

adheres to Paul Gilroy’s call, in Small Acts (1993), to “preserve the tension between

broadly defined political imperatives and the non-negotiable autonomy of cultural

expression” (qtd. in Alvarez 246, n6). For example, he notes that in order to afford a zoot

suit, most youth needed jobs that existed because of the war, and several zoot suiters

voluntarily joined the military. Alvarez also acknowledges the role of social reformers

and civil rights groups in fighting overt racial discrimination while showing that their

focus on the mainstream press “excus[ing] police departments, mayors’ offices, and state

legislators” was a middle-class effort to Americanize and assimilate (73). Alvarez also

continually refers to participants in zoot suit culture who have often been overlooked

by scholars: women, white youth and Asian American zoot suiters. While he does detail

the elements of style and speech connected with the zoot suit, Alvarez demythologizes

it by acknowledging its multiple significations: “[t]he zoot suit … was not inherently

political but acquired meaning from its historical context” (85).

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The Power of the Zoot is written clearly yet without simplifying the historical

processes and individuals involved, making it an appropriate text for scholars of youth

culture as well as a classroom text for an undergraduate or graduate course.

Beth Hernández-Jason

University of California, Merced

Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, eds. The Afro-Latin@ Reader: Historyand Culture in the United States. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. 584 pp.

In recent decades we have witnessed an outpouring of new research on African-

descended communities throughout Latin America and the United States. Due to the

growing number of Latin@ immigrants in the U.S., scholars have turned their attention

to the study of Afro-Latin@ identity as a minority discourse within the global Latin@

community. In this book, professors Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores offer a

varied collection of over sixty multi-genre entries, distributed among ten interrelated

sections that include essays, short stories, poems, book excerpts and testimonies about

the history and socio-cultural experience of Afro-Latin@s in the U.S. These texts are

organized by various themes that encompass categories such as history and historical

figures, race relations, cultural expression, image and representation, and Afro-Latinas.

Afro-Latin@s constitute a particular community in their own right who bridge

various communities (African American and Latin@). Even though the term Afro-

Latin@ is of recent vintage, the presence of Afro-Latin@s in the U.S. reaches far back

to the exploration and conquest of North America. Historically speaking, the Afro-

Latin@ presence in the region predates English settlements and the foundation of the

U.S. as a nation. The earliest Africans in North America were settlers, explorers, and

soldiers serving the Spanish Crown. As Peter Woods describes in his contribution, Afro-

Latin@s played an important role in the settlement of St. Augustine in 1565. In the

Southwest, Estevanico, who was initially part of the failed Pánfilo Narváez expedition

to the coast of Florida that began Cabeza de Vaca’s trek to Mexico, eventually became

part of Fray Marcos de Niza’s 1539 expedition to what are now parts of Arizona and

New Mexico in search of the legendary city of Cíbola.

Despite the early presence of Afro-Latin@s in what is now the U.S., it isn’t until

the 19th and 20th centuries that their (hi)stories begin to surface with the immigration of

blacks from Cuba, Puerto Rico, The Dominican Republic, Central America and the

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coastal areas of Colombia and Venezuela. At the end of the 19th century there was strong

cultural and political unity among all Cubans and Latin@s in Florida, mainly along

national and linguistic lines but the impact of post-Restructuration, Jim Crow laws and

anti-black racism pushed the Afro-Latin@ community to establish ties with other groups,

especially the African American community. In the 20th century, as Jiménez Román and

Flores put it, “The main locus of Afro Latino social life shifts from Florida to New York

City, and from the Cuban diaspora to that of the Puerto Ricans” (6). The cultural

problematic between the African American and Afro-Latin@ communities is embodied

by Arturo Alfonso Schomburg to whom an entire section of The Afro-Latin@ Reader is

dedicated. His experience as a black Puerto Rican dealing with racial discourse in the

U.S. and his ability to navigate the color line is similar to other Afro-Caribbean

personalities such as Melba Alvarado, Graciela, Minnie Miñoso, Mario Bauzá, Rafael

Hernández, Jesús Colón and Piri Thomas, all of whom are discussed in, or contribute to,

the reader. As is the case for U.S. Latin@s, some reference to homelands is ever present

in the lives of Afro-Latin@s and their testimonies, a subject specifically discussed in the

section titled “Living Afro Latinidades”. This transnational discourse resists the limitation

of Afro-Latin@s to the confines of the U.S. Nevertheless this transnational dimension

doesn’t have to be romanticized due to the incipient racism that the black community

faces in Latin America. The experience of racism by Afro-Latin@s within the Latino

community in the U.S. is still prevalent in the 21st century, a sad state of affairs for this

minority whose public images are misrepresented and perceived as not fully Latin@ (in

some cases, not fully African-American either). One may ask if this form of racial

segregation of Afro-Latin@s by the Latin@ community can be explained as a product

of their own frustration as being ostracized by the white (Anglo) community.

Afro-Latin@ creativity and cultural resiliency are apparent in popular music,

evident in the section dedicated to the roots of salsa. This phenomenon was notable

since the early decades of the twentieth century, illustrated by the incorporation of

Rafael Hernández and other boricuas into the Hellfighters Regiment Band during World

War I. The collaboration of Mario Bauzá and Dizzy Gillespie in the creation of the

Afro-Cuban jazz, Cubop in the late 40s and the work of David García gave rise to the

story of New York’s Latin Music that culminated with the salsa boom of the 70s.

Furthermore, the influence of Mexican music and dance by Afro-Cuban son and African

influenced instruments has had a deep impact on the Chicano culture throughout the

20th and into the 21st century.

The relation between Latin@ and African American communities is central to

the understanding of Afro-Latin@s in the U.S. Inasmuch as the experience of Afro-

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Latin@s is common to other members of the African diaspora, it may have been useful

to expand the scope of Afro-Latin@s to include more members of immigrant

communities that have come to the U.S. via Brazil and Haiti, for instance. Due to the

shifting definition of what is an Afro-Latin@, the concept should be more inclusive and

not only limited to Mexico, Central & South America and the Spanish-Speaking

Caribbean. The Afro-Latin@ Reader offers excellent material for the understanding of

the complexity and enriching world of the Afro-Latin@ community in the U.S.

Alain Lawo-Sukam

Texas A&M University

Juan Javier Pescador. Crossing Borders with the Santo Niño de Atocha.Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009. 280 pp.

Crossing Borders with the Santo Niño de Atocha by Juan Javier Pescador offers a

thoroughly researched and informative analysis of the historical development and

contemporary usage of the Mexican popular devotion to the Holy Child Jesus. Crossing

Borders makes a significant contribution to the growing body of literature on Latino/a

religiosity that critically analyzes the creative reinventions and adaptations that Latino

peoples continue to construct as they seek spiritual and emotional support in increasingly

precarious anti-Latino environments. Through the weaving of extensive international

archival research, both civic and ecclesiastical, with transnational ethnographic

observations (including his own familial experiences), material religion (primarily

retablos and miracle narratives) and popular culture, Pescador tells the intriguing story

of how the ever-growing devotion to the autonomous Santo Niño de Atocha evolved over

more than five centuries to the “contemporary metamorphosis of the Holy Child as a

border-crossing religious symbol for the immigrant experience and the Mexican and

Chicano communities in the United States” (xii). The author’s astute analysis maps out

the making of a holy icon that is truly indigenous to the Americas as his distinct identity

emerges from the social and political context of the new republic of Mexico in the early

19th century. Pesacador’s research and lively narrative reveals the devotional

transformation from a localized and laity controlled devotion to Our Lady of Atocha

with the princely Holy Child Jesus on the outskirts of Madrid, Spain in the 15th century,

to Our Lady of Atocha with prince child completely appropriated and reconstructed by

the Spanish crown in the 16th century, to an autonomous Holy Child icon during the

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waning days of the Spanish empire in Mexico, to the diffusion of his veneration by the

“underclass and the lower class” (xv) between northern Mexico and the Southwest of

the U.S. along the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro in the 19th century, with a radical

change in age and appearance along the way, and ultimately to the young male icon of

today making visible a people made politically and socially invisible. Pescador’s

insider/outsider perspective offers unique scholarly attention to the powerful dynamics

of how popular devotions evolve over time, geography, and socio-political contexts.

Each of the four chapters considers a specific historical period in which

significant changes to the devotion and the representation of the autonomous image of

the Santo Niño occur. What is most intriguing is how the devotion to Our Lady of

Atocha with child, who had been transplanted to northern Mexico by an elite Spaniard

in 1704, experienced a radical shift as the newly independent and liberal Mexican

population in Plateros, Zacatecas reconstructed the devotion to an autonomous and

wandering Holy Child; a child independent from his mother. As the new Republic of

Mexico was moving into independence from its colonial mother, the devotion to the

male child mirrored a society in flux, a society learning to be on its own. Change and

growth did not come peacefully and amidst political and civic unrest, a weakened

ecclesiastical institution, an economic boom in state controlled mining, and a

demographic surge in post-independent northern Mexico, devotion to the male child

expanded. A process of reappropriation took place and “Mexican families from Zacatecas

to New Mexico transformed and recreated a colonial icon originally meant to inculcate

Spanish colonial values in them. They turned it into a meaningful symbol to facilitate

their way out from the post-Spanish colonial era” (75). The devotion spread further

when in 1848 the printing and wide distribution of a Nueva Novena to the Holy Child

with his image as an independent older boy wearing sandals and traveling attire and

bearing food and water further mirrored the increased migrations, regional and national

chaos impacted most certainly by the U.S. war on Mexico.

Pesacador investigates further the spread of the devotion into northern New

Mexico in the mid 1800s and refutes previous scholarship that identified the Medina

Chapel (originally a Penitente morada) in Chimayó, New Mexico as the birthplace of

the devotion in that region. As a frequent visitor to Chimayó myself, I welcome

Pescador’s sound research that shows the devotion actually began at Chimayó’s Santuario

del Señor de Esquipulas, but was shifted in 1929 to the Medina Chapel when the

Diocese of Santa Fe reigned in the popular devotion to Santo Niño.

Bringing the reader up to the present, Pescador examines carefully how the

Santo Niño and several other popular saints ( Juan Soldado, San Simón, and Pedrito

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Jaramillo, and la mera mera, Our Lady of Guadalupe), continue to migrate north and

“shapeshift” to address the changing needs of immigrant and native born Latino descent

populations in the Americas. He also considers how “border-crossing public ritual” like

the Via Crucis and the pilgrimages of Our Lady of Guadalupe as the Migrant Virgin,

“confers upon the experiences of Mexicanos in the United States a spiritual dimension

frequently denied” (197). This well-crafted book generously invites both academic and

lay readers to better understand “the transformative ability” that both mortal and deified

border crossers have “to adapt and respond to new situations and challenges” (200).

Lara Medina

California State University Northridge

Phillip J. Williams, Manuel A. Vázquez, and Timothy J. Steigenga, eds. A Placeto be: Brazilian, Guatemalan, and Mexican Immigrants in Florida’s NewDestinations. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2009. 228 pp.

This collection centres on the more recent communities of Mexicans,

Guatemalans, and Brazilian immigrants who settle in new geographical destinations in

the South of Florida. The chapters go well beyond traditional explorations of

transnationalism, as sustained and substantial social and economic networks and relations

across national and political borders. The authors highlight the “bifocal” orientation of

these communities in maintaining significant connections with their societies of origin,

while carving new social spaces within their new social and geographic contexts.

Attention is given to the particular geographical and ethnocultural characteristics,

familial connections, friendships, religious linkages, and adopted strategies through

which these immigrant communities transpose elements of their original home, country,

culture, and society in order to make sense of their experience of migration and adapt in

a new hostile environment.

Three are the key issues that emerge repeatedly in this collection. One,

immigrant communities and the kinds of transnational relations and networks they create

are diverse, complex, ambiguous, and must be understood in light of the groups’ unique

geographic regions, social landscape, development of social capital, and ethnocultural

composition. They share some parallels but they differ greatly in the kinds of

transnational relations they create and develop. Two, collective mobilization happens

more effectively when communities are organized around multi-ethnic labour agendas.

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Emphasis on ethnic homogeneity may prove to be counterproductive to address issues

of social injustice. Three, and most important, religion plays a central role for many

immigrants. The studies show that religious affiliation functions in multiple ways.

Together with home and family, the church is presented as one of those spaces where

people find various kinds of support including work. It can also be a source of exploitation

in inter-ethnic connections and shared religious affiliation. Religion can serve as the

bridging force connecting transmigrant communities and communities of origin.

The studies dispel the notion that recent immigrants are more prone to religious

devotion. More established immigrants tend to be more engaged in institutional religion,

while more recent arrivals display informal connections; individual personal spiritualities

characterize how many interact with religion. They also dispel the idea that these

communities are generally religiously homogeneous. A decreasing Catholicism shares

the religious landscape with an increasing Evangelicalism / Pentecostalism, strong

Charismatic movement, Spiritualists, and Afro-religions. Most surprising is the reported

increase in number of people who do not profess religious affiliation. As suggested in

the conclusion, the variants are many and call for further studies beyond traditional

analysis of transnationalism, and which take seriously the inter-ethnic, inter-cultural,

and inter-religious encounters between immigrant communities of different generations.

The authors unveil how immigrant communities and transnational networks

weave the ambiguous and uneven topography of religious affiliations with the multiple

factors of gender and ethnonational and cultural identity. The attention given to everyday

lived religion is one of the outstanding features here. The results impede easy conclusions

in understanding immigrant communities, yet they give us a glance of the complexity

of the settlement process immigrants undergo.

Finally, some difficulties do arise with the ways immigrant communities are

studied here without examining the historical circumstances that caused them to migrate.

Allusions are made to the motivations for leaving their countries; home, family, and

personal advance are proposed as key reasons. However, there is little that points to the

local socio-political, cultural and economic conditions that forced them to leave their

families behind, break with the only world they knew, and risk the journey into the U.S.

This, I believe, can shed further light in understanding the behaviour of immigrant

collectives. Overall, this collection is a necessary critical piece pushing forward the study

of transnational networks and immigrant communities.

Néstor Medina

University of Toronto

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Roberto Avant-Mier. Rock the Nation: Latin/o Identities and the Latin RockDiaspora. New York: Continuum Press, 2010. 240 pp.

This new book by Communication Studies scholar Roberto Avant-Mier

provides the most comprehensive compilation of examples of the Latin/o American

presence in Anglo rock available in print today. And what a compelling list this is. Avant-

Mier presents the Latin/o connections of countless artists and bands, including Led

Zeppelin, The Clash, Joan Baez, The Ramones, Buddy Holly, The Doors, The White

Stripes, Spoon, Robert Johnson, and Frank Zappa. The study builds upon a rich body

of literature on the subject; Rock the Nation is heir to John S. Roberts in its goal of

underscoring the “Latin Tinge” in Anglo rock, and to George Lipsitz in its attempt to

unearth the multicultural and hybrid genealogies of rock.

The core of Rock the Nation consists of five chapters, three of which have already

appeared in print. Chapter 1 takes as a point of departure the phenomenon of border

radio, a group of high-powered Northern Mexican stations that could be heard across

the border, to present multiple examples of Mexicans and Mexican Americans who were

involved in and had an impact on the blues, country, and early rock and roll. This first

chapter also documents the presence of Mexican music, particularly mariachi trumpets,

in the recordings of myriad Anglo artists, from Johnny Cash to Beck Hanson. Chapter

2 focuses on the 1940s and early 1950s pachuco or zoot suiter, the Mexican American

version of the African American hepcat. The author suggests that Mexican American

pachuco slang, dress, and music, most conspicuously expressed by Don Tosti and Lalo

Guerrero, had a strong impact on 1950s Anglo rock and roll culture. Chapter 3 proposes

to re-write the history of 1960s garage rock taking into account the multiple and

important contributions of Mexican Americans. Chapter 4 recounts the history of early

rock and roll in Mexico, a story told through the writings of one particular chronicler,

journalist and author José Agustín. Chapter 5 begins with an overview of Argentine

rock history from the 1960s through the 1980s, and continues with a history of more

recent rock in Spanish.

Readers may notice that despite its subtitle (Latin/o Identities and the Latin

Rock Diaspora), the book focuses mostly on rock in Mexico and the United States. There

are brief references to bands from Colombia and Chile, and a cursory overview of rock

in Argentina (summarized from research by Pablo Vila, properly acknowledged), but

they are not extensive enough to allow the author to theorize about the Latin/o

experience broadly defined. Indeed, there is a general, problematic tendency in the book

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to extrapolate from the Mexican experience to speak about all Latinos. The author

sometimes uses the terms Mexican and Latin/o interchangeably, as when he describes

styles such as “cumbia, ranchera, conjunto norteño, tejano, and combinations thereof ”

(34) as “regional Latin,” as opposed to “regional Mexican” music. When describing the

evolution of the terminology used to market Spanish-language rock (from “rock en tu

idioma” to “rock en Español” to the later “Latin Alternative”), the author again

generalizes from the Mexican and United States cases in claiming that this terminology

was in use “throughout Latin America” (160ff ). In fact, these terms were not used as

marketing categories in the Southern Cone. This U.S.-centric perspective is particularly

frustrating in a chapter that purports to analyze rock and punk as “transnational”

phenomena (Chapter 5).

One of the book’s goals is to rewrite rock and roll history with Latin/o

Americans at the center. This laudable project, it seems, is already underway. Current

rock textbooks designed for college-level courses, such as John Covach’s What’s That

Sound? (Norton, 2009) and Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman’s American Popular

Music: The Rock Years (OUP, 2005), include a handful of the key examples discussed in

Rock The Nation. Rock en Español artists like Café Tacuba, Fabulosos Cadillacs, and Julieta

Venegas, who Avant-Mier claims “remain ignored and seen as worthless by monolingual

and ethnocentric journalists and cultural analysts in the mainstream” (175), in actuality

receive regular coverage in Billboard Magazine, National Public Radio, and in major

newspapers such as the Los Angeles and New York Times. The author makes reference

to these sources throughout the book, belying his claim about the absence of Rock en

Español in the mainstream media.

The book succeeds in presenting a comprehensive review of recent scholarship

and journalism on the Mexican influence in Anglo rock and its subgenres. Many parts

of the book read like an annotated bibliography, with extensive sections summarizing

the work of scholars and journalists who have studied the “Latin Tinge” phenomenon,

such as John S. Roberts, Ned Sublette, George Lipsitz, Josh Kun, and Ed Morales. The

author’s musical observations are also largely borrowed from the secondary literature, as

are his extensive lists of Anglo artists with Latin/o connections.

For the most part, the book does not enter into critical dialogue with this

literature. Except for the inflammatory writing of Samuel P. Huntington, all other

sources, including rock criticism, rock biographies, CD liner notes, and academic

monographs remain unchallenged. Without a thorough engagement with primary

sources, the author is unable to take a critical stance towards the work of journalists, CD

compilators, and scholars. When Avant-Mier departs from the literature to provide his

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own readings, statements become tentative and speculative. Consider the following

quote, from a paragraph that makes the claim that early Heavy Metal band Black

Sabbath may have Latin “traces”:

[‘Laguna Sunrise’ and ‘Fluff ’] are probably best described as simple acoustic-

electric guitar instrumentals, but given the band’s proclivities for harder, louder,

electric-guitar sounds, the context for these songs (i.e., the band’s location in

Los Angeles) suggests inspiration by Spanish-guitar sounds, boleros, or similar

sounds that can be heard in Mexican folk music. (135)

While Rock the Nation does not provide much in the way of new perspectives

or interpretations, it will be useful as an overview of the current scholarship on a rich

topic in need of further elaboration and study.

Daniel Party

Saint Mary’s College

Notre Dame, Indiana

Patricia Gándara and Frances Contreras. The Latino Education Crisis: TheConsequences of Failed Social Policies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,2009. 415 pp.

Authors Gándara and Contreras take on a formidable task in their book, The

Latino Education Crisis: The Consequences of Failed Social Policies, to provide a

comprehensive account of the educational and social conditions and prospects of the

Latino community. The urgency of the situation facing Latinos — and, as they argue,

the nation — is reminiscent of the calls for alarm and investment raised by Hayes-

Bautista, Schink, and Chapa over two decades ago in The Burden of Support: Young

Latinos in an Aging Society (Stanford UP, 1988). However, what distinguishes this book

is the manner in which Gándara and Contreras use their vast empirical work in

education to situate the “crisis” within a much broader context of contemporary social

policy dynamics and American anti-immigrant politics.

The opening chapters of The Latino Education Crisis meticulously discuss the

social and educational conditions that have evolved over time to produce a rather firmly

established and predictably limited status among the Latino population. The key

argument that Gándara and Contreras build through this volume is that the crisis facing

Latinos is longstanding but not insurmountable if we engage in a more comprehensive

treatment of the situation through policies that pursue a broader human development

approach. As the argument unfolds in the first chapters, readers are presented with

extensive documentation of the economic, health, educational, and political conditions

that shape and influence the life chances of Latino youth. Indeed, the data the authors

present substantiates the urgency of their message, and for readers who are yet unfamiliar

with the specific historical legacies of Latino communities in the U.S., the book is

especially useful in its portrayal of the numerous ways in which this population has been

systematically marginalized. In addition, the authors assert that the particular impact of

poverty and social isolation among Latinos has produced a situation that necessitates a

re-thinking of how we view education as a social institution charged with ameliorating

these effects and reversing the trends of undereducation and disenfranchisement. And,

as the authors further argue, schools alone cannot address the full spectrum of needs

that emerge for Latinos in the U.S. in their pursuit of education and social mobility.

Having set the stage for their analysis of the crisis and the possibilities that exist

for addressing it, the book continues in the second half with a unique approach among

policy researchers: Although the chapters continue to offer extensive documentation

drawing from the authors’ own investigations, they are powerful in humanizing the issues

with rich descriptions of students’ experiences that further illuminate the complexity of

the challenge. Moreover, the authors draw out important considerations of the strengths

represented by Latino youth and their communities, which resonates with the

perspectives that have been offered in other volumes that examine the PK-12 and

postsecondary journeys of this population, such as García’s Hispanic Education in the

United States: Raíces y Alas (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001) or Yosso’s Critical Race

Counterstories Along the Chicana/Chicano Educational Pipeline (Routledge, 2006).

While Gándara and Contreras do not approach their book through a lens of

critical theory, their analyses and recommendations are definitely informed by an

acknowledgment of the forces of institutional racism and classism that combine to shape

the long-term trajectories of Latino students and their communities. A particular gem

in demonstrating this sensibility is Chapter 4, “Is Language the Problem?,” where the

authors provide a thorough and disturbing account of the language and immigration

politics that have continued to haunt efforts to use educational institutions to intervene

positively in the lives of English language learners. Indeed, part of the difficulty of such

a volume is the translation of these dynamics for a policy research audience that may

find critical theoretical arguments too distinct from conventional approaches to facilitate

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cross-fertilization and dialogue. Gándara and Contreras have presented a perspective

that allows us to see the individual agency of Latino students in their educational pursuits

(i.e., “beating the odds” as discussed in Chapter 6), while also revealing elements of our

educational and other social institutions that require considerable overhaul if we are to

realize the vision of educational and social mobility in the U.S. that is inclusive of

Latinos. One comes away from having read The Latino Education Crisis with both a

sobering view of the obstacles that remain and a deep appreciation for the tenacity of

educators, advocates, and the youth themselves in persisting toward a goal of full access

and meaningful participation in American society.

Gloria M. Rodríguez

University of California, Davis

Gabriela F. Arredondo. Mexican Chicago: Race, Identity, and Nation (1916-1939).Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. 272 pp.

In Mexican Chicago Arrendondo explores the history of the immigrant Mexican

community of Chicago in the early twentieth-century. Chicago, at the time, was a major

receiving city for international immigration from the many nations of the world and

became a polyglot industrial city producing finished goods, becoming a major processor

and trading center for raw materials and commodities. Like other immigrant workers,

Mexicans came to Chicago to do the hard labor required in the city’s rail yards, meat

packing plants, and steel mills, which stretched from the city center into Gary, Indiana.

This diverse patchwork of urban ethnic neighborhoods is the backdrop for Arrendondo’s

book.

Arrendondo frames her book around the interconnected web of tensions faced

by Mexican immigrants in Chicago. Her book argues that some Mexicans did not want

to become American citizens. Not treated as “white” people in Chicago, yet not exposed

to the worst racism faced by African-Americans, some Mexicans felt U.S. citizenship had

little to offer them. Moreover, Mexican nationalism colored the feelings of many others.

Interestingly, women seemed to see more benefit to life in the United States than did

men, as they were happy to take advantage of social programs and protections offered to

women and the greater degree of social freedom. Mexicans are, in Arrendondo’s telling,

a racialized, yet in-between people living in a netherworld between citizen and non-

citizen, white and non-white in a city where ethnicity and whiteness are entwined.

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Mexicans faced segregation in this city of immigrants. In some cases, there were

efforts to segregate Mexicans as undesirable, and in others, it seems that reformers

separated Mexicans in order to protect them from violence at the hands of other

immigrants. Mexicans were clearly racialized as Arrendondo shows, and it appears that

they dealt with this in a multiplicity of ways. Some retained their Mexican identities

and did so by refusing U.S. citizenship and continuing to celebrate Mexican holidays

and the speaking of Spanish, with much support from the Mexican Consulate in

Chicago. In fact, the Consulate was central in creating and promoting in print and in

public a Mexican identity among immigrants. When the depression hit, and nativists

sought to deport or remove Mexicans, the consulate, assisted in bringing Mexicans back

to Mexico. By boarding trains to Mexico during the Great Depression, many of those

non-citizens coerced into accepting charity funded repatriation or those choosing freely,

gave up the legal right to return to the United States. Mexicans, unlike other immigrant

workers, were North Americans, and for those who chose to remain Mexican citizens,

there was always the threat of deportation or repatriation using the very rail lines that

might have brought them from Mexico in the first place.

Arredondo’s book reveals the many contradictions of the immigrant generation

in Chicago. It would have been instructive had Arrendondo provided more information

on how Mexican experiences differed from those of other immigrants in Chicago. While

religion enters into the discourse throughout the text in helpful ways, it would also have

been helpful to know more about inter-religious competition and cooperation in the

heavily Catholic immigrant neighborhoods of Chicago. Arrendondo’s fine book is an

important contribution to our understanding of the long-term Mexican origin

community in Chicago, which in the first decade of twenty-first century, is now one of

the largest and most diverse concentrations of Mexican ancestry people outside of

Mexico or the United States Southwest.

Marc S. Rodríguez

University of Notre Dame

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