Book Description
In Chicano/a popular culture, nothing signifies the working class, highly-layered, textured, and metaphoric sensibility known as "rasquache aesthetic" more than black velvet art. The essays in this volume examine that aesthetic by looking at icons, heroes, cultural myths, popular rituals, and border issues as they are expressed in a variety of ways. The contributors dialectically engage methods of popular cultural studies with discourses of gender, sexuality, identity politics, representation, and cultural production. In addition to a hagiography of "locas santas," the book includes studies of the sexual politics of early Chicana activists in the Chicano youth movement, the representation of Latina bodies in popular magazines, the stereotypical renderings of recipe books and calendar art, the ritual performance of Mexican femaleness in the quinceañera, and mediums through which Chicano masculinity is measured.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Synopsis
On November 17, 1901, Mexico City police raided a private party and arrested 41 men, half of whom were dressed as women. This clandestine transvestite ball was apparently not an unheard of phenomenon at the time, although it was not normally something that would gain national attention. However, Mexican cultural trends in literature, in art, in the sciences and in journalism were inciting an atmosphere of sexual curiosity that was in search of the right turn of events to ignite a discursive explosion and focus interest on what was not a new phenomenon, but what was about to become a new concept: homosexuality. The "nefarious ball" scandalized Mexico City and is still part of the city's lore. It provoked social commentary on the state of masculinity in Mexico; it lived, and lives on, in popular culture; it has spawned a novel, as well as songs, ditties, engravings by famous Mexican artists and other cultural artifacts. The editors take the scandal as the point of departure for a book that examines issues of sexuality and social control in Mexico at the turn of the century.
The ball is treated as a cultural event in itself - the editors have assembled pictures, have translated part of a historical novel about the event, and include the famous engravings of Posada while, at the same time, including essays that broadly speak about the underworld in Mexico City. What emerges from this volume is a comprehensive slice of history that includes essays on working class minorities, prison conditions, criminology, mental health discourse, etc.
