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With this book, Rachel Afi Quinn makes the case for a transnational feminist cultural studies lens of analysis and an ethnographic approach to the study of race, gender, and visual culture in the Dominican Republic. This book provides a new window into contemporary life in Santo Domingo through which surrealist cultural productions reflect the social climate. Quinn theorizes the ways that the racial meaning of Dominican women’s mixed-race bodies “see/saw” in the viewing moment, as they are read visually in relation to others and informed by particular narratives of identity. Drawing on some forty interviews conducted by the author, this text centers these voices as it reveals the ways that the mixed-race bodies of Dominican women and girls signify within a racial schema tied to an economy in which they are commodified. Queer identities and fluid sexualities intersect with racial ambiguity and Dominican whiteness, Quinn argues, while incorporating public art, digital images, and Dominican film and music videos that are circulated transnationally, including performances by Rita Indiana Hernández and Michelle Rodriguez. Numerous other works by Dominican women artists and activists including print and online publications, documented live performances, photographic images, and social media discourse compose this text. Transnational political organizing is also considered here as part of a legacy of Dominican feminist activism against patriarchal oppression

This book uses the Catholic parish to view Mexican immigration and ethnicity in the United States with a focus on Chicago. For Mexican immigrants, the parish had an Americanizing influence on its members. At the same time, many Mexican Americans gained a sense of mexicanidad by participating in the parish’s religious and social events. This process of building a Mexican identity and community in Chicago began in the 1920s. The first parishes served as refuges and as centers of community and identity. Mexicans fiercely attached themselves to specific parishes in Chicago, much like European American groups before them. The book explores how Chicago’s expanding Mexican Catholic population, contained in just two parishes prior to 1960, reshaped dozens of parishes and entire neighborhoods. The laity, often with Spanish-speaking clergy, made these parishes Mexican. The third largest archdiocese in the United States has, in many ways, become “Chicago católico,” a place where religious devotions hold sway well beyond church doors. With its century-old Mexican population, Chicago presaged a national trend. Today Latinos comprise 17 percent of the US population. This book’s parish-level research offers historic lessons for myriad communities currently undergoing ethnic succession and integration around the nation.

While Chicago has been long described as a city of Latinidad, there has been very limited academic attention paid to the lives of second-generation Intralatino/as—MexiRicans, MexiGuatemalans, DominiRicans among other rich combinations—who embody Latinidad in their multiple nationalities and ethnicities. Based on twenty interviews, this book documents the presence of Intralatino/as in Chicago and critically analyzes their everyday negotiations with their multiple national identities within the context of their nuclear and extended family stories. Proposing the concept of “horizontal hierarchies” as a theoretical framework for examining the power dynamics among diverse Latino/a ethnic communities, and analyzing rich and compelling anecdotes about the inclusion and exclusion of Intralatino/as in their family lives, the book attempts to bring into representation the everyday ways in which these second-generation Latino/as experience transnationalism within the domestic space of home while they engage affectively with, and against, the national boundaries and imaginaries produced by their loved ones.

When primarily immigrant, day-laboring clientele eat a meal at a traditional taco truck, the taco truck becomes a significant social space in which Mexican cultural identity is reaffirmed. But the traditional taco truck is also a politically charged symbolic space that can spark heated debates about Latino culture and the uses of street spaces in cities. This book uses the taco truck as a vehicle to tell a story about the Mexican American experience and identity and deconstructs the myriad meanings taco trucks represent to diverse community groups and how such meanings influence urban politics and the built environment. The traditional taco truck is a powerfully transformative feature of the American landscape because the trucks’ social spaces intersect with complex geographic processes of immigration, class, ethnicity, gentrification, commodification, food-ways, and the right to public space. Thus the book is also about power, privilege, and the political economy of cities and the novel ways marginalized Mexican immigrants take and remake urban space through their food practices. Through investigating taco trucks in various U.S. metropolises, this book elucidates the ways neoliberal cities work and how Mexican immigrants claim their right to the city.

This anthology challenges the notion that Latinas/os are newcomers to the Midwest by emphasizing that Latinas/os have resided in the region for over a century, and have contributed to the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of rural and urban Midwestern communities. Its eighteen interdisciplinary chapters and introduction essays explore issues of history, education, literature, art, and politics defining today’s Latina/o Midwest. Some contributors delve into the Latina/o revitalization of rural areas, where communities have launched bold experiments in dual-language immersion education while seeing integrated neighborhoods, churches, and sports teams become the norm. Others reveal metro areas as laboratories for emerging Latino subjectivities, places where for some, the term Latina/o itself corresponds to a new type of lived identity as different Latina/o groups interact in shared neighborhoods, schools, and workplace.

Tourists exult in Bahia, Brazil, as a tropical paradise infused with the black population's one-of-a-kind vitality. But the alluring images of smiling black faces and dancing black bodies masks an ugly reality of anti-black authoritarian violence. This book argues that the dialectic of glorified representations of black bodies and subsequent state repression reinforces Brazil's racially hierarchal society. Interpreting the violence as both institutional and performative, the book follows a grassroots movement and social protest theater troupe in their campaigns against racial violence. As the book reveals, economies of black pain and suffering form the backdrop for the staged, scripted, and choreographed afro-paradise that dazzles visitors. The work of grassroots organizers exposes this relationship, exploding illusions and asking unwelcome questions about the impact of state violence performed against the still-marginalized mass of Afro-Brazilians.

This book elucidates the tension between the promise of transitional justice and persistent social inequality and impunity. In 2001, following a generation of internal armed conflict and authoritarian rule, the Peruvian state created a Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC). This book places the TRC, feminist and human rights movements, and related non-governmental organizations within an international and historical context to expose the difficulties in addressing gender-based violence. Its innovative theoretical and methodological framework based on decolonial feminism and a critical engagement with intersectionality facilitates an in-depth examination of the Peruvian transitional justice process based on field studies and archival research. The book uncovers the colonial mappings and linear temporality underlying transitional justice efforts and illustrates why transitional justice mechanisms must reckon with the societal roots of atrocities, if they are to result in true and lasting social transformation.

Telling the affecting stories of eighty gay, bisexual, and transgender (GBT) Latino activists and volunteers living in Chicago and San Francisco, this book closely details how these individuals have been touched or transformed by the AIDS epidemic. Weaving together activists' responses to oppression and stigma, their encounters with AIDS, and their experiences as GBTs and Latinos in North America and Latin America, the book explores the intersection of civic involvement with ethnic and sexual identity. Even as activists battle multiple sources of oppression, they are able to restore their sense of family connection and self-esteem through the creation of an alternative space in which community members find value in their relationships with one another. In demonstrating the transformative effects of a nurturing community environment for GBT Latinos affected by the AIDS epidemic, the book illustrates that members find support in one another, as compañeros, in their struggles with homophobia, gender discrimination, racism, poverty, and forced migration.

This book explores U.S. Puerto Rican culture in past and recent contexts. The book presents East Coast, Midwest, and Chicago cultural production while exploring Puerto Rican musical, film, artistic, and literary performance. Working within the theoretical frame of cultural, postcolonial, and diasporic studies, the book relates the experience of Puerto Ricans to that of Chicanos and Cuban Americans, showing how even supposedly mainstream U.S. Puerto Ricans participate in a performative culture that embodies elements of possible cultural “Ricanstruction.” The book examines various dimensions of U.S. Puerto Rican artistic life, including relations with other ethnic groups and resistance to colonialism and cultural assimilation. To illustrate how Puerto Ricans have survived and created new identities and relations out of their colonized and diasporic circumstances, the book looks at the cultural examples of Latino entertainment stars such as Jennifer Lopez and Benicio del Toro, visual artists Juan Sánchez, Ramón Flores, and Elizam Escobar, as well as Nuyorican dancer turned Midwest poet Carmen Pursifull. It includes a comprehensive chapter on the development of U.S. Puerto Rican literature and a pioneering chapter on Chicago Puerto Rican writing. A final chapter considers Cuban cultural attitudes towards Puerto.