Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture and Chicana/O Sexualities

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.

Author: Kenneth A. Loparo
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Published: 04/02/2003
Pages: 327
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.34lbs
Size: 9.68h x 6.54w x 0.97d
ISBN: 9781403960962

About the Author
ALICIA GASPAR DE ALBA is Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she teaches courses on barrio popular culture, border consciousness, lesbian literature and creative writing. She is the author of Chicana Art Inside/Outside the Master's House (Texas 98) and Sor Juana's Second Dream (New Mexico 99).