Mothers and Daughters in Post-revolutionary Mexican Literature


Book Description

The antithesis of the madre abnegada is the mujer mala, the whore, a notion the author also questions by revealing the complexity of the mother-daughter relationship, through which women may perpetuate their own oppression."--Jacket.




Writing Pancho Villa's Revolution


Book Description

The 1910 Mexican Revolution saw Francisco "Pancho" Villa grow from social bandit to famed revolutionary leader. Although his rise to national prominence was short-lived, he and his followers (the villistas) inspired deep feelings of pride and power amongst the rural poor. After the Revolution (and Villa's ultimate defeat and death), the new ruling elite, resentful of his enormous popularity, marginalized and discounted him and his followers as uncivilized savages. Hence, it was in the realm of culture rather than politics that his true legacy would be debated and shaped. Mexican literature following the Revolution created an enduring image of Villa and his followers. Writing Pancho Villa's Revolution focuses on the novels, chronicles, and testimonials written from 1925 to 1940 that narrated Villa's grassroots insurgency and celebrated—or condemned—his charismatic leadership. By focusing on works by urban writers Mariano Azuela (Los de abajo) and Martín Luis Guzmán (El águila y la serpiente), as well as works closer to the violent tradition of northern Mexican frontier life by Nellie Campobello (Cartucho), Celia Herrera (Villa ante la historia), and Rafael F. Muñoz (¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa!), this book examines the alternative views of the revolution and of the villistas. Max Parra studies how these works articulate different and at times competing views about class and the cultural "otherness" of the rebellious masses. This unique revisionist study of the villista novel also offers a deeper look into the process of how a nation's collective identity is formed.




Fearless Women in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War


Book Description

"Study of the role women played in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War. Examines female figures such as the soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution and the milicianas of the Spanish Civil War and the intersection of gender, revolution, and culture in both the Mexican and the Spanish contexts"--Provided by publisher.




Angeles Mastretta


Book Description

The first major study on the works of the Mexican novelist, Angeles Mastretta, demonstrating the rich complexity and range of the author's fiction and essays. The Mexican novelist, Angeles Mastretta [b. 1949], has only recently received serious critical attention largely because her work has been seen as 'popular' and therefore inappropriate for academic study. This first major work tobe published on Mastretta seeks to demonstrate the rich complexity and range of the author's fiction and essays. In the tradition of Post-Boom Latin American women's writing, Mastretta's texts are motivated by a desire to speak primarily of the silenced experiences and voices of women. Two of her novels, referential and testimonial in style, can be placed within the Mexican Revolutionary Novel tradition and explore the Revolutionary period and its consequences in the light of female experiences and perspectives. The hitherto unexplored themes of female sexuality and bodily erotics in Mastretta's texts are also considered in this volume. Her feminist works avoid facile simplifications: heterogeneous and dialogical, they interweave the historical and the fictional, the everyday and the fantastic. The originality of Mastretta's writing lies in its elusive postmodern ambiguities: shimmering surfacesare often interrupted by unexpected depths and proliferating meanings cannot be fully circumscribed by critical analysis. Jane Elizabeth Lavery lectures in Latin American Studies at the University of Kent.




A Revolution in Movement


Book Description

Honorable Mention, Latin American Studies Association Mexico Section Best Book in the Humanities A Revolution in Movement is the first book to illuminate how collaborations between dancers and painters shaped Mexico’s postrevolutionary cultural identity. K. Mitchell Snow traces this relationship throughout nearly half a century of developments in Mexican dance—the emulation of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in the 1920s, the adoption of U.S.-style modern dance in the 1940s, and the creation of ballet-inspired folk dance in the 1960s. Snow describes the appearances in Mexico by Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova and Spanish concert dancer Tortóla Valencia, who helped motivate Mexico to express its own national identity through dance. He discusses the work of muralists and other visual artists in tandem with Mexico’s theatrical dance world, including Diego Rivera’s collaborations with ballet composer Carlos Chávez; Carlos Mérida’s leadership of the National School of Dance; José Clemente Orozco’s involvement in the creation of the Ballet de la Ciudad de México; and Miguel Covarrubias, who led the “golden age” of Mexican modern dance. Snow draws from a rich trove of historical newspaper accounts and other contemporary documents to show how these collaborations produced an image of modern Mexico that would prove popular both locally and internationally and continues to endure today.




Mythological Constructs of Mexican Femininity


Book Description

Mexican figures like La Virgen de Guadalupe, la Malinche, la Llorona, and la Chingada reflect different myths of motherhood in Mexican culture. For the first time, Melero examines these instances of portrayed motherhood as a discursive space in the political, cultural, and literary context of early twentieth century Mexico.




Concise Encyclopedia of Mexico


Book Description

Concise Encyclopedia of Mexico includes approximately 250 articles on the people and topics most relevant to students seeking information about Mexico. Although the Concise version is a unique single-volume source of information on the entire sweep of Mexican history-pre-colonial, colonial, and moderns-it will emphasize events that affecting Mexico today, event students most need to understand.




Las Soldaderas


Book Description

Archival photos and Elena Poniatowska tell the story of women soldiers during the Mexican Revolution.




Performing Women and Modern Literary Culture in Latin America


Book Description

Women have always been the muses who inspire the creativity of men, but how do women become the creators of art themselves? This was the challenge faced by Latin American women who aspired to write in the 1920s and 1930s. Though women's roles were opening up during this time, women writers were not automatically welcomed by the Latin American literary avant-gardes, whose male members viewed women's participation in tertulias (literary gatherings) and publications as uncommon and even forbidding. How did Latin American women writers, celebrated by male writers as the "New Eve" but distrusted as fellow creators, find their intellectual homes and fashion their artistic missions? In this innovative book, Vicky Unruh explores how women writers of the vanguard period often gained access to literary life as public performers. Using a novel, interdisciplinary synthesis of performance theory, she shows how Latin American women's work in theatre, poetry declamation, song, dance, oration, witty display, and bold journalistic self-portraiture helped them craft their public personas as writers and shaped their singular forms of analytical thought, cultural critique, and literary style. Concentrating on eleven writers from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela, Unruh demonstrates that, as these women identified themselves as instigators of change rather than as passive muses, they unleashed penetrating critiques of projects for social and artistic modernization in Latin America.




Encyclopedia of Latin American and Caribbean Literature, 1900-2003


Book Description

The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Latin American and Caribbean Literature, 1900-2003 draws together entries on all aspects of literature including authors, critics, major works, magazines, genres, schools and movements in these regions from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day. With more than 200 entries written by a team of international contributors, this Encyclopedia successfully covers the popular to the esoteric. The Encyclopedia is an invaluable reference resource for those studying Latin American and/or Caribbean literature as well as being of huge interest to those folowing Spanish or Portuguese language courses.