The Need for a "History of Mexican Music" Course at California State University, Los Angeles


Book Description

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the need for a "History of Mexican Music" course at California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA). The class will include a performance ensemble(lab), curriculum based on the History of Mexican music (lecture) and will be considered an open elective making it accessible to the general student body. This course will give birth to the first ever Mexican "Banda" at CSULA, Banda Aguilas de Los Angeles. This project report will review literature that explains a need for curriculum that focus specifically on Mexican music, how Mexican music influenced the United States, and why "Banda" was chosen as the specific performance ensemble.




Barrio Rhythm


Book Description

The hit movie La Bamba (based on the life of Richie Valens), the versatile singer Linda Ronstadt, and the popular rock group Los Lobos all have roots in the dynamic music of the Mexican-American community in East Los Angeles. With the recent "Eastside Renaissance" in the area, barrio music has taken on symbolic power throughout the Southwest, yet its story has remained undocumented and virtually untold. In Barrio Rhythm, Steven Loza brings this hidden history to life, demonstrating the music's essential role in the cultural development of East Los Angeles and its influence on mainstream popular culture. Drawing from oral histories and other primary sources, as well as from appropriate representative songs, Loza provides a historical overview of the music from the nineteenth century to the present and offers in-depth profiles of nine Mexican-American artists, groups, and entrepreneurs in Southern California from the post-World War II era to the present. His interviews with many of today's most influential barrio musicians, including members of Los Lobos, Eddie Cano, Lalo Guerrero, and Willie chronicle the cultural forces active in this complex urban community.




From Out of the Shadows


Book Description

An anniversary edition of the first full study of Mexican American women in the twentieth century, with new preface




Gronk


Book Description

Gronk was born in 1954 in the barrios of East Los Angeles. An autodidact by circumstance, he began his career as an urban muralist who had to look up the word “mural” to know whether he could paint one. Over time, he has grown into an international figure who has created grand sets for operas and computerized animation for panoramic screens. In this sweeping examination of Gronk's oeuvre, Max Benavidez elucidates how the artist can cross genres, sexual categories, and ethnic barriers, yet still remain true to himself. From street murals to mail art, from large-scale action painting to performance art and operatic set design, Gronk has made a lasting mark on the Chicano art movement, the punk scene, gay art, and the cultural world stage. As a founder of the East L.A. avant-garde art collective Asco (Spanish for nausea), Gronk and his contemporaries responded to Hollywood's rejection of Chicanos by creating a conceptual countercinema, the No Movie, that incorporated Hollywood imagery and style even as it wickedly dissected the banality and biases of the mass media. In collaborations with Cyclona, Mundo Meza, Jerry Dreva, and Tomata DuPlenty, Gronk challenged the limits of sexuality, gender norms, and taste. What Benavidez ultimately reveals is Gronk's uncanny power to reinvent himself and his art, moving through one vivid artistic and subcultural scene to another. Add large doses of Gronk's wit, irony, and talent and you have the story of his major contribution not only to Chicano art but to late twentieth-century culture. Max Benavidez is a writer, independent scholar, essayist for the Los Angeles Times, and a consultant to a wide range of cultural and academic institutions.




Program Evaluation


Book Description




Next of Kin


Book Description

As both an idea and an institution, the family has been at the heart of Chicano/a cultural politics since the Mexican American civil rights movement emerged in the late 1960s. In Next of Kin, Richard T. Rodríguez explores the competing notions of la familia found in movement-inspired literature, film, video, music, painting, and other forms of cultural expression created by Chicano men. Drawing on cultural studies and feminist and queer theory, he examines representations of the family that reflect and support a patriarchal, heteronormative nationalism as well as those that reconfigure kinship to encompass alternative forms of belonging. Describing how la familia came to be adopted as an organizing strategy for communitarian politics, Rodríguez looks at foundational texts including Rodolfo Gonzales’s well-known poem “I Am Joaquín,” the Chicano Liberation Youth Conference’s manifesto El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, and José Armas’s La Familia de La Raza. Rodríguez analyzes representations of the family in the films I Am Joaquín, Yo Soy Chicano, and Chicana; the Los Angeles public affairs television series ¡Ahora!; the experimental videos of the artist-activist Harry Gamboa Jr.; and the work of hip-hop artists such as Kid Frost and Chicano Brotherhood. He reflects on homophobia in Chicano nationalist thought, and examines how Chicano gay men have responded to it in works including Al Lujan’s video S&M in the Hood, the paintings of Eugene Rodríguez, and a poem by the late activist Rodrigo Reyes. Next of Kin is both a wide-ranging assessment of la familia’s symbolic power and a hopeful call for a more inclusive cultural politics.




America's Changing Neighborhoods [3 volumes]


Book Description

A unique panoramic survey of ethnic groups throughout the United States that explores the diverse communities in every region, state, and big city. Race, ethnicity, and immigrants' lives and identity: these are all key topics that Americans need to study in order to fully understand U.S. culture, society, politics, economics, and history. Learning about "place" through our own historical and contemporary neighborhoods is an ideal way to better grasp the important role of race and ethnicity in the United States. This reference work comprehensively covers both historical and contemporary ethnic and immigrant neighborhoods through A–Z entries that explore the places and people in every major U.S. region and neighborhood. America's Changing Neighborhoods: An Exploration of Diversity uniquely combines the history of ethnic groups with the history of communities, offering an interdisciplinary examination of the nation's makeup. It gives readers perspective and insight into ethnicity and race based on the geography of enclaves across the nation, in regions and in specific cities or localized areas within a city. Among the entries are nearly 200 "neighborhood biographies" that provide histories of local communities and their ethnic groups. Images, sidebars, cross-references at the end of each entry, and cross-indexing of entries serve readers conducting preliminary as well as in-depth research. The book's state-by-state entries also offer population data, and an appendix of ancestry statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau details ethnic and racial diversity.







Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon


Book Description

Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A.




Chicano and Chicana Art


Book Description

This anthology provides an overview of the history and theory of Chicano/a art from the 1960s to the present, emphasizing the debates and vocabularies that have played key roles in its conceptualization. In Chicano and Chicana Art—which includes many of Chicano/a art's landmark and foundational texts and manifestos—artists, curators, and cultural critics trace the development of Chicano/a art from its early role in the Chicano civil rights movement to its mainstream acceptance in American art institutions. Throughout this teaching-oriented volume they address a number of themes, including the politics of border life, public art practices such as posters and murals, and feminist and queer artists' figurations of Chicano/a bodies. They also chart the multiple cultural and artistic influences—from American graffiti and Mexican pre-Columbian spirituality to pop art and modernism—that have informed Chicano/a art's practice. Contributors. Carlos Almaraz, David Avalos, Judith F. Baca, Raye Bemis, Jo-Anne Berelowitz, Elizabeth Blair, Chaz Bojóroquez, Philip Brookman, Mel Casas, C. Ondine Chavoya, Karen Mary Davalos, Rupert García, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Shifra Goldman, Jennifer A. González, Rita Gonzalez, Robb Hernández, Juan Felipe Herrera, Louis Hock, Nancy L. Kelker, Philip Kennicott, Josh Kun, Asta Kuusinen, Gilberto “Magu” Luján, Amelia Malagamba-Ansotegui, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Dylan Miner, Malaquias Montoya, Judithe Hernández de Neikrug, Chon Noriega, Joseph Palis, Laura Elisa Pérez, Peter Plagens, Catherine Ramírez, Matthew Reilly, James Rojas, Terezita Romo, Ralph Rugoff, Lezlie Salkowitz-Montoya, Marcos Sanchez-Tranquilino, Cylena Simonds, Elizabeth Sisco, John Tagg, Roberto Tejada, Rubén Trejo, Gabriela Valdivia, Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, Victor Zamudio-Taylor