Celebrate Día de los Muertos!

Desirée A. Martín examines the rise and fall of popular saints and saint-like figures in the borderlands of the United States and Mexico. Focusing specifically on Teresa Urrea (La Santa de Cabora), Pancho Villa, César Chávez, Subcomandante Marcos, and Santa Muerte, she traces the intersections of these figures, their devotees, artistic representations, and dominant institutions with an eye for the ways in which such unofficial saints mirror traditional spiritual practices and serve specific cultural needs.

The Concheros blend Catholic and indigenous traditions in their performances, but are not governed by a predetermined set of beliefs; rather they are bound together by long standing interpersonal connections framed by the discipline of their tradition. The Concheros manifest their spirituality by means of the dance. Rostas traces how they construct their identity and beliefs, both individual and communal, by its means. The book offers new insights into the experience of dancing as a Conchero while also exploring their history, organization and practices.

Crafting Identity goes far beyond folklore in its ethnographic exploration of mask making in central Mexico. In addition to examining larger theoretical issues about indigenous and mestizo identity and cultural citizenship as represented through masks and festivals, the book also examines how dominant institutions of cultural production (art, media, and tourism) mediate Mexican "arte popular," which makes Mexican indigeneity "digestible" from the standpoint of elite and popular Mexican nationalism and American and global markets for folklore. The first ethnographic study of its kind, the book examines how indigenous and mestizo mask makers, both popular and elite, view and contest relations of power and inequality through their craft.

The art and tradition behind this unique and joyous Mexican celebration. The Day of the Dead Celebration is the most important holiday of the year in Mexico and parts of the American Southwest, a joyful time when families remember their dead. Day of the Dead provides a colorful look at the iconic folk art and family traditions that play a vital role in the event, which happens across the country from October 31 through November 2.

The Day of the Dead is the most important annual celebration in Oaxaca, Mexico. Skillfully combining textual information and photographic imagery, this book begins with a discussion of the people of Oaxaca, their way of life, and their way of looking at the world. It then takes the reader through the celebration from the preparations that can begin months in advance through to the private gatherings in homes and finally to the cemetery where the villagers celebrate together -- both the living and the dead. The voices in the book are of those people who have participated in the Day of the Dead for as long as they can remember. There are no ghosts here. Only the souls of loved ones who have gone to the Village of the Dead and who are allowed to return once a year to be with their family.

The folk art inspired by Day of the Dead, celebrated in Mexico and around the world, including the American Southwest, powerfully communicates the cultural traditions of this joyous holiday. As a companion volume to the authors' Day of the Dead, this book focuses on the artistic imagery of Day of the Dead, including the skulls, skeletons, and the iconic figure of Catrina, as seen in various pieces of market art, community art and contemporary art. The work and influence of important Mexican folk artists, such as Jose Guadalupe Posada and Diego Rivera, are represented and discussed.

Now that Latinos are the most numerous ethnic minority in the United States and a growing part of the middle and professional classes, a Mexican American educator takes stock. Latinos can see that their sun is rising. Marco Portales knows; his life has been lived under that rising sun. On the beach at Corpus Christi, in class at SUNY-Buffalo, waiting tables in Chicago, traveling to London, teaching at Berkeley, raising a family near NASA headquarters in Houston—Portales gives readers a view of the private world and public significance of Latinos. By vividly recreating his parents’ generation as well as his own, Marco Portales encourages readers to consider Latino progress since the days of his happy youth during the Eisenhower fifties, years that coalesced into the gradual but steady unfurling of his ethnic consciousness.

Today's Latinx motion pictures are built on the struggles--and victories--of prior decades. Earlier filmmakers threw open doors and cleared new paths for those of the twenty-first century to willfully reconstruct Latinx epics as well as the daily tragedies and triumphs of Latinx lives. Twenty-first-century Latinx film offers much to celebrate, but as noted pop culture critic Frederick Luis Aldama writes, there's still room to be purposefully critical.

Mexicanos tells the rich and vibrant story of Mexicans in the United States. Emerging from the ruins of Aztec civilization and from centuries of Spanish contact with indigenous people, Mexican culture followed the Spanish colonial frontier northward and put its distinctive mark on what became the southwestern United States. Shaped by their Indian and Spanish ancestors, deeply influenced by Catholicism, and tempered by an often difficult existence, Mexicans continue to play an important role in U.S. society, even as the dominant Anglo culture strives to assimilate them.

This powerful study shows how America's biggest export, rock and roll, became a major influence in Mexican politics, society, and culture. From the arrival of Elvis in Mexico during the 1950s to the emergence of a full-blown counterculture movement by the late 1960s, Eric Zolov uses rock and roll to illuminate Mexican history through these charged decades and into the 1970s. This fascinating narrative traces the rechanneling of youth energies away from political protest in the wake of the 1968 student movement and into counterculture rebellion, known as "La Onda" (The Wave).