Born and raised in Los Angeles, Dan Vargas spent his twenties going to punk shows at King's Palace, Club 88, the Cathay de Grand, the Vex, the Starwood, the Hong Kong Cafe, Base's Hall, and the Masque. He has produced for several bands and is currently a songwriter and singer for an LA rock band. In this article, he reflects on the…

In the field of Chicana/o arts and letters, "rasquachismo" refers to the celebration of the sensibility of "los de abajo" (the underdogs), whose resourcefulness and ingenuity permit them to overcome adversity by stitching together the tools needed to survive from whatever materials they have at hand. In this article, I apply…

The historic immigration rights marches of 2006 placed the plight of undocumented immigrants in the national spotlight. Competing interpretations of the marches focused in part on the waving of Mexican flags by marchers. While some English-language media critics saw the flags as expressing political disloyalty to the United States, the marchers…

The contemporary situation in the United States with respect to Mexican migrants has reached a level of intensity that harkens back to the mass expulsions of the 1930s and the 1950s, when millions were forcefully removed south across the border. Recent deportation raids have targeted food processing plants and other large businesses hiring migrant…

While most studies of Mexican American suburbanization since the 1970s focus on the transformation of residential (private) space, it is in suburban public space that some of the most important struggles over belonging and rights have occurred. This article builds a theoretical framework to analyze the relationships between public space,…

Our study explored cultural understandings surrounding the reproductive decisions of US-born, college-educated Mexican American women through a series of semi-structured in-depth interviews. In considering the results, this article advances debates on Latina women's reproductive choices beyond the theoretical paradigms of "assimilation" and…

This study, carried out in a barrio neighborhood near the U.S.-Mexican border, uses a structural violence perspective to understand the extent of and individual determinants of mistreatment of residents by immigration authorities. Results indicate that barrio residents are more likely than the U.S. population in general to experience mistreatment…

This article complements the existing body of Ruiz de Burton scholarship by providing the first sustained examination of her literary representations of American Indians in both "Who Would Have Thought It?" (1872) and "The Squatter and the Don" (1885), and by exploring how these representations serve her broader aims of social and political…

Mexican women's working and romantic lives were frequent subject matter in early-twentieth-century Mexican American music. Surprisingly, this trend is rendered nearly invisible by the corpus of scholarly work that focuses on the male-centered "heroic corrido," particularly the class and race conflicts represented in that "masculine" genre. This…

The novel "Loving Pedro Infante" by Chicana writer Denise Chavez provides an insightful transcultural feminist critique of Golden Age Mexican cinema culture through a careful examination of gender roles. In the novel, the reception of Pedro Infante's films by spectators bridges generations and national spaces and leads to the formation…

During the interwar period, California's labor-intensive agriculture transitioned from reliance on diverse immigrants to preference for Mexicans. Political movements to restrict immigration, the Great Depression, and labor unrest compelled farm employers to search for labor that could be used flexibly and deported easily. To achieve this…

Based on an oral history interview, this essay examines the work of Yolanda M. Lopez, one of the most significant Chicana artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It posits that her work portrays feminist intersectionality and oppositional consciousness, predating the Chicana feminist literature on these paradigms. Documenting her…

Current approaches to designing antigang policies overemphasize the notion that criminality is the defining characteristic of gangs and that solutions require a get-tough approach. As an ex-gang member, I conducted a five-year ethnographic study and a fourteen-year informal study of Mexican American street gangs in two Southwestern states to…

This essay intervenes in contemporary scholarship on Sandra Cisneros's "Woman Hollering Creek" (1991) by examining the canciones she uses as epigraphs and their relationship to the multiple nationalisms that Chicana/os actively negotiate. I argue that Cisneros's decision to include powerfully nationalist Mexican cancion traditions…

This essay analyzes the historical construction of "Spanish" icons in northern New Mexico and the complex Hispanic and Chicano identities they both evoke and mask. It focuses on the January 1998 vandalism of a statue depicting New Mexico's first Spanish colonial governor, Don Juan de Onate. The removal of the Onate statue's foot…