Born in 1933, Rafael Ferrer has encountered, engaged, and challenged art movements that define the twentieth century, including European surrealism, American post-minimalism, and Latino neo-expressionism. He has worked in sculpture, drawing, and painting, and also with assemblage, collage, actions, and installation. His prolific and wide-ranging…

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…

In 2008 the author co-curated (with Pilar Tompkins Rivas) the art exhibition "Vexing: Female Voices from East LA Punk" at the Claremont Museum of Art in Claremont, California. Part of his motivation, as a scholar, was to generate discourse about the punk scene in East Los Angeles from 1979 to 1984 and to stimulate further research in…

The public discourse about immigration in the United States has long been fraught with xenophobia and racism. Since 9/11, moreover, the immigration issue has been firmly linked to questions of national security in the public imagination. In this recent period, the state has asserted extraordinary controls over immigrants and citizens that affect…

Two of the most significant themes in Chicana feminist thought are the character of mestiza consciousness and the view that political solidarity--that is, the uniting of diverse people in common cause--should build upon diversity among peoples rather than on a single shared identity. Numerous Chicana and Latina feminists have connected these two…

As a child, the author saw that art held a daily purpose for her family. It inspired her grandmother to worship and communicate to God and her many saints. This art uplifted them with spiritual, miraculous images that taught them morals based on the narratives of the image. The first work of art she owned was a painting given to her by her Tia…

This essay analyzes Latino conservative thought by rethinking the logics of assimilation through a simultaneous exploration of aesthetic possibility and negative affect. Focusing on the writings of Richard Rodriguez, the essay considers how creative forms of self-individuation and political agency cannot easily be decoupled from negative forms of…

Patssi Valdez, one of the most influential yet understudied female artists of the Chicana/o movement, was the only original and long-term female member of the 1970s art collective Asco. Through the visual discourses of pachuca glamour and punk, Valdez negotiated and exploited the gendered ideologies that visually put her at the center of the…

Women often enter judiciary positions through the trial courts, particularly county courts, because they see these courts as a stepping-stone to higher judicial office. As the eligibility pool of experienced female Hispanic lawyers expands, Hispanic women are increasingly taking seats on trial court benches. What political and demographic shifts…

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…

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 examines how Guillermo Gomez-Pena's ethno-cyborgs, performance personae that first appeared in his work in the mid-1990s, exploit and critique two overlapping cultural-political movements: the emergence of Internet technologies (cyberculture) and the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). After locating the…

Arizona Senate Bill 1108, the "anti-ethnic studies bill," proposed to eliminate ethnic studies programs and ethnic-based organizations from state-funded education. Along with other anti-immigrant legislation, this bill is creating an oppressive climate of discrimination against individuals of Mexican descent in Arizona. This study…

Focusing on Jaime Hernandez's "Locas: The Maggie and Hopey Stories," part of the "Love and Rockets" comic series, I argue that the graphic landscape of this understudied comic offers an illustration of the theories of space in relation to race, gender, and sexuality that have been critical to understandings of Chicana…

In this article the author describes his first winter in Elizabeth, New Jersey with his family in 1972. His family included: his mother Margarita; his aunts Dinorah and Nereyda; the family matriarch, his grandmother Maria Otilia Anreus; and himself, an underweight and scrawny twelve-year-old named after the infamous anarchist, Alexander Berkman.…