In Chicana/o popular culture, nothing signifies the working class, highly-layered, textured, and metaphoric sensibility known as "rasquache aesthetic" more than black velvet art. The essays in this volume examine that aesthetic by looking at icons, heroes, cultural myths, popular rituals, and border issues as they are expressed in a variety of ways. The contributors dialectically engage methods of popular cultural studies with discourses of gender, sexuality, identity politics, representation, and cultural production. In addition to a hagiography of "locas santas," the book includes studies of the sexual politics of early Chicana activists in the Chicano youth movement, the representation of Latina bodies in popular magazines, the stereotypical renderings of recipe books and calendar art, the ritual performance of Mexican femaleness in the quinceañera, and mediums through which Chicano masculinity is measured.

Autorentext
ALICIA GASPAR DE ALBA is Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she teaches courses on barrio popular culture, border consciousness, lesbian literature and creative writing. She is the author of Chicana Art Inside/Outside the Master's House (Texas 98) and Sor Juana's Second Dream (New Mexico 99).

Inhalt
PART I: A BARRIO ALTAR (ICONS & HEROES) A Chicana Hagiography for the 21st Century: Ana Castillo's Locas Santas; R.Alcalá The "Macho" Body as Social Malinche; G.S.Estrada In Search of the Authentic Pachuco: An Interpretive Essay; A.Madrid PART II: MYTHIC BARRIOS (CULTURAL MYTHS) Deconstructing the Mythical Homeland: México in Contemporary Chicana Performance; L.Gutiérrez A Poverty of Relations: On Not "Making Familia from Scratch," but Scratching Familia; R.Rodríguez 'Tanto Tiempo Disfrutamos': Chicanas and the Sexual Politics of Chicano Youth Culture in Los Angeles in the 1960s; D.Espinoza The Verse of the Godfather: Unwrapping Masculinity, Familia and Nationalism in Chicano Rap Discourse; R.T.Rodríguez PART III: BARRIO RITES (POPULA RITUALS) Revisiting the Chavez Ravine: Baseball, Urban Renewal and the Gendered Civic Culture of Postwar Los Angeles; E.Avila 'La Quinceañera': Making Gender and Ethnic Identities; K.M.Davalos Only Cauldrons Know the Secrets of Their Soups: Like Water for Chocolate; M.Segovia Cruising Through Low Rider Culture: Chicana/o Identity in the Marketing of Low Rider Magazine; D.M.Sandoval PART IV: BORDER BARRIOS ('A TRADITION OF LONG WALKS') Rights of Passage: From Cultural Schizophrenia to Border Consciousness in Cheech Marín's Born in East L.A.; A.Gaspar de Alba Gendered Bodies and Borders in Chicana/o Performance and Literature; S.Chávez-Silverman Lost in the Cinematic Landscape: Chicanas as Lloronas in Contemporary Film; D.R.Pérez PART V: VELVET BARRIOS (ESTE-REO-TIPOS/STEREOTYPES) Lupe's Song: On the Origins of Mexican/Woman Hating in the United States; D.J.González Resisting "Beauty" and Real Women Have Curves; M.P.Figueroa Out of the Fringe: Desire and Homosexuality in the '90s Latino Theatre; M.T.Marrero Velvet Malinche: Fantasies of "the" Aztec Princess in the Chicana/o Sexual Imagination; C.Rueda Esquibél