Alicia Gaspar de Alba – författare

Since 1993, more than five hundred women and girls have been murdered in Ciudad Juárez across the border from El Paso, Texas. At least a third have been sexually violated and mutilated as well. Thousands more have been reported missing and remain unaccounted for. The crimes have been poorly investigated and have gone unpunished and unresolved by Mexican authorities, thus creating an epidemic of misogynist violence on an increasingly globalized U.S.-Mexico border.This book, the first anthology to focus exclusively on the Juárez femicides, as the crimes have come to be known, compiles several different scholarly "interventions" from diverse perspectives, including feminism, Marxism, critical race theory, semiotics, and textual analysis. Editor Alicia Gaspar de Alba shapes a multidisciplinary analytical framework for considering the interconnections between gender, violence, and the U.S.-Mexico border. The essays examine the social and cultural conditions that have led to the heinous victimization of women on the border-from globalization, free trade agreements, exploitative maquiladora working conditions, and border politics, to the sexist attitudes that pervade the social discourse about the victims. The book also explores the evolving social movement that has been created by NGOs, mothers' organizing efforts, and other grassroots forms of activism related to the crimes. Contributors include U.S. and Mexican scholars and activists, as well as personal testimonies of two mothers of femicide victims.

Months before Alma LÓpez's digital collage Our Lady was shown at the Museum of International Folk Art in 2001, the museum began receiving angry phone calls from community activists and Catholic leaders who demanded that the image not be displayed. Protest rallies, prayer vigils, and death threats ensued, but the provocative image of la Virgen de Guadalupe (hands on hips, clad only in roses, and exalted by a bare-breasted butterfly angel) remained on exhibition. Highlighting many of the pivotal questions that have haunted the art world since the NEA debacle of 1988, the contributors to Our Lady of Controversy present diverse perspectives, ranging from definitions of art to the artist's intention, feminism, queer theory, colonialism, and Chicano nationalism. Contributors include the exhibition curator, Tey Marianna Nunn; award-winning novelist and Chicana historian Emma PÉrez; and Deena GonzÁlez (recognized as one of the fifty most important living women historians in America). Accompanied by a bonus DVD of Alma LÓpez's I Love Lupe video that looks at the Chicana artistic tradition of reimagining la Virgen de Guadalupe, featuring a historic conversation between Yolanda LÓpez, Ester HernÁndez, and Alma LÓpez, Our Lady of Controversy promises to ignite important new dialogues.

In the early 1990s, a major exhibition Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985 toured major museums around the United States. As a first attempt to define and represent Chicano/a art for a national audience, the exhibit attracted both praise and controversy, while raising fundamental questions about the nature of multiculturalism in the U.S.This book presents the first interdisciplinary cultural study of the CARA exhibit. Alicia Gaspar de Alba looks at the exhibit as a cultural text in which the Chicano/a community affirmed itself not as a "subculture" within the U.S. but as an "alter-Native" culture in opposition to the exclusionary and homogenizing practices of mainstream institutions. She also shows how the exhibit reflected the cultural and sexual politics of the Chicano Movement and how it serves as a model of Chicano/a popular culture more generally.Drawing insights from cultural studies, feminist theory, anthropology, and semiotics, this book constitutes a wide-ranging analysis of Chicano/a art, popular culture, and mainstream cultural politics. It will appeal to a diverse audience in all of these fields.

“What the women I write about have in common is that they are all rebels with a cause, and I see myself represented in their mirror,” asserts Alicia Gaspar de Alba. Looking back across a career in which she has written novels, poems, and scholarly works about Sor Juana InÉs de la Cruz, la Malinche, Coyolxauhqui, the murdered women of JuÁrez, the Salem witches, and Chicana lesbian feminists, Gaspar de Alba realized that what links these historically and socially diverse figures is that they all fall into the category of “bad women,” as defined by their place, culture, and time, and all have been punished as well as remembered for rebelling against the “frames” imposed on them by capitalist patriarchal discourses.In [Un]Framing the “Bad Woman,” Gaspar de Alba revisits and expands several of her published articles and presents three new essays to analyze how specific brown/female bodies have been framed by racial, social, cultural, sexual, national/regional, historical, and religious discourses of identity-as well as how Chicanas can be liberated from these frames. Employing interdisciplinary methodologies of activist scholarship that draw from art, literature, history, politics, popular culture, and feminist theory, she shows how the “bad women” who interest her are transgressive bodies that refuse to cooperate with patriarchal dictates about what constitutes a “good woman” and that queer/alter the male-centric and heteronormative history, politics, and consciousness of Chicano/Mexicano culture. By “unframing” these bad women and rewriting their stories within a revolutionary frame, Gaspar de Alba offers her compaÑeras and fellow luchadoras empowering models of struggle, resistance, and rebirth.

The essays in "Velvet Barrios" collectively intervene in the field of popular culture studies to examine the various ways in which the ideologies of sex maleness and femaleness as well as the ideologies of gender femininity and masculinity are produced and consumed, approved and accepted, resisted and reinvented in the popular arts, rituals, icons, myths, and beliefs of the 'alter Native community' of Mexican descent in the United States. Gaspar de Alba argues that Chicana/o culture is not a subculture but an alter Native culture 'an Other American culture indigenous to the landbase now known as the West and the Southwest of the US. The collection is called "Velvet Barrios" because the editor believes that nothing signifies the working class, highly layered, textured, and metaphoric sensibility known as the rasquache aesthetic (that characterizes so much of Chicana/o popular culture) more than black velvet art. In her words, 'What is more evocative of sexed and gendered barrio representations than those images of voluptuous maidens, feathered warriors, airbrushed Chevys, tattooed cholos, and sacred virgins?'From the hagiography of 'locas santas', to the sexual politics of early Chicana activists in the Chicano youth movement, from the representation of Latina bodies in popular magazines to the ritual performance of Mexican femaleness, as enacted by the quinceanera from the iconic fetishization of el Pachuco, la Malinche, and la Llorona in film and literature or the stereotypical renderings of recipe books and calendar art be it baseball, nortena music, or nationalist rhetoric through which Mexican masculinity is measured by fraternity initiations, lowriding, hip hop, detective fiction, or border crossings all of these pieces dialectically engage methods of popular culture studies with discourses of gender, sexuality, identity politics, representation, and cultural production. "Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture & Chicana/o Sexualities" focuses fully on the more closeted issues of barrio popular culture. There is no monolithic singular 'barrio', or community, which can contain all of these interventions. Instead, this collection helps us to construct a plurality of 'barrios', a diversity of neighbourhoods in which to be/become/signify Chicano and Chicana bodies of the 21st century.

The essays in "Velvet Barrios" collectively intervene in the field of popular culture studies to examine the various ways in which the ideologies of sex maleness and femaleness as well as the ideologies of gender femininity and masculinity are produced and consumed, approved and accepted, resisted and reinvented in the popular arts, rituals, icons, myths, and beliefs of the 'alter Native community' of Mexican descent in the United States. Gaspar de Alba argues that Chicana/o culture is not a subculture but an alter Native culture 'an Other American culture indigenous to the landbase now known as the West and the Southwest of the U.S'. The collection is called "Velvet Barrios" because the editor believes that nothing signifies the working class, highly layered, textured, and metaphoric sensibility known as the rasquache aesthetic (that characterizes so much of Chicana/o popular culture) more than black velvet art. In her words, 'What is more evocative of sexed and gendered barrio representations than those images of voluptuous maidens, feathered warriors, airbrushed Chevys, tattooed cholos, and sacred virgins?'From the hagiography of 'locas santas', to the sexual politics of early Chicana activists in the Chicano youth movement, from the representation of Latina bodies in popular magazines to the ritual performance of Mexican femaleness, as enacted by the quinceanera from the iconic fetishization of el Pachuco, la Malinche, and la Llorona in film and literature or the stereotypical renderings of recipe books and calendar art be it baseball, nortena music, or nationalist rhetoric through which Mexican masculinity is measured by fraternity initiations, lowriding, hip hop, detective fiction, or border crossings all of these pieces dialectically engage methods of popular culture studies with discourses of gender, sexuality, identity politics, representation, and cultural production. "Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture & Chicana/o Sexualities" represents the first book to focus fully on the more closeted issues of barrio popular culture. There is no monolithic singular 'barrio', or community, which can contain all of these interventions.Instead, this collection helps us to construct a plurality of 'barrios', a diversity of neighbourhoods in which to be/become/signify Chicano and Chicana bodies of the 21st century.