Olga Nájera-Ramírez – författare

Chicana Traditions features essays from professionals engaged with a broad and ever-expanding Chicana expressive culture. Professors and students, performing artists and folklorists, and archivists and activists merge personal experience with formal discussion to share fascinating inside stories. The topics include a professional woman mariachi performer; the creation and evolution of the escaramuza charra (all-female precision riding team) within the male-dominated Mexican rodeo; the ranchera music of the transnational performer Lydia Mendoza, the complex crossover of Selena's Tejano music, and the bottle cap and jar lid art of Goldie Garcia. An eye-opening journey through a borderland where cultures and identities converge, Chicana Traditions reveals how Chicanas continue to invent, reshape, and transcend their traditional culture.

Dancing across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos focuses specifically on Mexican dance practices on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. The essays explore various types of Mexican popular and traditional dances and address questions of authenticity, aesthetics, identity, interpretation, and research methodologies in dance performance. Contributors include not only noted scholars from a variety of disciplines but also several dance practitioners who reflect on their engagement with dance and reveal subtexts of dance culture. Capturing dance as a living expression, the volume's ethnographic approach highlights the importance of the cultural and social contexts in which dances are practiced. Contributors are Norma E. CantÚ, Susan Cashion, MarÍa Teresa CeseÑa, XÓchitl C. ChÁvez, Adriana Cruz-Manjarrez, RenÉe de la Torre Castellanos, Peter J. GarcÍa, Rudy F. GarcÍa, Chris Goertzen, Martha GonzÁlez, Elisa Diana Huerta, Sydney Hutchinson, Marie "Keta" Miranda, Olga NÁjera-RamÍrez, Shakina Nayfack, Russell RodrÍguez, Brenda M. Romero, Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter, JosÉ SÁnchez JimÉnez, and Alberto ZÁrate Rosales.

Often seen as a static dance form, folklórico is in fact a living, dynamic practice. Norma E. Cantú and Olga Nájera-Ramírez edit a collection that illuminates the passing down of folklórico traditions and show how the dance has changed and grown in Mexican American communities across the U.S. A roster of leading scholars, dancers, teachers, and librarians discuss how Mexican Americans use folklórico to resist cultural erasure and stereotypes, honor their heritage, and express themselves. Artists, meanwhile, push the boundaries of folklórico by adding new stories and perspectives that include Chicane, queer, and local experiences. Together, the contributors highlight folklórico's importance to the people who teach it, perform it, and sustain it.Multidimensional and enlightening, Folklórico in the United States expands our knowledge of a powerful and creative dance tradition central to Mexican Americans' sense of self and community.Contributors: Erica Acevedo-Ontiveros, Jenna Cortez-Aguirre, Manuel R. Cuellar, Alma Ixchel Flores-Pérez, Guadalupe Friaz, Ennio García-Miera, Javier Sepúlveda Garibay, Jacquelyn Y. Guzmán, Aida Hurtado, Cándida F. Jácquez, Gabriela Mendoza-García, Mona Lisa Montgomery, Cassondra Montoya, Felisa Patiño-Longoria, Cindy Padilla, Russell C. Rodriguez, Gema Sandoval, Sarahí Lay Trigo

Chicana Feminisms presents new essays on Chicana feminist thought by scholars, creative writers, and artists. This volume moves the field of Chicana feminist theory forward by examining feminist creative expression, the politics of representation, and the realities of Chicana life. Drawing on anthropology, folklore, history, literature, and psychology, the distinguished contributors combine scholarly analysis, personal observations, interviews, letters, visual art, and poetry. The collection is structured as a series of dynamic dialogues: each of the main pieces is followed by an essay responding to or elaborating on its claims. The broad range of perspectives included here highlights the diversity of Chicana experience, particularly the ways it is made more complex by differences in class, age, sexual orientation, language, and region. Together the essayists enact the contentious, passionate conversations that define Chicana feminisms.

The contributors contemplate a number of facets of Chicana experience: life on the Mexico-U.S. border, bilingualism, the problems posed by a culture of repressive sexuality, the ranchera song, and domesticana artistic production. They also look at Chicana feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, the history of Chicanas in the larger Chicano movement, autobiographical writing, and the interplay between gender and ethnicity in the movie Lone Star. Some of the essays are expansive; others—such as Norma Cantú’s discussion of the writing of her fictionalized memoir Canícula—are intimate. All are committed to the transformative powers of critical inquiry and feminist theory.

Contributors. Norma Alarcón, Gabriela F. Arredondo, Ruth Behar, Maylei Blackwell, Norma E. Cantú, Sergio de la Mora, Ann duCille, Michelle Fine, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Rebecca M. Gámez, Jennifer González, Ellie Hernández, Aída Hurtado, Claire Joysmith, Norma Klahn, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Olga Nájera-Ramírez, Anna Nieto Gomez, Renato Rosaldo, Elba Rosario Sánchez, Marcia Stephenson, Jose Manuel Valenzuela, Patricia Zavella