You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Relational Undercurrents accompanies an exhibition by the same name that opens at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California in September, 2017. The exhibition and edited volume call attention to the artistic production of the Caribbean islands and their diasporas, challenging the conventional geographic and conceptual boundaries of Latin America.
An intimate portrait of LA gang members turning to drugs, nostalgia, and religion as they age and fight to stay relevant in a new era. Once celebrated in the gang world as rebels who defied the established prison order, veterano Maravilla gang members now grapple with the consequences of leading violent and drug-ridden lives. At once thrilling and tender, The Marvelous Ones sheds light on how these aging gang members struggle to stay meaningful in the face of addiction, violent trauma, and a rapidly changing East Los Angeles. Randol Contreras spent close to a decade studying the legendary Maravilla gangs of East LA, who made waves in the 1990s for their rebellion against the most powerful prison gang in the United States: the Mexican Mafia, or La Eme. These men granted Contreras unique access to their experiences, revealing how family members shun them, how jail and prison worsen them, how the church and drug treatment redeem them, and how their brightest moments lie in their pasts as legends of the California gang world. The Marvelous Ones gives human faces to the suffering and resilience of some of the most marginalized members of our society.
An intimate portrait of LA gang members turning to drugs, nostalgia, and religion as they age and fight to stay relevant in a new era. Once celebrated in the gang world as rebels who defied the established prison order, veterano Maravilla gang members now grapple with the consequences of leading violent and drug-ridden lives. At once thrilling and tender, The Marvelous Ones sheds light on how these aging gang members struggle to stay meaningful in the face of addiction, violent trauma, and a rapidly changing East Los Angeles. Randol Contreras spent close to a decade studying the legendary Maravilla gangs of East LA, who made waves in the 1990s for their rebellion against the most powerful prison gang in the United States: the Mexican Mafia, or La Eme. These men granted Contreras unique access to their experiences, revealing how family members shun them, how jail and prison worsen them, how the church and drug treatment redeem them, and how their brightest moments lie in their pasts as legends of the California gang world. The Marvelous Ones gives human faces to the suffering and resilience of some of the most marginalized members of our society.
OCEANS attends to the inextricable human and nonhuman agencies that affect and are affected by the sea and its running currents within contemporary art and visual culture. Oceans cover more than 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, dividing and connecting humans, who carry saltwater in their blood, sweat and tears. They also represent a powerful nonhuman force, rising, flooding, heating and raging in unprecedented ways as the climate crisis unfolds. Artists have envisioned the sea as a sublime wilderness, home to mythical creatures and bizarre species, a source of life and death, a site of new beginnings and tragic endings, both wondrous and disastrous. From migration to melting ice caps, th...
Exploring representations of Latinx people from Scarface to Narcos, this book examines how pop culture has framed Latin America as the villain in America’s long and ineffectual War on Drugs. If there is an enemy in the War on Drugs, it is people of color. That is the lesson of forty years of cultural production in the United States. Popular culture, from Scarface and Miami Vice to Narcos and Better Call Saul, has continually positioned Latinos as an alien people who threaten the US body politic with drugs. Jason Ruiz explores the creation and endurance of this trope, its effects on Latin Americans and Latinx people, and its role in the cultural politics of the War on Drugs. Even as the foc...
Arvey Foundation Book Award, Association for Latin American Art, 2018 Many Latin American artists and critics in the 1920s drew on the values of modernism to question the cultural authority of Europe. Modernism gave them a tool for coping with the mobility of their circumstances, as well as the inspiration for works that questioned the very concepts of the artist and the artwork and opened the realm of art to untrained and self-taught artists, artisans, and women. Writing about the modernist works in newspapers and magazines, critics provided a new vocabulary with which to interpret and assign value to the expanding sets of abstracted forms produced by these artists, whose lives were shaped ...
"Dissatisfactions examines Chicano/Latino stylized dissatisfactions with both the US nation-state and the activism responding to systemic state violence within a very contentious post-1968 Los Angeles"--
In the wake of Mexico’s revolution, artists played a fundamental role in constructing a national identity centered on working people and were hailed for their contributions to modern art. Picturing the Proletariat examines three aspects of this artistic legacy: the parallel paths of organized labor and artists’ collectives, the relations among these groups and the state, and visual narratives of the worker. Showcasing forgotten works and neglected media, John Lear explores how artists and labor unions participated in a cycle of revolutionary transformation from 1908 through the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940). Lear shows how middle-class artists, radicalized by the revoluti...
A cross-disciplinary volume that combines and puts into dialogue perspectives on disasters, this book includes contributions from anthropology, history, cultural studies, sociology, and literary studies. Offering a rich and diverse set of arguments and analyses on the ever-relevant theme of catastrophe in the circum-Caribbean, it will encourage debate and collaboration between scholars working on disasters from a range of disciplinary perspectives.
Pierre Bourdieu in Hispanic Literature and Culture is a collective reflection on the value of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s work for the study of Spanish and Latin American literature and culture. The authors deploy Bourdieu’s concepts in the study of Modernismo, avant-garde Mexico, contemporary Puerto Rican literature, Hispanism, Latin American cultural production, and more. Each essay is also a contribution to the study of the politics and economics of culture in Spain and Latin America. The book, as a whole, is in dialogue with recent methodological and theoretical interventions in cultural sociology and Latin American and Iberian studies.