Song for Cesar

Carmen Lomas Garza is a Chicana artist who creates images about the lives of Mexican Americans based on her memories and experiences growing up in South Texas. In this charming film, Carmen returns to Texas to revisit the people and places that inspired her work.

This book casts new light not only on artists - such as Sandra de la Loza, Judy Baca, and David Botello, among others - but on the exhibitions that feature their work, and the collectors, curators, critics, and advocates who engage it.

This anthology provides an overview of the history and theory of Chicano/a art from the 1960s to the present, emphasizing the debates and vocabularies that have played key roles in its conceptualization. In Chicano and Chicana Art--which includes many of Chicano/a art's landmark and foundational texts and manifestos--artists, curators, and cultural critics trace the development of Chicano/a art from its early role in the Chicano civil rights movement to its mainstream acceptance in American art institutions. Throughout this teaching-oriented volume they address a number of themes, including the politics of border life, public art practices such as posters and murals, and feminist and queer artists' figurations of Chicano/a bodies. They also chart the multiple cultural and artistic influences--from American graffiti and Mexican pre-Columbian spirituality to pop art and modernism--that have informed Chicano/a art's practice.

The Royal Chicano Air Force produced major works of visual art, poetry, prose, music, and performance during the second half of the twentieth century and first decades of the twenty-first. Materializing in Sacramento, California, in 1969 and established between 1970 and 1972, the RCAF helped redefine the meaning of artistic production and artwork to include community engagement projects such as breakfast programs, community art classes, and political and labor activism. The collective's work has contributed significantly both to Chicano/a civil rights activism and to Chicano/a art history, literature, and culture. Blending RCAF members' biographies and accounts of their artistic production with art historical, cultural, and literary scholarship, Flying under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force is the first in-depth study of this vanguard Chicano/a arts collective and activist group.

Since the 1980s, a prolific "second wave" of Chicano/a writers and artists has tremendously expanded the range of genres and subject matter in Chicano/a literature and art. Building on the pioneering work of their predecessors, whose artistic creations were often tied to political activism and the civil rights struggle, today's Chicano/a writers and artists feel free to focus as much on the aesthetic quality of their work as on its social content. They use novels, short stories, poetry, drama, documentary films, and comic books to shape the raw materials of life into art objects that cause us to participate empathetically in an increasingly complex Chicano/a identity and experience. This book presents far-ranging interviews with twenty-one "second wave" Chicano/a poets, fiction writers, dramatists, documentary filmmakers, and playwrights.

Not just a colorful record of the making of a mural in Chicago's Pilsen community led by Ray Patlán, this film traces the mural movement of the mid-1970's back to murals in Mexico. Different people view the mural and reflect on its meaning for themselves as Latinos.

As the lead singer of the Grammy Award-winning rock band Quetzal and a scholar of Chicana/o and Latina/o studies, Martha Gonzalez is uniquely positioned to articulate the ways in which creative expression can serve the dual roles of political commentary and community building. Drawing on postcolonial, Chicana, black feminist, and performance theories, Chican@ Artivistas explores the visual, musical, and performance art produced in East Los Angeles since the inception of NAFTA and the subsequent anti-immigration rhetoric of the 1990s. Showcasing the social impact made by key artist-activists on their communities and on the mainstream art world and music industry, Gonzalez charts the evolution of a now-canonical body of work that took its inspiration from the Zapatista movement, particularly its masked indigenous participants, and that responded to efforts to impose systems of labor exploitation and social subjugation.

The population of Mexican-origin peoples in the United States is a diverse one, as reflected by age, class, gender, sexuality, and religion. Far from antiquated concepts of mestizaje, recent scholarship has shown that Mexican@/Chican@ culture is a mixture of indigenous, African, and Spanish and other European peoples and cultures. No one reflects this rich blend of cultures better than Chican@ rappers, whose lyrics and iconography can help to deepen our understanding of what it means to be Chican@ or Mexican@ today.

A lyrical journey through the heart of Chicano culture as reflected in the love songs of the Tex-Mex Norteña music tradition.

A collection of interviews, essays and vaudeville skits from the 1930s to the 1950s al pertaining to Mexican American theater. Historical studies by Jorge Huerta, Nicolás Kanellos, Tomás Ybarra-Fausto and others; exclusive interview of Luis Valdez; and a vaudeville material from Lalo Astol, the Carpa García and others never before published.

A collection of plays by Chicano authors includes biographies of the playwrights, production histories of the plays, and critical commentary.

The 1970s and 1980s saw the awakening of social awareness and political activism in Mexican-American communities. In San Diego, a group of Chicana women participated in a political theatre group whose plays addressed social, gender, and political issues of the working class and the Chicano Movement. In this collective memoir, seventeen women who were a part of Teatro de las Chicanas (later known as Teatro Laboral and Teatro Raíces) come together to share why they joined the theatre and how it transformed their lives.