meXicana Fashions: Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction - Hardcover

Aída Hurtado is a professor and the Luis Leal Endowed Chair in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author and editor of numerous books, most recently Beyond Machismo: Intersectional Latino Masculinities.
Norma E. Cantú is the Norine R. and T. Frank Murchison Endowed Professor in Humanities at Trinity University in San Antonio. In addition to pursuing scholarly research in folklore and literary studies, she has published poetry and fiction, including the award-winning Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera. Her most recent coedited volume is Entre Guadalupe y Malinche: Tejanas in Literature and Art.

"As I read meXicana Fashions, I thought of my mother--a second-generation thrift store queen seamstress artist--and grandmother--a soft-spoken woman from Monterrey who still loves a velour track suit at age seventy--and of my own color-coded closet filled with rococo ensembles. I felt all of us situated and witnessed, challenged and archived, in these pages. From the politics of donning rebozos to what Stacy I. Macias calls "racialized rasquache raunch," this book thoughtfully examines an important array of questions: What is fashion? What does it do? How do we articulate dissent through what we wear? What stories are we telling? Who are we? Where did we come from? But it does more than that. All the contributors bring reverence and affection to this subject as well as to the family members, television characters, historical figures, activists, artists, and colleagues they invite into their chapters. This book is a meXicana "look" in its own right--fashioning memories and stories from here and there, hybridizing the academic with the vernacular. This book is as much a rigorous examination of the politics of meXicana fashions as it is an homage to the people who give these aesthetics life." (Virgie Tovar, Author of You Have the Right to Remain Fat)

"meXicana Fashions makes a unique and compelling argument about the ways in which fashion, self-adornment, and dress contribute to the making of social identities. This wide-ranging and imaginative collection explores the layered border aesthetics of meXicanas across multiple identities, bodies, nationalities, and cultural geographies. In meXicana Fashions, the authors deftly examine the cultural processes enacted in everyday practices of self-adornment and fashion and capture Chicanas’ complicated engagements with the fashion industry. Informed by theories and methodologies of feminist border thinking, mestiza consciousness, and intersectionality, meXicana Fashions explores the complex dynamics of fashion aesthetics at the heart of meXicana creativity and cultural politics of belonging and resistance. An engaging read for anyone interested in border aesthetics and feminist cultural politics! " (Rosa-Linda Fregoso, professor emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of meXicana Encounters: the Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands)

"Readers will find themselves pausing to assess the jewelry that they are wearing or to take a mental stock of what is in their closet. I can’t remember the last time I read something that made me think so profoundly about my own fashion choices and how they’re influenced by generations before me. " (Dolores Inés Casillas, University of California, Santa Barbara, author of Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-language Radio and Public Advocacy)

"meXicana Fashions is a nuanced and essential compendium of essays exploring the landscape of dress and self-adornment in Chicana identity construction. The text explores codes of self-fashioning in street fashion, ethnic dress, and haut couture. The volume defines the complex power of self-presentation and fashion consciousness expressed in the dicho “La buena figura, hasta la sepultura.” " (Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, Independent scholar of Latina/o Art and Culture)