With the reemerging discussion of gentrification in the urban landscape, an exploratory case study of the Oak Park Redevelopment Plan in Sacramento, CA, was conducted in order to better understand the community’s gentrifying characteristics and the implications once the redevelopment goals are met. In addition, a Conceptual Framework [CF] was formulated in order to unpack the components and processes of gentrification. The findings suggest that the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency’s redevelopment polices act as a catalyst for gentrification that exclusively favors the in-migration of middle- and upper-income residents into the area at the expense of lower-income residents. These implications include the displacement of low-income renter-residents, changes to a neighborhood’s socio-economic and cultural characteristics, and the defacto exclusion of low-income residents as they will never be able to afford to live in the gentrified Oak Park neighborhood.

The concern with space, location, place, and geographic site has received heightened attention from artists and theorists from the 1960s onward. For critics and creators engaged with these concepts, the analysis of the interaction between of the processes of spatialization, identity formation, and memory has emerged as an important aspect of critical discourse. Lucy Lippard defines space as a physical site, understood as landscape or nature, while place implies intimacy, a familiarity with a certain geographic location. For Lippard, human interaction and, most importantly, the infusion of memory into space or a geographic site produces place. Michel de Certeau proposes that everyday practices create a text or unseen pathway in the physical nvironment. People transform space into place through interaction in their daily lived locale. Contemporary Chicana photographers Laura Aguilar, Kathy Vargas, and Delilah Montoya have produced extensive bodies of work during the past four decades that investigate the body, land, memory, and the issues of identity formation in relationship to location. The essay considers each artist in turn and first provides a general overview of each photographer’s art production. The essay then uses Lippard and Certeau’s concepts of space and place to analyze selected images from Aguilar’s Stillness (1999), Motion (1999), and Center (2001), Vargas’ My Alamo (1995), and Delilah Montoya’s Sed: The Trail of Thirst (2004). The work excavates the multiple meanings of the locations and bodies portrayed in these works, and demonstrates how the depiction of geographic space in these artists’ work becomes an intimate, personal site where the construction of places and identities occur.

The Panza Monologues is a solo performance piece both written by Virginia Grise and Irma Mayorga and also composed from contributions by Chicanas in San Antonio, TX gathered by Grise and Mayorga. In live production of the piece, Grise is the solo actor and Mayorga serves as director, dramaturge, and designer. As a whole, the play focuses on stories that hinge on the metaphor of “la panza” to articulate and describe the multiple conditions of Chicanas’ lives in terms of their physical, social, racial, and class dimensions. The piece has been performed in various locations from its inception in 2004 to the present. For their NACCS 2008 Annual Conference presentation, Grise and Mayorga composed a “performative conversation” for a session that offered (1) the genealogy of the piece’s development, (2) the differences between Grise and Mayorga’s theatrical training and work as activists, which in turn yields their aesthetic and Chicana feminist strategies employed in the performance, (3) an articulation of the play’s driving ideas and tenets in relation to Chicana/o cultural production, the socio-political conditions in San Antonio, TX, and feminist art practices, and (4) select monologues from The Panza Monologues script presented between Grise and Mayorga’s discussion of Chicana cultural expressions. This format sought to compose a presentation that experimented with the possibilities of discussing cultural production in the academic conference setting. Therefore this essay utilizes a “script” format that attempts to capture the dialogical style of Grise and Mayorga’s presentation. The essay culminates with a manifesto for “Panza Positive Cultural Production” that enumerates Grise and Mayorga’s observations and recommendations for producing Chicana/o teatro that is socially responsible and attentive to Chicana artists, Chicana/o peoples, and practice within Chicana/o cultural organizations.

This article explores the exclusion of Mexican regional music from major marketing and promotional efforts within the domestic music industry, and what that elision reveals about dominant and competing claims on “Latino” ethnic identity. Despite being the bestselling Latin music genre in the U.S., regional Mexican music receives the least development backing and attracts the fewest corporate sponsors. Unlike the suave salseros and Latin-pop divas of previous “Latin booms,” no Mexican regional artist, save for Selena, has ever been primed for mainstream “crossover” success. I argue that what is at stake in promotion of various Latin genres is the construction and reification of a desirable, market-friendly image of Latinidad in the mainstream cultural imagination, one rooted in hegemonic “tropicalist” tropes of Latinos as sensual and exotic, “hot and spicy,” sentimental and sexy. These stereotypes are reinforced by the physical location of the Latin recording and entertainment industries in Miami, where Mexican artists are handled by executives more attuned to salsa-inflected or overtly Caribbean forms of music like son, merengue, cumbia, and reggaetón—styles favored more commonly by East Coast Latinos who are primarily of Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, and Colombian descent. As a result, Mexicanos and Chicanos are positioned on the lowest rungs of a pan-Latino cultural hierarchy.

This essay calls upon Chicana/o Studies scholars to interrogate some of the assumptions underwriting the transnational turn. Chief among these is the implicit supposition that in order to produce transnational scholarship, one simply (but necessarily) must cross a national border. On the one hand, in taking the concept “transnational” far too literally, this simplistic assumption ignores far more substantive and compelling questions about transnational capitalism’s affects on subjectivity, desire, and resistance. On the other hand, the (sole) crossing-borders criterion suggests that those scholars who work on racial formations within the U.S. (Chicana/o Studies scholars, for instance) have no responsibility to think and work transnationally. Why should people, culture, racializations, literatures, produced within the U.S. not be studied within the larger context of transnational capitalism? Soto also critiques the fetishization of international difference and visibility politics. Queer theory, she argues, provides a helpful set of tools for negotiating these challenges of the transnational turn. Queer theory’s healthy poststructuralist skepticism of empiricism and positivism—together with its commitment to social justice and keen awareness of the power differentials within knowledge production—makes it poised to help us out of the temptation to simply shine a light on the global south.

This paper explores the racial/ethnic identities of multiracial Black-Mexicans or ‘Blaxicans.’ In- depth interviews with 12 Blaxican individuals in California reveal how they negotiate distinct cultural systems to accomplish multiracial identities. I argue that choosing, accomplishing, and asserting a Blaxican identity challenges the dominant monoracial discourse in the United States, in particular among African American and Chicana/o communities. That is, Blaxican respondents are held accountable by African Americans and Chicanas/os/Mexicans to monoracial notions of ‘authenticity.’ The process whereby Blaxicans move between these monoracial spaces to create multiracial identities illustrates crucial aspects of the social construction of race/ethnicity in the United States.

Even though the commodification of women by linking them erotically to food has been accepted for decades and used by women themselves to manipulate men and their desires, this has, in turn, led to behavioral and psychological problems. Using feminist as well as psychoanalytical criticism and theory by authors such as Nancy Chodorow, Nydia Garcia-Preto, Elspeth Probyn, Sigmund Freud, and others, “Latinas in the Kitchen: The Rhetoric of Food and Desire” explores how addiction to food and sex leads to unsuitable ways to satisfy one’s needs. Beginning with untreated emotional abuse that leads to inappropriate behavior between a father and daughter and that was caused by emotional abandonment by the daughter’s mother, readers can begin to develop an image of why a child grows into a woman who has an insatiable need for both sex and food. And even if a woman recognizes that she has a problem, failure to seek help from a psychiatrist can lead to a life of misery and an inability to understand why she behaves the way she does. This article argues that Lourdes Puentes, the major character in Christina Garcia’s novel Dreaming in Cuban, employs dysfunctional eating habits as sublimation of her sexual desire, and the text reveals rhetoric associated with the desire for both food and sex to disguise Lourdes Puentes’s sexual repression and her inability to solve personal problems.

Over a century ago Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón spoke out against the injustices of Porfirio Díaz’ regime through their writings in the leftist paper Regeneración and their work organizing under the banner of the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM); first in Mexico, and later while exiled in the United States, where Ricardo was repeatedly imprisoned for his attempts to ferment revolution. Documented in published essays in Partido papers, magonista ideology, anarchist and internationalist in nature, explicitly critiqued capitalism and the limitations of the nation-state in early 20th century Mexico. Just as important as these printed works for public dissemination, I believe, is the private correspondence Flores Magón wrote while incarcerated, in particular his exchanges with María Brousse de Talavera from the period 1908-09. Intense and powerfully poetic, his letters from the eve of the Mexican Revolution reveal him to be a romantic as much as a revolutionary and as such they shift, often with startling abruptness, from declarations of his love for Talavera to issues related to the Partido such as the campaign to free him and his companions. In this essay I argue that their letters allow us to examine what Chela Sandoval, in Methodology of the Oppressed, terms “amor en Aztlán,” a potentially decolonizing space wherein one is able to understand and actualize love as a liberatory force (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000: 146). For, as Sandoval writes “it is love that can access and guide our theoretical and political ‘movidas’—revolutionary maneuvers toward decolonized being” (141). In that emotional space that is love, in that imaginary space that is Aztlán, what possibilities and potentials did Flores Magón and Talavera create? How did this decolonizing love sustain them? And what can we learn, one hundred years later, from the words and actions of rebels, dreamers, and lovers?

The 1890s in New Mexico were a time of considerable political, cultural, and social upheaval as the question of statehood – which would remain unresolved until 1912 – roiled the population. In 1892 Eusebio Chacón’s two novellas, El Hijo de la Tempestad and Tras la Tormenta la Calma, appeared in “El Boletín Popular,” one of Northern New Mexico’s largest Spanish-language newspapers. “El Boletín Popular’s” positive stance towards statehood offers a political lens through which we might read Chacón’s fiction as a proactive instantiation of nuevomexicano cultural tradition. In his introductions to the novellas Chacón denies any Anglo literary influence, suggesting not only the presence of external social and political forces pressing upon the creation of his literature, but, most importantly, highlighting his desire to transcend literatura recreativa (literature as entertainment). His two novellas manifest a cultural politics from which the issue of New Mexican statehood becomes challenged and contested.