Political vs. linguistic borders

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 390-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yolanda Congosto Martín
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Mexican Origin ◽  
Mexican Spanish ◽  
Research Groups ◽  
Political Border ◽  
The City

Abstract This paper analyses and studies the melodic behavior of five female informants of Mexican origin or descent, three of them residents in the city of Los Angeles in the United States, and two in Mexico, one in Mexico City and the other in Puebla. There are two main objectives: firstly, to contribute to the prosodic description of Mexican Spanish on both sides of the political border between both countries (declarative statements and neutral absolute interrogatives), and secondly, to verify the continuity between the Mexican-American intonation of LA and that of MX Mexican. We followed the methodology developed by the research groups that make up Amper-Mexico and Amper-California Los Angeles, within the framework of the international AMPER project.

The Los Angeles "Zoot Suit Riots" Revisited: Mexican and Latin American Perspectives

2000 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 367-391 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Griswold del Castillo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Ethnic Group ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mexican Origin ◽  
Latin Americans ◽  
Zoot Suit

The so-called Zoot Suit riots in Los Angeles in June of 1943 made Latin Americans more aware of the negative racial attitudes within the United States toward Mexicans. Through the publicity surrounding the riots, they also first learned of the existence of a large ethnic group of Mexican origin. This knowledge, however, often came with an additional message that the Mexican American culture was not worthy of esteem by respectable people. / Los disturbios llamados "Zoot-Suit" que ocurrieron en Los Angeles en Junio 1943 hizo saber a los latino americanos que las actitudes de los norteamericanos hacia los mexicanos no eran muy positivas. A través de la publicidad durante los disturbios, aprendieron por la primera vez de la existencia de un gran grupo étnico de origen mexicano en los Estados Unidos. Desgraciadamente esta información vino con otro mensaje que la cultura de los mexicoamericanos no era digna de honor por la supuesta gente decente.

Review: Urban Latino Cultures: La Vida Latina en LA by Gustavo Leclerc, Raúl Villa, and Michael J. Dear (eds.)

1999 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-128
Author(s):  
Catherine S. Ramirez
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
History Of ◽  
Crime Wave ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The City ◽  
History Of Los Angeles

Throughout the twentieth century (and now the twenty-first), the specter of a Latina/o past, present, and future has haunted the myth of Los Angeles as a sunny, bucolic paradise. At the same time it has loomed behind narratives of the city as a dystopic, urban nightmare. In the 1940s Carey McWilliams pointed to the fabrication of a “Spanish fantasy heritage” that made Los Angeles the bygone home of fair señoritas, genteel caballeros and benevolent mission padres. Meanwhile, the dominant Angeleno press invented a “zoot” (read Mexican-American) crime wave. Unlike the aristocratic, European Californias/os of lore, the Mexican/American “gangsters” of the 1940s were described as racial mongrels. What's more, the newspapers explicitly identified them as the sons and daughters of immigrants-thus eliding any link they may have had to the Californias/os of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or to the history of Los Angeles in general.

Forging Aztecness: Twentieth-Century Mexican Musical Nationalism in Twenty-First Century Los Angeles

2020 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 127-146
Author(s):  
KRISTINA F. NIELSEN
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Cultural Frameworks ◽  
Music Research ◽  
Siglo Xx

Abstract (Spanish/English)Forjando el Aztecanismo: Nacionalismo Musical Mexicano del Siglo XX en el siglo XXI en Los ÁngelesHoy en día, un creciente número de músicos mexico-americanos en los Estados Unidos tocan instrumentos indígenas mesoamericanos y réplicas arqueológicas, lo que se conoce como “Música Azteca.” En este artículo, doy a conocer cómo los músicos contemporáneos de Los Ángeles, California, recurren a los legados de la investigación musical nacionalista mexicana e integran modelos antropológicos y arqueológicos aplicados. Al combinar el trabajo de campo etnográfico con el análisis histórico, sugiero que los marcos musicales y culturales que alguna vez sirvieron para unir al México pos-revolucionario han adquirido una nuevo significado para contrarrestar la desaparición del legado indígena mexicano en los Estados Unidos.Today a growing number of Mexican-American musicians in the United States perform on Indigenous Mesoamerican instruments and archaeological replicas in what is widely referred to as “Aztec music.” In this article, I explore how contemporary musicians in Los Angeles, California, draw on legacies of Mexican nationalist music research and integrate applied anthropological and archeological models. Pairing ethnographic fieldwork with historical analysis, I suggest that musical and cultural frameworks that once served to unite post-revolutionary Mexico have gained new significance in countering Mexican Indigenous erasure in the United States.

Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism

1991 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-23
Author(s):  
Roger Rouse
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Social Space ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mexican Migration ◽  
Single Word ◽  
The Social ◽  
Made In

In a hidden sweatshop in downtown Los Angeles, Asian and Latino migrants produce automobile parts for a factory in Detroit. As the parts leave the production line, they are stamped “Made in Brazil.” In a small village in the heart of Mexico, a young woman at her father’s wake wears a black T-shirt sent to her by a brother in the United States. The shirt bears a legend that some of the mourners understand but she does not. It reads, “Let’s Have Fun Tonight!” And on the Tijuana-San Diego border, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a writer originally from Mexico City, reflects on the time he has spent in what he calls “the gap between two worlds”: “Today, eight years after my departure, when they ask me for my nationality or ethnic identity, I cannot answer with a single word, for my ‘identity’ now possesses multiple repertoires: I am Mexican but I am also Chicano and Latin American. On the border they call me ‘chilango’ or ‘mexiquillo’; in the capital, ‘pocho’ or ‘norteno,’ and in Spain ‘sudaca.’… My companion Emily is Anglo-Italian but she speaks Spanish with an Argentinian accent. Together we wander through the ruined Babel that is our American postmodemity.”

Times, Tempos, and the Rhythm of Fast Fashion in Los Angeles and Seoul

2019 ◽  
pp. 269-282
Author(s):  
Christina H. Moon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
The United States ◽  
Material Object ◽  
Immigrant Communities ◽  
Fashion Industry ◽  
Korean Immigrant ◽  
Fast Fashion ◽  
Downtown Los Angeles ◽  
The City

Fast fashion is often a story about the most powerful global retail giants such as Zara and H&M. The rise and dominance of fast fashion within the United States, however, areintimately tied to the work of Korean immigrant communities within downtown Los Angeles. In the last decade alone, Koreans have refashioned the city of Los Angeles into the central hub of fast fashion in the Americas, designing and distributing clothing from Asia to the largest fast-fashion retailers throughout the Americas. This chapter explores the work of these fast-fashion families who blur the lines between design and copy, author and imitator, exploiter and exploited. How do their modes of work profoundly transform the material object of clothing? How do they complicate the assumed directions and global flows of design and production in the global fashion industry? And finally, what role does risk and failure play—in a landscape of creativity, aspiration, and imagining—to make fast fashion even a possibility?

The Virgin of Guadalupe as an Iconic Image in Mexican Culture

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlene Villaseñor Black
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mexican American Women ◽  
Virgin Of Guadalupe ◽  
Peace And Justice ◽  
Iconic Image ◽  
Religious Devotion ◽  
The Hill

According to believers, the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared in 1531 to recent indigenous convert Juan Diego on the hill of Tepeyac, north of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, an area in the environs of Mexico City. The series of apparitions culminated with the miraculous appearance of her image imprinted on his native cloak, or tilma. This painting, housed in the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the Villa de Guadalupe in northern Mexico City, has been venerated from the 16th century. The Virgin of Guadalupe is considered the patroness of Mexico, and special protector of its native and mestizo populations. She is perhaps the best-known symbol of Mexico, and her image is very common in the fine and popular arts. She has played a number of roles over the centuries—as object of religious devotion, emblem of national pride, symbol of peace and justice, and feminist icon. Similarly, her image has transformed over time, from the original sacred icon of 1531 to controversial contemporary images from the 1970s. Her image is also frequent in the United States, where 20th- and 21st century Chicana/o (Mexican American) artists represent her in community murals, prints, photographs, sculptures, and paintings. Chicana (Mexican American) women artists have transformed her into a feminist icon, generating controversy and provoking censorship in both the United States and Mexico. Held sacred by many Mexican, Chicana/o, and Latina/o Catholics, the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe has never been neutral, but instead, represents the mutability and political potential of Catholic sacred imagery.

scholarly journals Learning the City

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 100-109
Author(s):  
Jonathan Banfill ◽  
Angélica Becerra ◽  
Jeannette Mundy
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Public Universities ◽  
Community Organizations ◽  
Near Future ◽  
The City

What role should California’s public universities play in addressing borders—transnational, as well as those among and within cities? This essay highlights the need to develop tools that will enable alternative way to produce knowledge—one that aims to co-create with community organizations by combining scholarly, artistic, and activist practices with one another. These images provide glimpses from a near future that has begun to dismantle the barriers within and between Los Angeles and Mexico City, building bridges instead of walls.

Affective Bicultural and Global-Human Identity Scales for Mexican-American Adolescents

1997 ◽  
Vol 80 (3) ◽  
pp. 1027-1039 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aghop Der-Karabetian ◽  
Yolanda Ruiz
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Self Esteem ◽  
Human Identity ◽  
Latino Identity ◽  
Academic Aspiration ◽  
Latino American ◽  
First And Second Generation ◽  
Mexican American Adolescents

Scales were developed to measure affective aspects of Latino, American, and global-human identities among first- and second-generation Mexican-American adolescents. Participants were 84 boys and 93 girls from the Los Angeles high schools. 60 were born in Mexico, and 117 were born in the United States and had at least one parent born in Mexico. The affective Latino and American measures were independent and predictably related to a behaviorally oriented measure of acculturation. They were also used to identify Berry's four modes of acculturation: Separated, Assimilated, Marginalized, and Bicultural. The four acculturation groups rated similarly on self-esteem and academic aspiration. The first and second generations each scored higher on Latino identity than on American identity.

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