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Reviewed by:
  • The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory
  • Anthony Macías
The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory. By Catherine S. Ramírez. Durham: Duke University Press. 2009.

This unique, important book comes out swinging and packs a punch. In pithy prose Ramírez reassesses pachucas—everyday, working-class female zoot suiters, and la pachuca—iconographic, symbolic figure. Both "pachucas as agents and la pachuca as icon," (xiv) she argues, were "silenced" and "rendered invisible by Chicano cultural nationalism." (12) Using gender as a category of analysis from start to finish, she convincingly shows how "the conflation of the ideal Chicano subject with the male Chicano body erases Chicanas." (13) Ramírez places pachucas at the center of history, reversing the accusatory tropes of vendida ("sell-out") and malinche ("traitor"), and skillfully answering her own question, "who has betrayed whom?" (21). The book is thus a critical "intervention" presenting "alternative interpretations." (xviii) and a self-confident, "self-conscious recovery project" (xv) that reinserts Chicanas into the historical record, particularly regarding the wartime Los Angeles Sleepy Lagoon incident and zoot suit riots, and Chicano expressive culture.

Her main arguments are that pachucas have been mostly invisible in twentieth-century Chicano history, and that la pachuca has much to teach us about both U.S. nationalism and Chicano cultural nationalism, Americanism, full or first-class "citizenship, and resistant cultural, gender, and sexual identities and their contradictions." (xv) Structurally, the book's "dual perspective" encompasses the World War II and Chicano Movement eras, statist and insurgent nationalisms, thereby allowing her to "use one nationalism to relativize and shed light on another." (xvi) To substantiate her arguments, Ramírez draws from numerous sources, including archival special collections and personal papers, oral history interviews, periodicals and newspapers, poems, plays, films, short stories, novels, paintings, photographs, corridos (ballads), etiquette guidebooks, patriotic propaganda posters, trial court testimony transcripts, and Lowrider magazine cartoon strips and advertisements.

Engaging with feminist and queer studies, Ramírez analyzes bourgeois conventions of proper domesticity and respectability, the performance of oppositional masculinity and "dissident femininity," (110) the blurring of public and private spheres, and the politicized "heteropatriarchal" familia of Chicano power ideology. (113) Her fresh rereadings of the [End Page 224] secondary literature contribute to conversations in American studies, ethnic studies, and cultural studies, especially work on visual culture, hipness and coolness, and spectacular subcultures marked by conspicuous consumption "and conspicuous occupation of public space." (23) Some critics may question the notion of "style politics" or "style as resistance," (56-57, 84-85) but Ramírez persuasively provides ample examples, ultimately proving the power of culture "not only to reflect but to produce history, narrative, and meaning." (xv)

After a preface, an introduction, and four research chapters, an epilogue links the participation of U.S. Latina soldiers in the war on terror to her larger rumination on nationalism, violence, homegirls, and the home front. In the end, Catherine Ramírez's informative, illuminating book responds respectfully to one of the Chicana historical actors she quotes, who said, "We have not been able to have our side of the story told." (44) With an ear for language and an eye for fashion, the author validates the legacy of once vilified women who shook up the status quo with panache, impudence, insolence, insouciance, and insubordination.

Anthony Macías
University of California Riverside
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