Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage

Acknowledgments

ix The book that you are now holding is heavily marked by my alternating moments of attachment—from grappling with ideas to learning to reconfigure them—and of detachment, of learning to let go. This dual process, at times simultaneous, which has been going on for the last ten years, more or less the time that has transpired since the original “seed” was first planted, has been far from solitary. Different people have been involved, at varying levels and at different points in the time line of this project’s prepublication existence, and I want to acknowledge them. To say that Performing Mexicanidad would not have been possible without the support from the Chicana Matters Series editors, Deena González and Antonia Castañeda, is an understatement. I am grateful for their kind and encouraging words. I would particularly like to thank Theresa May at the University of Texas Press for her encouragement , support, and patience. Theresa’s production team was wonderful to work with, most especially Lynne F. Chapman. I also thank the anonymous reader for the very valuable and constructive feedback I received. Performing Mexicanidad first masqueraded as a doctoral dissertation I wrote under the direction of Rubén Medina at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I use the word “masqueraded” because only a few ideas—and one chapter from that project—are part of this book. But my word choice is not meant to signal that this book is the authentic “face” behind the mask; it is, at best, a phase in my critical ACKNOWLEDGMENTS x thinking regarding the simultaneity of invisibility and hypervisibility of female sexuality in Mexican and Chicana cultural practices. From those formative years at Wisconsin, I am grateful to Rubén for not saying “no” when I first approached him with a dissertation topic that was, at least for a department of Spanish and Portuguese at that moment, unconventional. Other people at the UW who were equally important then, when I was barely breaking the ground for my intellectual path, are: Jill S. Kuhnheim, Severino Albuquerque, and Alda Blanco, who imparted their wisdom and particularly their comprehension of “difference,” an important word in the 1990s both inside and outside the classroom. From those years there is a special place in my memory for Dionne Espinoza, who was (and still is) a compa ñera to be cherished and admired for her commitment to social justice issues, particularly feminismo. My friends during graduate school nourished me (mentally and materially) in crucial ways; they knew how to combine conversation with material sustenance. For their unconditional friendship I will be eternally grateful to: Rino Avellaneda, Steven Butterman, Svetlana Karpe, Lisa Petrov, and Mary Wu. But it is Verónica C. Dantán, who, beyond others, marks my years in Madison. I cannot begin to thank her enough for the love, the friendship, the laughter, and the moments of shared learning that would take us from the erudite to the banal. My colleagues at the University of Iowa deserve a special place in these acknowledgments because they were my first cheerleaders as I made it down the ternura track. (Ternura is my dear friend Susana Chávez-Silverman’s faux translation for “tenure.”) They believed in my work and my merits as a young scholar from day one, and for that I will always be thankful: Maria José Barbosa, Amber Brian, Maria Duarte , Denise Filios, Patrick Garlinger, Brian Gollnick, Judith LiskinGasparro , Mercedes Niño-Murcia, and Eileen Willingham. But three people at Iowa have, each in their particular and specific ways, left a huge imprint in my head/heart combo of an organ: Daniel Balderston, Claire Fox, and Kathleen Newman. Lastly, I especially want to thank for their feedback Denise and Eileen, who, while I was still at Iowa, read an early draft of one of this book’s chapters. While a faculty member at the University of Iowa I began to attend the encuentros sponsored by the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics under the direction of Diana Taylor. I am grateful to Diana for her vision and to any other faculty members and staff associated with the institute, for having given me the opportunity to attend these gatherings, as they have helped shape the contours of this book. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi Prior to my appointment to the faculty at the University of Arizona , I packed my bags and moved to Tucson because the...