Gender and Sexuality in Las Americas

Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture & Chicana/O Sexualities. Edited by Alicia Gaspar de Alba. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Pp. 322. $60.00 cloth, $26.95 paper.)

Hotel Ritz—Comparing Mexican And U.S. Street Prostitutes: Factors In HIV/AIDS Transmission. By David J. Bellis. (New York: The Haworth Press, 2003. Pp. 128. $24.95 cloth, $17.95 paper.)

Cuerpo y Sexualidad. Edited by Francisco Vidal and Carla Donoso. (Santiago, Chile: FLACSO-Chile, Universidad ARCIS, and VIVO POSITIVO, 2002. Pp. 203.)

In every region of Las Americas, intellectual inquiry is giving birth to fascinating and informative research in gender and sexuality studies across disciplines. During the first lustro of the new century, women and men of Latin American origin decipher from popular culture representations and icons of their gendered and sex lives to the everyday life experiences shaping their sexualized bodies and social realities. In this intellectual collage, the contributors inform and expand on the state of the art in sexuality research by visiting three geographical locations: cultural communities of Mexican origin in the United States, Mexico, and Chile.

Alicia Gaspar de Alba's Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture & Chicana/o Sexualities offers an incisive collection of essays about the ways in which relevant icons of Mexican and Mexican American culture have served as the origin and vehicle of multiple expressions of gender and sexuality. This anthology de-marginalizes and places popular culture of Mexican origin at the center of these examinations. The contributors study culture, gender, and sexuality not from the outside or from the top down but from within and as a respectful, critical, and sensitive examination of la cultura. In this anthology, icons are examined as they vanish but also as they are culturally examined and reinvented; at times icons remain intact. The book has five major themes that organize these contributions.

"A Barrio Altar: Heroes & Icons" offers three complex interpretations of gender and sexuality by examining some of their traditional cultural representations. First, both the permanence and the interruption of expressions of femininity of Mexican and Mexican American folklore are examined through Ana Castillo's writings: locas, curanderas, lloronas, malinches, and las vírgenes. While these are icons, they are also reflected in multiple ways in the everyday lives of the characters, whose nuanced expressions of femininity, sexuality, sexual morality, and religion intertwine. Second, a beautifully written, culturally insightful, and humanizing historical and literary examination looks at what has become one of the most misunderstood and marginalized expressions of Chicano masculinity: Pachuco identities. This contribution enhances our understanding of the struggle for search of manhood from the socioeconomic margins and racial segregation haunting men of Mexican origin living in the most disenfranchised sectors of U.S. society. And third, an examination of indigenous and Chicana/o sexualities emerges from a creative theoretical framework. The four cardinal points east, north, west, and south serve as the orientation to examine the sexualities, femininities, and masculinities of indigenous groups and Chicanos and of sexually marginalized groups traditionally ignored in the literature: gay indígenas. In this harmonious theoretical framework, we learn about the intricacies of sexuality and gender within contexts of Catholic hegemonic beliefs, colonization, occupation, cultural genocide, racism, and post–9-11 terrorism. Here the concept of "social Malinche" identifies the activist who is an intellectual and the intellectual who is an activist. "Esta gente en lucha permanente" identifies the indigenous or Chicana/o who strives for community-based and activist self-determination and empowerment, equilibrium, intellectual creativity, self-discovery, affirmation, and dignity, equal human rights, and respect for Chicano and indigenous communities.

"Mythic Barrios, Cultural Myths" offers four intellectual possibilities to demystify cultural expressions of a so-called mexicanidad or cultura mexicana. First, an in-depth critical analysis of a trio of autobiographical performances engages in the difficult job of dissecting the ways in which an "authentic" Mexico has been selectively reproduced but also contested. Here we learn how...