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The Latin Americanist, September 2015 this area. Rather, she focuses on the agency of Venezuelans in producing spectacularity to negotiate power and project their idea of themselves on to a public. The epilogue offers an interesting discussion of the politics of beauty in the context of the extremely polarized politics of Chavez’s presidency, arguing that the struggle of modernity is just as present in discourses of beauty as in democracy and revolution. Queen for a Day is groundbreaking in its consideration of transgender and hegemonic bodies within the same analytic framework, and it offers new ways of understanding performativity, spectacle, gender and power. It has clear implications on many fields due to Ochoa’s thorough engagement with scholarship on coloniality, modernity, race, beauty, performativity, spectacle, gender, corporeality, materiality, transgender studies, and queer diasporic studies. At times, the monograph’s terms and theory can be a bit overwhelming, yet the richness of the interviews and Ochoa’s vivid, descriptive writing style balance out this heavily theoretical work. The monograph’s discussion of transformistas is of particular interest to transgender studies. Transsexuals change their bodies according to the gender identity in their minds, yet Ochoa shows how transformistas use technologies of beauty to enable the emergence of gender that is already in their bodies. Ochoa successfully pushes the “frivolous” worlds of beauty and bodily transformation into the realm of the political. Indeed, she argues that frivolity’s discursive separation from “serious” politics allows it to become a space of possibility for people who are excluded from the political imaginary. Ochoa’s work is an important step in decolonizing Venezuelan bodies and nation. Carson Morris Department of History University of New Mexico MAYAN TALES FROM CHIAPAS, MEXICO. By Robert M. Laughlin. Trans. Socorro Gómez Hernández and Juan Benito de la Torre . Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014, p. 265, $75.00. I would like to begin this review by saying that Robert Laughlin’s considerable oeuvre stands as one of the major accomplishments in the field of Maya Literatures. For those unfamiliar with his work, it must be stated that Laughlin’s recording and dissemination of Zinacantán’s oral literature have gone hand-in-hand with his commitment to the development of that community’s Maya language, Tzotzil. For example, beyond the publication of bilingual and trilingual literary texts Laughlin has worked on dictionaries such as The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of San Lorenzo Zinacantán (1975), a work that, in the foreword to the present volume, Gary Gossen refers to as “the most comprehensive dictionary of a Native American 94 Book Reviews language to appear since this sixteenth century” (ix). In addition, he has collaborated with Maya writers and intellectuals in the formation of Monkey Business Theatre, a Tzotzil- and Tzeltal-language theater troupe, as well as the Maya literary cooperative, Sna Jtz’ibajom (The House of the Writer). Arising out of Laughlin’s well-established trajectory of academic activism, the trilingual English-Spanish-Tzotzil Mayan Tales from Chiapas, Mexico is an excellent addition to the author’s overall work. While many readers may at first gloss balk at a volume that contains stories already collected in works like Laughlin’s own Of Cabbages and Kings: Tales from Zinacantán (1977) and Gossen’s Four Creations: An Epic Story of the Chiapas Mayas (2002), I would argue that the intertextual relationship between the present work and its “predecessors” seeks to reorient non-indigenous readers towards a new understanding of indigenous oral literatures. As noted in Gossen’s forward, the works “consist[s] of forty-two texts by a single elderly female narrator, Francisca Hernández Hernández (doña Pancha), all of them elicited from her by Laughlin in a kind of running Tzoztil conversation . . . not unlike the way stories are told in traditional Native settings” (ix). In other words, the volume offers a collection of tales told by a specific narrator, a move that highlights the particularity of the stories recounted in the text while illuminating the fact that versions of these tales, collected elsewhere, are no less shaped by the specificity of their own narrators. As one reads Mayan Tales one slowly comes to appreciate how...

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