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Journal of American Folklore 117.464 (2004) 234-235



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Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change. Edited by Norma E. Cantú and Olga Nájera-Ramírez. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Pp. x + 269, bibliographies, photographs, index.)

Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change is the first book devoted exclusively to studies of Chicana folklore written by Chicana scholars. Most of the thirteen articles found here draw on feminist theory and recent Chicana/o cultural theory, examining genres as diverse as visual arts, music, rituals, beliefs, games, legends, and festivals. The authors come from fields as varied as their subject matter: literature, cultural studies, ethnomusicology, anthropology, education, sociology, and museum studies are all represented.

Editors Norma E. Cantú and Olga Nájera-Ramírez have divided the studies into three sections reflecting different levels of maintenance and change within the traditions discussed: enduring traditions, practicing traditions, and transforming traditions. The five essays that make up "Enduring Traditions" examine longstanding practices: quinceañera rituals, santos-carving, indita songs, traditional children's songs and games, and the legend of La Llorona. [End Page 234] Despite the emphasis on historical continuity, some of the most interesting pieces here look at how women have adapted traditions to fit modern life. Cantú describes the recently created cincuentañera, a new rite of passage created by fifty-year-old women using elements of the traditional quinceañera, a fifteen-year-old girls' coming-of-age party. Helen R. Lucero surveys the work of female artists who create retablos (painted wood panels) and santos (saints), both of which are typically produced by men. Domino Renee Pérez offers traditional and contemporary versions of La Llorona, asserting that modern-day Chicanas are reinterpreting the story to make her "a representation of female resistance within a wholly oppressive environment" and to "address [the] new struggles" women face in contemporary urban life (p. 110).

Part 2, "Practicing Traditions," consists of intimate portraits of three extraordinary women and their individual expressions of Chicana folklore. Yolanda Broyles-González's account of her Yaqui grandmother's philosophy and practice of an "Indianized" Catholicism is singularly moving. Cynthia L. Vidaurri's look at the women of the Fidencistas, a folk religious movement based on the life and work of "El Niño Fidencio" (a curandero in early twentieth-century Nuevo León), examines ways in which Chicana healers have challenged male authority in non-radical, "culturally appropriate" ways (p. 141). Leonor Xóchitl Pérez provides a very personal account of the trials faced by women who wish to be mariachis and the empowering possibilities offered by participation in this traditionally masculine musical genre.

The final section of the book, "Transforming Traditions," is devoted to analyses of ways in which women have altered and transcended traditional Mexicano/Chicano culture, often inventing new forms of expression along the way. Broyles-González contributes a piece on Lydia Mendoza's ranchera songs, examining her unique contributions to the genre and to the Chicano community as a whole as she "deterritorialized 'Mexicanness'" (p. 198) and created a diasporic community through the "powerful mythic space" of el rancho (p. 188). This author so excels at describing the nonverbal that one hopes she will someday tackle other long-neglected genres such as dance. An informative study by Nájera-Ramírez on the newly created women's equestrian tradition, la escaramuza charra, provides a fascinating discussion of how some women have succeeded, with difficulty, in overcoming gender-prescribed boundaries by using the "cultural logic" (p. 220) of the tradition against itself. Deborah Vargas examines the politics of musical crossover through the career of Tejana singer Selena, convincingly arguing that the very concept of "crossover," which implies a linear progression toward North American "success," is problematic for the description of Selena's "crossover" into the Latin American market from her regional Tejano base. The collection concludes with Tey Marianna Nunn's description of the work of Albuquerque artist Goldie Garcia and her use of rasquache, a flashy and uniquely Chicana/o aesthetic based on pastiche.

Although a few of the essays here would...

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