Latino/a Popular Culture

Book excerpt: "With stunning, eloquent, and insightful essays Latino/a Popular Culture offers the best guide to the cultural production of the largest group of people of color in the United States. The essays broaden both our knowledge of Latino/a cultural production and challenge the traditional paradigms of cultural and ethnic studies doing so through accessible, historically informed approaches." -Mary Pat Brady, Cornell University "Latino/a Popular Culture greatly contributes to the genres of both cultural studies and Latino studies. The editors exhort undergraduate and graduate students to continue looking at Latino/a popular coluture as "as site of invention, critique and pleasure" (p.16) since much work still needs to be done in this area." -Harvard Educational Review "The book provides an insight into the current struggles that Latinos who live in the norhern hemisphere face." -MELUS Latinos have become the largest ethnic minority group in the United States. While the presence of Latinos and Latinas in mainstream news and in popular culture in the United States buttresses the much-heralded Latin Explosion, the images themselves are often contradictory. In Latino/a Popular Culture, Habell-Pall n and Romero have brought together scholars from the humanities and social sciences to analyze representations of Latinidad in a diversity of genres - media, culture, music, film, theatre, art, and sports - that are emerging across the nation in relation to Chicanas, Chicanos, mestizos, Puerto Ricans, Caribbeans, Central Americans and South Americans, and Latinos in Canada. Contributors include Adrian Burgos, Jr., Luz Calvo, Arlene D vila, Melissa A. Fitch, Michelle Habell-Pall n, Tanya Kater Hern ndez, Josh Kun, Frances Negron-Muntaner, William A. Nericcio, Raquel Z. Rivera, Ana Patricia Rodrguez, Gregory Rodriguez, Mary Romero, Alberto Sandoval-S nchez, Christopher A. Shinn, Deborah R. Vargas, and Juan Velasco. Cover artwork "Layering the Decades" by Diane Gamboa, 2002, mixed media on paper, 11 X 8.5". Copyright 2001, Diane Gamboa. Printed with permission. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Michelle Habell-Pall n is Assistant Professor in American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington. Mary Romero is Professor of Justice Studies at Arizona University and a Carnegie Scholar with the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Her books include Challenging Fronteras: Structuring Latina and Latino Lives in the U.S..