4/24/2023

Most significant ethnic Mexican musical/poetic form

- El corrido
What defines el corrido- musical and literary
Intercultural conflict
Emerge from Spanish romance during colonial era
- By Mexican era/ 19th century it is a new genre, romance corrido
- Later: corrido
Narrative ballad with epic themes
- Violence (military battles; accidents)
- Commemoration (individuals; places)
- Rivalries (profession; other)

4/19/2023
Social Dances
All about participation
Can be virtuosic and competitive, but participation is most important
Partner dancing is most prevalent but collective dancing is also common
Reflect social values too, especially gendered values in partner dances
19th century: victorian values in dancing meaning little if any touching
Early 20th C: by this time, touching between
Son as super-genre; multiple regional variations
Major traditions in mexico
- Son jalisciense: Jalisccco and neighboring regions; ensemble: mariachi
- Son huasteco: Huastec mountains and neighboring regions ensemble: trio huasteco
- Son jarocho: southern Veracruz and neighboring regions; ensemble: no particular name
Many other regional son traditions
Social Bases of Mexican Son
● Largely mesgixo or multi-racial traditions
- Some more African than others
- Some more indigenous than others
● Regional traditions reflect the ethnoracial history of respective region in Mexico
● Distinct from European forms/ salon dances:
Critical elements of tradion/ Practice
● Social dance context: fandango
● rhythym / sesquialtera- 3:2
- Alternating or synthesized
● Melody and harmony is western-based
● Instrumental/predominance of strings
 - Regionally based guitar- like instruments unique to Mexico
- Some incorporation of European instruments
● Dance style: zapateado
In the USA
● How do we understand these traditions are practiced in the US?
● Cultural continuity
- Practicies carried across thye border, be it by communities of immigration
(families and musicians)
● Cutlturl discovery
- Second generation ethnic mexicans exploring mexican cultural practices and
beginning
● New tradiciones
- US-based performance forms new nodes in the world of these music traditions
- Musical change: new influences and adaptations
- Social change: new contexts and participants

4/12/2023
Chicano Park
Community takeover of land- april 1970
- Chicano park samba- los alacranes Mojados
Community disenfranchisement
- Subordinate experience within city
- Freeway and bridge expansion and the barrio
- Junkyard industry rezoning and environmental racism
Murals: Art and public space
- Chicano movement era: political themes
- Art and ownership it belonged to the community
Mexican muralism post revolutionary mexico
- Nationalist wave of artistic activity
- Los tres grandes among others
- Diego rivera, david alfaro siquerios, jose clemente orozco
- 1920s-1950s- period of work
Social realism
Focus on real life conditions of working classes as critique of institutional and power structures
creating those conditions
Muralism of the chicano movement
Probably the most recognized of chicana visual art
Directly inlfluenced by los tres grandes and their use of revolutionary themes and social realism
- One distinction: LTG: government supported
- Chicano muralism more spontaneous
Varrio Si, Yonkes No
1. Colors of mexican flag, factories and a bridge; protesters; police prominent statement of
title
2. Factories and pollution: industry zoned in barrio; bridge; coronado bridge that split the
barrio; community in resistance( historical and present day) flag colors: cultural
sentiment/unity
3. Rather than just culturally empowering images, history

4/10/2023
Visual art and cultural experience
- Representation and expression
Selected genres
- Religious folk art
● Santera tradition
- Political art
● Poster genre
- Performance art
● ASCO
Explore Further
Chicana Art Appreciation
What are we looking for when viewing or thinking about chicanx art?
- story/ narrative
● How does this piece/genre/artist speak to the experience of ethnic mexicans in the
US
- Style
● Through colors, line/shape, attitude/personailty, how does the artist express a
chicana sensibility
- Social context
● Related to story/ narrative, how do artists position their work in a social and
political context: a critique of mainstream/ valorization of community
Genres of chicano visual art
wide , wide, wide, world
 - Cannot talk about all of it here; some things we dont talk about
Lowriders
- Customized cars and bicycles as visual art
- paintjobs / art/ murals
Fine Art
- Long history of established gallery art
Religious Folk Art
Local expression of religiosity
- Related to folk catholicism in this sense
Most priment in older colonial settlements
- New mexico and texas
- Frontier/ isolated
Santo tradition
- Folk-based religious imagery
- Wood-based: carved (bulto) or painted (retablo)
Contemporary commercialization
Political Art: Posters
Carlos Cortez: poster art
Literal Genre
- message/ Campaign/ Propaganda
- Poster genre
Much of Chicanx art is political
Performance art
Stations of the cross ASCO 1971

4/5/2023
Food and gendered division of labor
Division of labor in conventional male-female household
Class implications
- Two-income households: a typical household may exhibit inside-women/outside-men
household labor dichotomy
- Women having kitchen tasks and the generational transmission of knowledge among
women includes food culture
Male privilege within food culture
Men and outdoor cooking
Division of labor in conventional male-female household
Class implications: working poor
Social Distinction and hierarchy in food consumption
Food we eat and how we eat as markers of class status
Limon and the carne asad
Ethnic Mexican grilling and carne
Low-value meat: skirt cut vs. prime cut
Art of making it delicious
Common feature of marginalized communities and their diet

The Bronze Screen

59:35 greg nava A lot of stereotypes come from guilt to justify something that people know is
unfair or unjust→ want to compensate for it
1:00:21 if you play a bandito people will think you are a bandito in real life, won’t be a star if
you play villains
Cheech and Chings up in smoke was a money-making machine that was a part of the hit-making
part of the industry– made a lot of films or money but never was considered part of the industry
Rita morena- if we only had the chance to show you more of us you would come to love us and
ask for more of us
1:18Type casting even at six esai morales
3/27/2023
Stereotypes and Representation
Latinos Beyond Reel- comments
Persistence
Impact
Power
Stereotypes are bad and not a new phenomena
Hollywood shuffle
Why do stereotypes persist?
Stereotypes= always bad?
Human social trait
However, can express other social relationships that reveal inequities
Over-simplification/ Exaggeration
Racial/ cultural groups: can be wildly inaccurate and ethnocentric
Power relations/ Axes of differentiation
race/ethnicity/ gender/ class/ sexuality
Othering-antithesis of Self– eurocentric way of thinking
Inversion of values
 Repressed desires
Hegemony-power that exists in ether
Apparatus of control/ ethnocentrism and norms

3/22/2023
As ethnic mexicans, indegenous heritage and culture part of broader culture
Varying expressions
Part of family/community relationship to established indigenous nations
Mexico or US
Part of socio-cultural response to the
Aztlan
Aztec origin story as symbolic Chicana homeland
- Chicana Movement era idea; mostly equated with chicano cultural nationalism
- Mexican-American War and Paradigmatic sub
Broader issues of movement indigeneity
- Feminist critique of solely masculine representations of indigenous heritage:
Quetzalcoatl/ Huitzilopotchli
- Counter Images: Coatlique/ Tonantzin/ Coyolxauhqui
Meaning in post-movement eras
- Chicana relation to American Indian nations
- Land Grants and Settler Colonialism
Mitotes
Practice of colonial period to maintain indigenous culture and spirituality
Lively expression of movement, song, conviviality
- Community building, cultural maintenance
Often took place outside of the surveillance of colonial administration
- Due to repercussions
- When witnessed, there were complaints by admin
Danza de indios
Spiritual and ceremonial dance practice related to mexican indigeneity
While “Aztec” centered, may include “pan-Indian” ethos
Danza de Concheros
Danza de Concheros- traditional Indo-Catholic
Danza Azteca- 20th century revision of indo-cristiano practice
Danza Mexika- decolonizing practice of danza, (no Catholicism); idealized?
Danza was part of being mexican– even Marianne was not a dancer her family was not dancers
but it was part of everyday life– Magic- not people just dance- came to us and saw them as
people
 - Paradise thing
- Chicano yes but also indian- mexican to chicano to indian
- Culture, fitness, art , sewing- unifying force of many aspects of culture
- Danza azteca survived beause of the poor barrio people
- Poor people hold on to the culture

Class 3/20/2023
Religious syncretism
Folk Catolismo
- In the Americas
- Ethnic Mexicans
● Folk Saints
Spirituality in Ethnic Mexican Life
Reflection of social and cultural history
- Colonial residue
- Mexican mestiza cultura
- Other influences
Practices can also be a reflection of social marginalization
- Catholic Church as a representation of power and status
- Some practices challenge this logic
Religious Syncretism
Process by which two disparate religious traditions combine
- Become a new, or third, practice
- One tradition incorporates practices of the other
Seen across the globe and history
- christianity , islam, and other religious traditions
Proximity and cultural blending
Consequence of colonialism and empire
Folk Catholicism
“Official” and “unofficial” religious prectices
Religious of regional or ethnic identity
- See throughout western hemisphere/ americas
Some are “new” syncretic religions
- Condomble (brazil)/ Santeria (cuba)/ Vodou (Haiti)
Others consider selves Catholics, but…
- Some aspect of their spiritual practice is outside of official Roman dogma or practice
(minor or major)
- Roman church opposes most folk practices
Ethnic Mexican Folk Catholismo
Distinction between
 - folk / ethnic practice of Roman Catholicism
● Syncretic practice of Roman Catolismo
● Emerges from below
- Inclusion of ethnic Mexican folk cutural elemenst in Roman Catholicism
● Mariachi Mass
● “Offical” / Vatican II / opening of the church to vernacular traditions of langauge
and culture
Folk/ Local Veneration
Points of similarity/ continuity
- Example of how syncretic process takes place
Roman Catholic Pantheon of Saints
- Similarities with other religious practices veneration of multiple deities
- TRansition smoothed by similarities/continuities
La Virgen de Guadalupe/ ‘official”
- Apparition of Virgin Mary to indegenous person in colonial Mexico
- Details of apparition story suggest it may be instead veneration of indigenous, Tonantzin
● Early example of syncretism
Colonialism and Religion
Local indegenous religious pracrtices certainly affected by colonial encounter
- Spanish stamped out indigenous spirituality as “paganism”: practices and temples
Subversion/ Survival/ Resistance
- Syncrentic practices were/ are sometimes to maintain spiritual practices under the cover
of accepting colonial relgious imposition
Folk Catolismo
- Open practice
- Sometimes tolerated by local Church
Ethnic Mexican Folk Saints
- Jesus Malverde
- Teresa Urrea/ Santa Teresa de Cabora
- Don Pedro Jaramillo
- El Nino Fidencio
- La Santa Muerte

Chicana Latina Dyad- Alicia Gaspar de Alba

We have grown to assume that Chicanas are another type of Latinas, but
since the shoe does not fit on the other foot, the term Latina becomes, in effect, what Aparicio
calls 'a hegemonic construction from above.'
When we claim an identity, what we are doing is declaring that we are the same as others who go
by the same label– culturally, politically, linguistically, and historically

When we claim sameness with a particular label–latina we also claim difference– chicana

Respective differences align within each one’s identity wheel rather than subsuming one under
the other– chicana under latina– pull them apart and seeing how they work together

Icons are 3d, man made objects or 2d images of those objects, both of which symbolize a
culture’s most widely accepted beliefs and values

Heroes are common folk who rise to fame and power and their significance is both that they
possess unique talents and that they remain one with la plebe

the Chicano/Mexicano cultural value of familia, at the expense of education and individual
success, was the guiding principle of Selena's image.

Selena as a cultural icon was, indeed, man-made, first by her father and then by the
male-dominant industries that are now raking in the profits of the Selena phenomenon

Alter native culture- a culture that is different from but native to landbase now known as the
American West and Southwest

Perhaps the only problem I have with the obfuscation of the terms Chicana and Latina is that it
places all of us in the immigrant category; we all become border crossers into the United States,
and thus we erase the history of the conquered Mexican north, the history of Mexican nativity in
this landbase

By casting chicano pop culture as “residual”, these texts reify hegemonic discourses about
Chicanos/as as quaint, backwards foreigners, outsiders, and aliens who have come to this country
to revitalize themselves and achieve the American Dream

Nuyorican from the Bronx and a Chicana from south Texas are two forms of latinidad– given the
affinities named above and articulated in more detail by Aparicio, it would seem that the terms
are, if not interchangeable, then certainly parallel enough to fit under the same umbrella. The
trouble with affinities, however is that they are not really parallel because they are not
necessarily equal in referent value.

It has become politically correct to fit chicanas under the broader rubric of latinidad, but can
latinas fit under the chicana umbrella?
Latina cannot be chicana unless she is embodying or enacting a chicana role– J-Lo being Selena

The different between identity and performance of identity

Qualities that share but also differentiate– they are separate identities not ineterchangable
3/1/2023
Bilingualism
Often based on contextual use and learning environment; also social pressures
● Coordinate bilingualism
- Keep distinct/ identifiable
- English separate from Spanish
● Compound Bilingualism
- Blend or, mix languages
- Spanglish
Spanglish
Portmanteau of Spanish and English
- Same with englanol
Linguistically complex mix of Spanish and English
Consists of code-switching as well as
- Anglicized Spanish
- Hispanicized English: parkear
- Idioms too: llamar pa tras
Calo
Hybrid language/ youth slang
- Archaic Spanish/ Spanish gypsy: zincalo
- Hispanicized English/ Anglicized Spanish
● Spanglish before Spanglish
- Youth idioms and play
● Jazz Cool/ Pachuco Cool
● “See you later alligator, after a while crocodile”
● “Me entiendes Mendez?”/ “Que te pasa calabaza?”
Pachucas/os and the Zoot
Araisas- Arizona
borlo - dance
Califas- california
Jae- job
Jura- police
Ranfla- car lowrider
Rola- rong
Simon yeah
tacuche - suit
Tirando chancla- dancing your ass off
Trucha- watch out
Vato -guy, dude

2/26/2023
G Anzaldua- How to Tame a Wild Tongue
- Speech classes to remove accents– attack on ones form of expresion with the intent to
censor are a violation of the First Amendment– Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can
only be cut
- Hociona, repelona, chismosa, mal criada– all words that are derogatory if applied to
women– never heard applied to men
- We are robbed of our female being bu the masculine plural– language is a male discourse
- Chicano spanish- border tongue– corresponde a un modo de vivir- living language
- Chicano spanish sprang out of the chicanos need to identify themselves as a distinct
people
- Secret language
- First moved to san fan spoke in spanish which embarrassed them– why?
- Pachuco- language of rebellion
- ruca-girl, vato- guy or due, chale-no, simon- no, churro- sure, periquiar- talk,
pigionear-petting, que-gacho-how nerdy, ponte agula- watch out, la pelona- death
In Class 2/27/2023
Personal Experience of language meaning
Language in ethnic Mexican life
- Identity and social experience
Language
What is language?
Grammar, Syntax, Structure= yes
*Social contexts of language and how it is used
- As a practice
● Do you speak the same way all the time?-- no
Ethnic Mexican Language Practices
- Markers of national identity
- Assumption of language practice
- longer history in the US=predominance of English
 - less history in US= predominance of Spanish
- Not necessarily true
Markers of Class (and race)
- Working class and middle class practices
- Multi-racial families and multiple linguistic practices

2/22/2023
In Class
Masculinity and Hypermasculinity
- Macho and Machista
Limon article
- Speech/ Play/ Performance
- Chingaderas
- Folklore and resistance
- Criticism
Male Gender Identity
- Like other expressions of identity, can be complex
- Multiple or situational expressions
- Culturally and socially defined
- Fluid v binary
- Learned behavior, change is possible
Masculinity
- Set of attributes, behaviors, and roles generally associated with men and boys
Machismo
- Virtually universal tern for negative masculitniy
Negative macsulintiy
Pathological
- Male dominance/ unequal power relations among genders
- patriarchy/systems of male dominance
- Male chauvinism/ unreasonable belief in male dominance
- hypermasculinity/exaggeration of stereotypical male behaviors or roles
Expressions include
- Denigration of women
Macho
Machismo
- Has become a universal term for hypermasculinity, cross-culturally
- Considered normative with ethnic Mexican men from outside culture
Within ethnic Mexican culture: negative and positive connotations
 - Negative: hypermasculinity; MACHISTA
- positive: masculinity- MACHO: self-reliant, self-sufficient; family-oriented
- Two-sides of the same coin
Carne, Carnales, + Carnavalesque (Limon)
Limon article on ethnic Mexican men and the carne asada in South Texas
- Seeks to delegitimize opinions of elite Mexican writers as anti-working class
- Performance of speech/play within a cultural context; masculinity, language, humiliation
- Folklore of everyday activity/ folklore of resistance
Ramos and Paz
- Men of lower classes tend toward aggression and humiliation, often speaking in sexual
allusions, and are of low regard because of this
Chingaderas
- Genre of male speak
Folklore of resistance
- Chingaderas as a socially salient reference to the social position of the communities of
these men
- Critique of Ramos and Paz; literal content analysis; missed the “play of interaction
Play
Relajo
- Carrying on/ bantering/ playing
- confiaza/ trust and familiarity to play or be playful (among carneles)
- Playful nip vs the bite
Ethnic Mexican verbal art
- Folklore of intercultural conflict; a place for chingaderas?
Carne
- Low value meat/ common feature of marginalized communities and their diet
- Art of making it delicious
Limon Criticism
L cummings
- Downplayed machista, hetero- normative attitudes
- Missed opportunity to note anti-women/ anti-gay behavior
- The exclusion of women from these gatherings says something about these
gatherings and the interaction of men

2/19/2023
In class
Study of Gender
- Women but more
 - Gender is not binary– fluid
- Gender identity
- Gender expression
- Anatomical sex
- Sexual orientation and gender attraction
Womens Experiences
- Woemnadn and ethnic mexiacan communities
- Us and Mexican histories of media representation
- Gender normative roles
- Hypersexualized or mother roles
- Subservient to males
- Lived experience is a different matter
- Women as leader/labrorer/activist/ survivor
- Stories about women’s experiences critical
- Transgressive and transformative
Chicana Feminism
anti -opression
- Based on race/ sex/ gender/ class and more
- Generally opposed to hierarchical structures
- empowerment /inclusion for everybody
- chicana/o+chican@+chicanx
- against “sisterhood” of white feminism
- issues of race and class
Intersectionality
- Triple opression
- Solidarity and colation with other women and groups who faced similar historical
experiences
Comprehensive impact
- arts /literature/academia/politics/more
Select Theorectical Innovations of Chicana Feminism
- borderlands /mestiza consciousness-gloria anzaldua
- Intersectional analysis proposed within the trope of the border; embodied theory
that described processes of negotiating culturally hybrid environments and
relations/histories of power towards the creation of new possibilities and relationships
Quinceaneara and Coming of Age
Coming of age/ lifecycle events
- cultural , sometimes gendered, experiences
- biological: birth/ menstruation/ adulthood/ death
- labor: work/ promotion or graduation/ retirement
- other: religious/ marriage
Rite of Passage
Life cycle rituals
- Ceromony or practice that acknoledges or completes one stage of life experience;
necessary before the start of the next stage
Rite of passage (van Gennep)
- Ritualized behavior
- separation/ previous or former state
- liminality =/ in -between
- incorporation/ movement toward the new state
Quinceneara
- Young womans 15th birthday celebration representing emergence into adulthood
Ethnice Mexican and Latin American tradition
- Most popular in Greater Mexico
- Various practices across the Americas, including USA

Quinceneara- life cycle marker- after could wear makeup, wear heels, go to dances
- Signal fertility and responsibility
- Most traditions created to fulfill needs in communities emerge out of earlier ones
- Cincuenteanera- arrived at what was potential at 15
- Quincennera allows chicanas to performs their cultural identity outside the realm of
mainstream U.S. culture
- Prior to 1950s was a celebration for the elite, 1960s a celebration for all, 70s and 80s less
common bc of proms
- Revelatory tradition to remember life experiences
- A marker of ethnicity and functions as a coming-of-age ritual that offers the young
woman as space to perform her emergence into adulthood and to contest and shape the
expectations that the symbolic act implies
- Libro y rosario the women are initiate into a gender specific domain for prayer and
religion often seen as the domain of women
- Affrim cultural tradition and celebrate the individuals history within the context of the
group
- Cope, achieve transition
- Symbols of sacremenrs– baptism, confirmation, first communion– she and the
community are reminded of all she has achieved and of what is to come
Cutlutral space to perform emergence into adulthood
- Ceremony is the liminal place in-between
Gender-specific behavior and elements
- Gifts: dress/ shoes/ diadema
/ medalla
- Perform: dance / brinids/ last doll
Contestation of social norms and expectations
- Self-determinaton or constricting
- Negotiation

The mexican macho is a humorist that commits chingaderas– humor of the macho is an act of
revenge

2/15/2023
Systems of race and class inequality from the colonial era
Mexico: hierarchical casta system
Us: hierarchical race relations and the impact of slavery
Race constructs to maintain power and privilege of settler colonialism
Class and labor implications of racialized social systems, including American systems of labor
servitude (slavery, indentured servitude)

Romanticized view of Spanish/ Mexican history of California and Southwest by extension

- Mission life and colonial relations with indigenous
- Folklore and culture
Whitening of regional history by Anglos or for Anglo consumption
- “Old Spanish Days” and similar festivals
- Early 20C boosterism: Tourism/ land speculation/ “beatification”
- Cultural Erasure of indigenous mestizo and African histories

Becoming Hispanic
Mexican American Generation (1930s-60s)
- Organizing to remedy experiences of segregation, social obstacles due to discrimination
in schooling, employment, housing, etc.
- Not about term “Mexican American” as used today but rather political sensibilities of
assimilation and accommodation of era

Intersection

Political Generations
- Also known as “social generations”
- Defined as social cohort on the basis of shared socio-historical experience, particularly
from a young age at the point of reaching maturity
- Separate from kinship generation model
- child/parent/grandparent / etc.

Generational notion of Chicacon history

 - creation/conquered gen (1848-early 1900s)
- Migration gen (1910s-1930s)
- Mexican American gen (1930s-60s)
- Chicano Gen (1960s….)(1980s)
- later – post chicano or Latino gen (1990s-today)
- The Unique Psycho-Historical Experience of Mexican American People (Rodolfo Alvarez)

Segregation through 1950s

- Segregation- structural violence of society
- de jure segregation- by statute or law; legal to segregate/ Jim Crow
- De facto segregation- matter of fact or in practice; no legal sanction
- social construction of race
- us legal and social definitions
- whiteness as inherently anti-black
- Mexican American middle class of the period

The Lemon Grove Incident

Us Courts
- Caucasians and Whites/citizenship cases
- Takao Ozawa: white but not Caucasian
- Bhagat Singh Thind: Caucasian but not white
- American Whiteness as a subjective construction
- Mexican case
- Ricardo Rodriguez: allowed as part of class protected by treaty
- “as if” white/ not declared “white”

Faustian Pact
- Assimilation and americanization
- Efforts to integrate into Us society as WHite means hostility to oppressed groups namely
Blacks/ African americans
- Assuming status of whiteness meant also assuming the inferiority of Blacks/ African
Americans
- Embrace of Whiteness

Exceptions
Leader who did not accept notions of whiteness
- Emma tenayuca
- Claimed indigenous heritage
- Chicana generations
 - Rejected mexican americanist accommodation
- Claimed brownness and indigenous past
- Common cause with other racialized groups
- Celebrated exclusion from whiteness

2/13/2023
Intersectionality– can't analyze discrimination by separate identity ( race, class, gender) they all
intersect and feed off each other
– axes of differentiation in identity and experience
- race/class/gender/sexuality/more
- Intracultural as well as intercultural

Race and Ethnic Mexicans

3 roots Mexican racial identity
- Indigenous “biological catastrophe”
- Spanish only 200K
- African also 200K
Colonial residue: Mestizo/ Mulato
American racial system
- Black and white
- Indigenous not present/outside
- Danger of “mixing”-- miscegenation
Casta System
Mexican Whiteness
- Colonial reference to “spanish”
- casta system
- 20th century hispanicism
- spanish americans/ latin americans
- eurocentric view of New World identity
- survival/ 19th C indigenous and frontier identities

Reading Engagements
The dichotomy which exists throughout the borderlands between what is Spanish and what is
Mexican is a functional, not ornamental, arrangement– its function is to deprive the Mexicans of
their heritage and to keep them in their place
Give back to Indio-hispano citizens the heritage of racial pride which we have robbed them and
to teach Anglo-Americans to respect and honor this heritage

2/8/2023
What is popular culture?
- Influence of capital, urbanization
Culture is all pervasive
- Popular culture( latin american perspective)
- In reference to the popular classes or common people; similar to folk or folk culture
Popular culture (western)
- Artificial high/low divide and its class connotations
- Mass culture/ unrefined
- Popular culture industries
Influence of capital, urbanization, industrialization
- Popular culture industries
- tv/film/radio as media
- Mass dissemination of cultural product
- Consumption model/commercialization
- Cultural objects become commodities for profit (ads)
Some forms of contemporary pop culture are commercialized forms of folklife expressions
Mass Culture
Defined from “above”
- Representing the dominant ideology
- Imposition of values and opinions on the masses
Presupposes structural inequalities/ stratified society
- Originally class-based but can be intersectional
Urbanization and atomization of society
- Older forms of social organization less influential
Vehicle of the powerful
- Dour view of the “masses”
Cultural Populism
Defined “from below”
- People create their own meanings rather than (or in spite of) meaning being imposed
- Reception theories
- Expression of the people
Popular culture as “text”
- Liertal “words/scripts” but also images, ads, etc
- Text is “read” in the context of peoples lives
- Made relevant for their own circumstances and needs
- can be oppositional, subversive, resistance

2/6/2023
Important to him that he is texan-mexican
Polka music- german but the same they play
Narciso Martínez el huracán del valle
Lydia mendoza- living that song– feel that she is whatever song she is singing
Flaco jimenez
Folklife- popular culture– music/trauma
Reading Engagement week 5
Intro
- Why study pop culture??- it surrounds us everyday and tells us a lot about ourselves
- High culture - opera, ballet– appeal to audiences of “refined taste and highly developed
aesthetic sensibilities”
- Low culture- sporting events, soap operas– interested primarily in the qualities that will
attract a large quantity of consumers who are not well educated or aesthetically
sophisticated
- Cultura popular- folk culture
- Adorno associates mass culture with “culture industries” to distinguish it from popular
culture which he considers to be a spontaneous expression arising directly from the
masses.
- Those who control culture industries merge high and low culture art into consumable
products for the masses.-- reasily available and passed from above– no interest for
specific content or formation of individual artistic expression but rather in transforming
works into various cultural commodities such as radio programs or movies
- Cultural works only have value in relation to their potential as commodities to be foisted
on the masses, particularly the masses in the most economically developed countries
where consumers have more buying power.
- Consumer is the object rather than the subject of a process that cynically lulls us into
accepting “the master’s voice”

2/1/2023
Octavio Romano
William Madsen- bete blanche of the movimiento– mexican americans of the south west “all
chicanos point with disgust
 - Being the object of a study is not always pleasant
- Unconscious bias
- Study people who read what you write and are willing to talk back
- Anthropologists need to reexamine the argument that they can give us substantially true
pictures of a culture by following time honored methods
- Sampling techniques used for chicano groups have been molded on those used for
“simple” societies, without regard to the fact that chicanos as americans are part of the
varied fabric of modern life
- age , sex, and economic status have been the main criteria, without regard to other factors
such as factionalism and differences in political philosophy.
- Knowledge of language standard and dialectal
- Fluency in a language can be a dangerous thing
- Fluency is equivalent to readiness or smoothness of speech
- A different matter when you attempt to interpret people’s feelings and attitudes in actual
speech situations
- The interpretation of the word movida– to move– chicanos use it to mean (movida chueca
crooked maneuver)
- By not knowing the meaning of movida rubel misinterprets and draws unwarranted,
stereotyped conclusions about chicano behavior from what he thought he heated, seeing
Chicanos as passive, apolitical , and incapable of organizing much of anything.
- Literal meanings for figurative expressions
- animalito= bug
- The bottle “crawling with bugs”-- mom says “there is nothing on it all that nurse must
have spots on her glasses”-- arrogance of public health nurses display toward poor and
nonwhite– rosa’s reaction was hostility toward nurse not about germs
- Munro Edmonson “even a highly competent ethnographer is usually lost when his
informants begin to joke among themselves”
- But when his informants begin to joke with or about the ethnographer, he is more than
lost, especially if he is not aware that joking is going on.
In Class
Explore the meanings of folklife and folklore
- Use and distinction of terms
Process of Transmission
- Oral v written
Review the Paredes reading
- Observer and observed
Folk– social relations of researcher and subject
- Denotation of difference (with observer)
- Class ethnic, racial, other social axes
Care with use / folk
 - Tradition and custom
- Usage can be vague or generalization
folklife - about genre and form (folklore) in cultural context– practice
- Expressive culture and public culture
Folklore types
Various types but share common process
- Transmission (knowledge production
- How a practice is learned by the next gen
- Oral tradition v written tradition
- - connotations of difference
Some types
- Literary folklore- verbal art: stories, jokes, tales
- Anthropological folklore- performance
Americo Paredes
“The dean of Chicano Studies”
- Scholar of ethnic mexican musical and literary folklore
On Ethnographic Work..
- Article on research methodology
The Native Scholar
Researcher who belongs to the group under study “organic intellectuals” (Gramsci)
- Can understand native narratives; “interested” scholar
- - including winks/twitches
A new voice in the academy
- New perspective; potentially decolonizing processes of research (othering)
- Still needs to state positionality
- Is not freed from questions of objectivity; more scrutiny
Genres of Folklife/ Folklore
Verbal Art
- Jokes, stories, slurs, tales, rhymes, “la llorona”
Dance/Movement-based
- Matachines ballet folklorico, danza azteca
Theater
- Pastorelas, folk dramas, actors
Music
- Regional styles/genres, indita, corridos, conjunto
Visual Art
- Murals, santos, nacimientos, ofrendas
Spirituality
- Folk religion and saints, Virgen de Guadalupe, dia de los muertos, curanderismo
Life Cycle
 - Quinceanera, weddings, seasonal events
Home/Work Life
- Food culture, dress/fashion, labor practices, games
Others
- Other realms of everyday life and practice

1/31/2023
Power In The Story
Feb 1836
General antonio Lopez de Santa Anna– ol mission san antonio de valero in Tejas
– The Alamo– squatters
– thought 8it would be easy- it wasnt it lasted twelve days
– won but then lost a few weeks later april 21 to San Houston
- Human beings participate in history both as actors and as narrators
- Vernacular use- history means both the facts of the matter and a narrative of thos facts,
both “what happened”--sociohistorical process and “that which is said to have
happened”- our knowledges of that process or on a story about that process
- History of us- mayflower- sociohistorical– history of france with Michelet– knowledge of
that process
- History can mean either the sociohistorical process or our knowledge of that process, but
the boundary between the two is often quite fluid– if it is completely blurred– history
meaning both does it signify truth?- “the ways in which what happened and that which is
said to have happened are and are not the same may itself be historical”
- Suggests the importance of context
- Positivism- emphasis the distinction between the historical world and what we say or
write about it
- Constructivism- stresses the overlap between the historical process and narratives about
that process
- The more distant the sociohistorical process is from its knowledge, the easier the claim to
a “scientific” professionalism
- History is a story about power, a story about those who won
Page 8
Importance of history and historical narratives
- How they are constructed- Trouillot
People without history
Mexican American history primer
How do we typically learn about historical topics and subjects?
- We are both actors of history and narrators
- What happened (object)
- What is said to have happened (process)
- Power is typically either a minor element, not considered, or is hidden (fiction)
- Non-western world and marginalized west : “people without history”
Power shapes historical narratives (purposefully and not)
- Can distort elements of the story
- Can silence them too
Contemporary sources that shape historical narratives
News; TV/film;
“People without History”
- Who tells their history?
- Decide their role?
- How do they tell their own history?
Social war and Intercultural Conflict
Intercultural conflict between ethnic Mexicans and Anglos
- Mexican American War 1846-48
Tensions previous but war brought a revolution to social life of ethnic Mexicans
- “Strangers in their own land” to “era of open hostility”
Era of Open Hostility- Paredes
Post 1848 to beginning of 20th century
- Settler colonialism
- Political and economic disenfranchisement
- Manifest and structural violence- new systems and turning their back on ethnic mexican
community
- Social banditry- part guerilla part robin hood
- Intercultural conflict
Folklore of Symbolic Mediation- Pena
What was a social life like for ethnic Mexicans living in the US?
What could they do to resolve the conflict in their everyday lives?
Tell their stories through their cultural genres/ folklore
- songs/ corridos
- stories / tales
- Humor / jokes/ terminology
Folklore as valve to express social frustrations, temporarily mediating conflict
Reading Engagement 1/27/2023
Thick Description
- Kluckhorn defines culture as “the total way of life of a people” ; “the social legacy the
indiviudial acquires frp, his group”; “a way of thinking, feeling, and believing”; “an
abstraction from behavior; “a theory on the part of the anthropologist about the way in
which a group of people in fact behave ; a “storehouse of pooled learning”’ “a set of
standardized orientations to recurrent problems”; “learned behavior “‘ a mechanism for
normative regulation of behavior ; “ a set of techniques for adjusting both to the external
environments and to other men”; “a precipitate of history
- A map, a sieve, a matrix
- Thin description= moving the eyelids pg.7
- Thick description= winking and what it means in the context
- An ethnographer is faced with a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of
them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular,
and inexplicit, and which he must contribute somehow first to grasp and then to render.
- With the ideas of thin and thick description in mind, is thin description used to define the
explicit gesture or communication and thick description used to describe the implicit
gesture? (Geertz 7)

R Rosaldo- Erosion of Classic Norms

- Even our fantasies and our “innermost thoughts” are produces and limited by our own
local culture.
- Culture refers to the forms of how people make sense of their lives
- Culture encompasses the everyday, the ridiculous and the sublime. Neither high nor low,
culture is all-pervasive.
- In Erosion of Classic Norms, Rosaldo states that “culture encompasses the everyday, the
ridiculous and the sublime”, and that “neither high nor low, culture is all-pervasive.”
(Rosaldo 2) This makes me wonder if culture influences things that are considered
objective, like math and science. For example, is the way that Algebra practiced different
depending on the culture?

1/25/2023
Erosion of Classic Norms
Fantasy and innermost thoughts are produced and limited by our own local culture

Cultural Relativism
- The bonded culture group
- Culture borderlands
- Understanding other cultures on their own terms
- No imposition of outside categories, especially western categories
 - the dog analogy
Processual Analysis
- Objectivity
- Reflexivity
Ethnography and Representation

Culture Group
- Classic anthropology and social sciences
- A culture could be mapped-bounded culture group
- Within its known boundaries, existed the culture- did not necessarily coincide with state
borders- considered a “stable”, self-obtained “whole”
Cultural Borderlands
- Culture is always changing, just slowly- the ever-changing same
- It is not static/stable- constantly dynamic due to conflict and contestation; particularly at
the margins and borders
Possibilities of cultural borderlands
- Positioned ethnographers/scholars
- Engagement with conflict and change
- Fluidity and multiplicity
Process and Social Analysis: rosaldo
Classic Norms of ethnography
- Commitment to objectivism (scientism of an older era)
- Complicity with imperialism (colonialism and imperialist nostalgia)
- Belief in monumentalism (the “canon”)
These have been eroding with new scholarship for the past few generations towards more
processual analysis
- Interaction and change through time
Objectivity
- The personal as bias= unscientific- can be true but is simplistic
- Scientific endeavor was detached and dispassionate from the object/subject of study
- Methodology of ethnographic fieldwork of participant observation
- Researcher is to observe and learn by participating
- Ethnographic observation as a human form of natural history research
- Problem: (Colonialist) positioning of researcher does not account for the role within process
Reflexivity
- Instead of objectivity: reflexive and positioned research
- Ethnography is best when we know who is doing the research and why
- Ethnographic research cannot be absolute/ partial truths
-positioned researchers are social subjects themselves
- Positioning helps explain why the focus on some issues and miss others
- Rosaldo was and important scholarly voice for making reflexivity visible

My positionality in relation to Mexican American culture

- Outsider
- Familiar to it but does not fully understand it
- Consumer perspective
-

1/23/2023
Culture- community, traditions, way of life, ingroup outgroup, the other.
- All pervasive
- Way of life/ shared history, language, values, norms, and practices
- Human behavior is culturally-mediated; it is learned, not genetic
- Knowledge passed on by explicit and implicit manner
- How we learn while outside the formal process
Early meanings from agriculture
- To cultivate; to tend
- Later about human exploits- cultivation/civilization
To “cultures” and the “folk”
- Evolutionary and developmental use
- High and low / folk and popular
Anthropological use
- Material and symbolic systems (webs of significance)- not an experimental science in
search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.
- Away from evolutionary use
Locating Culture
- Where do we find culture?
- Where is culture concept applicable- macro and micro levels
- Large group: continental; national; religious
- Small group: youth/student; occupation; fandom
- Intersectional analysis: racial, class, gender, sexuality
C.GEERTZ THICK DESCRIPTION
Meaning and interpretation
- Webs of sig
Thick description/ethnography
- Structures of meaning
Multiple layers/ possibilities of meaning
Public, not private
- Culture is shared, not individual
The Ordinary
 - Everyday lived experience
The Wink
- Codes and cultural comm- understanding the “unspoken”
- The wink vs the twitch

1/18/2023
Definition of border- a boundary that distinguishes two regions
- displacement of people
- different atmosphere
- powerful and divisive
- separates but also brings together
- notes how they share something

Mexico-US border- reality

- Geopolitical line
- Legal economic political
- Lived experience
- Social inequity

Roberto Alvarez
- Literal and A-literal
- A-literal\conceptual
- Concept\metaphor
- Space/homeland
- genre/style

Concept/Metaphor
Border as a metaphor
- line/limit/edge
- contact/encounter
Anzaldua
- Border culture- “herida abierta
Third zone/ space
 - In-between
- Trans-border practices
- Deterritorialization- land acknowledgments
- Reterritorialization

Space and Homeland

Geography of contact
- Mexico-us border
- Southwest la frontera
Also a vocabulary of home/belonging
- Public and private space
Chicana homeland
- Greater mexico
- Aztlan- spiritual homeland
- Frontera

Genre/Style
Expression a d or form
-emerging out of third space
Hybridity
-mixture blend syncretic
Cultural mestizaje
Borderlands mixing
Cultural mestizaje