Mexican America - Bibliography
Mexican America: Bibliography
Ahlborn, Richard, ed. Man Made Mobile: Early Saddles of Western North America. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1980.
Altman, Ida. "Spanish Society in Mexico City After the Conquest." Hispanic American Historical Review (1991) 71:3.
Arizpe, Lourdes. "The Rural Exodus in Mexico and the Mexican Migration to the United States ." International Migration Review. Volume 15 (4) (1979): 626-649.
Bouvier, Virginia. Women and the Conquest of California, 1542-1840: Codes of Silence. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2001.
Cline, Sarah. "The Spiritual Conquest Reexamined: Baptism and Church Marriage in Early Sixteenth-century Mexico ." Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 73 (3) (1993): 453-480.
Cortés, Hernán. Letters from Mexico . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.
Davalos, Karen Mary. Exhibiting Mestizaje: Mexican (American) Museums in the Diaspora. Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 2001.
Díaz del Castillo, Bernal. The True History of the Conquest of Mexico . New York: Robert M. McBride & Company, 1927.
Driscoll, Barbara. The Tracks North: The Railroad Bracero Program of World War II. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1999.
Fernández-Aceves, María Teresa. "Once We Were Corn Grinders: Women and Labor in the Tortilla Industry of Guadalajara, 1920-1940." International Labor and Working-Class History, No. 63 (2003): 81-101.
García, Mario. "The Chicana in American History: The Mexican Women of El Paso, 1880-1920—A Case Study." Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 49, no. 2 (May, 1980): 315-337.
Garcíagodoy, Juanita. Digging the Days of the Dead: A Reading of Mexico’s Días de Muertos. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1998.
Gaspar de Alba, Alicia. Chicano Art: Inside/Outside the Master’s House. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1998.
Glantz, Margot, ed. La Malinche, sus padres y sus hijos. Mexico:Taurus Ediciones, 1994.
González, Gilbert. Labor and Community: Mexican Citrus WorkerVillages in a Southern California County, 1900-1950. Chicago:University of Illinois Press, 1994.
Goodwin, Lee. "Field Notes: Heritage and Change through Community Celebrations: A Photographic Essay." Western Historical Quarterly 29 (Summer 1998): 215-223.
Kessell, John. Kiva, Cross, and Crown: The Pecos Indians and New Mexico 1540-1840. Washington, D.C.: The National Park Service, 1979.
Lafaye, Jacques, and Lockhart, James. "A Scholarly Debate: The Origins of Modern Mexico - Indigenistas vs. Hispanistas." The Americas , Vol. 48, No. 3, 315-330.
Limón, José. American Encounters: Greater Mexico , the United Status, and the Erotics of Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998.
Oles, James. South of the Border: Mexico in the American Imagination 1914-1947. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993.
Rodríguez, Jospeh. "Becoming Latinos: Mexican Americans, Chicanos, and the Spanish Myth in the urban Southwest." Western Historical Quarterly 29. Summer 1998: 165-185.
Root, Regina. The Latin American Fashion Reader. Oxford: Berg Publishing, 2005.
Sánchez, George. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945. New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1993.
Sando, Joe. Pueblo Nations: Eight Centuries of Pueblo Indian History. Santa Fe: Clear Light Publishers, 1992.
Semo, Enrique. The History of Capitalism in Mexico : Its Origins, 1521-1763. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.
Viola, Herman, and Margolis, Carolyn, ed. Seeds of Change: Five Hundred Years Since Columbus. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991.
Wells, Miriam. Strawberry Fields: Politics, Class, and Work in California Agriculture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.
"Mexican America - Bibliography" showing 24 items.
Page 1 of 3
Vela de Pancho Villa
- Description
- Pancho Villa is one of the most recognizable leaders of the Mexico Revolution. This civil war, which lasted from 1910-1921, was fought to curb U.S. corporate interests and to redistribute agricultural lands, especially for indigenous communities. It was a social revolution that reasserted popular culture and the value of "Mexican-ness." It was also a prolonged, violent conflict that spread death and hunger throughout Mexico, spurring migrants north, mostly into El Paso, Los Angeles, and other historically Mexican U.S. cities. With them came ideas, images, and language for organizing laborers and the rural poor. These ideas and images percolated in the popular culture of Mexican Americans and reappear in the art and activism of Chicanos in the 1960s and 1970s. On the back of this candle depicting Villa are prayers written in English and Spanish asking him to grant the petitioner some of the insight and prowess that enshrined this bandit, social revolutionary, and media star in the mythology of modern Mexico.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- depicted
- Villa, Pancho
- ID Number
- 1991.0741.13
- catalog number
- 1991.0741.13
- accession number
- 1991.0741
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
"La Tierra Nueva en Aztlán"
- Description
- The evolving civil rights movement of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s revolutionized the consciousness of young people across the United States. As in African American communities, a new sense of mobilization spread among Mexican Americans. Many adopted a more political identity—chicano and chicana—and explored their history, which was omitted from school textbooks. The Chicano movement sought to remedy the injustices experienced by many Mexican Americans, from substandard education and housing to working conditions. Many symbols and ideas of the Chicano movement were taken from the pre-Hispanic past, especially Aztec history. Aztlán, the original homeland in the Aztec migration stories, has an important place in Chicano mythology. As a symbolic reclamation of their place in American history, Chicanos locate Aztlán in the Southwest United States, in the area conquered during the Mexican-American War. The image shown here, by Manuel Moya, is an ink drawing done on a handkerchief known as a paño. Paños are graphic art works drawn on handkerchiefs by Chicano prisoners in California, Texas, and the Southwest. Titled, La Tierra Nueva en Aztlán, or The New Land in Aztlán, combines the images of the Aztec past with a Pancho Villa-like figure from the Mexican Revolution.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1986
- artist
- Moya, Manuel
- ID Number
- 1991.0431.01
- catalog number
- 1991.0431.01
- accession number
- 1991.0431
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
"Our Lady of Guadalupe"
- Description
- The Virgin of Guadalupe is a symbol of religious faith and nationhood. As the patron saint of Mexico, she was among the first manifestations of the Virgin Mary in the newly colonized Americas. In a country that has historically been divided in many ways—regionally, ethnically, linguistically, and economically—the Virgin of Guadalupe brings together all Mexicans, north and south of the border. It is no coincidence that many of her devotees see their indigenous heritage reflected in her brown skin—according to tradition, she first appeared to an indigenous Mexican, Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, in 1531. Not coincidentally, the site of her appearance, a hill in Mexico City, had been a recently destroyed temple to the Aztec earth goddess, Tonatzin. While echoing the pre-Hispanic past, the Virgin of Guadalupe is an emblem of unity and perseverance that has been invoked in struggles ranging from the Mexican War of Independence (1810-1821) to the organizing and activism of the United Farm Workers of America in the 1960s and 1970s. This image is taken from a paño made by Walter Baca in 1991. Paños are graphic art works designed on handkerchiefs by Chicano prisoners in California, Texas, and the Southwest.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1991
- artist
- Baca, Walter
- ID Number
- 1991.0431.02
- catalog number
- 1991.0431.02
- accession number
- 1991.0431
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
"Tierra o Muerte"
- Description
- Following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the annexation of Texas, the land claims of many Mexican families were not respected, either by the new English-speaking settlers or by the U.S. government. Dispossession from family- and community-owned lands dealt a severe economic blow to the livelihood of generations of Mexican Americans. The issue of land evokes especially bitter memories in New Mexico. In 1967, the year this poster was made with the slogan Tierra o Muerte, meaning Land or Death, a Hispanic land rights organization called La Alianza, led by Reies López Tijerina, raided the Rio Arriba County courthouse in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico. In addition to reclaiming land from the government of New Mexico, the goals of the raid were to free imprisoned Alianza members and to arrest the district attorney who was prosecuting them as communists and outside agitators. The raid on the courthouse was ultimately unsuccessful and Tijerina served time in a federal prison. Although seen by some as a divisive figure, Reies López Tijerina was as recognizable as Cesar Chavez to many Chicano activists of the late 1960s. Mirroring similar political tensions in the African American community, Chicano civil rights activists were torn between leaders such as Chavez, who advocated nonviolence, and leaders like Tijerina, whose political strategy was decidedly more militant.
- Date made
- 1967
- ID Number
- 1990.0654.01
- catalog number
- 1990.0654.01
- accession number
- 1990.0654
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Orale ese Vato
- Description
- As this paño humorously titled Orale ese vato (Spanish for roughly, right on, man) shows, one characteristic of Chicano art is that it avidly consumes and reconfigures both American and Mexican pop culture with its own slang, looks, and attitude. A paño is a hand-drawn handkerchief traditionally designed by Chicano prisoners. Like a letter that retells memories of both good and bad times, paños are often mailed as gifts to friends and loved ones. Valued as a vibrant popular art that overlaps with muralism, tattoo design, graffiti, and auto airbrushing, paños and their makers are receiving increased exposure for their visual storytelling abilities. An illustrator and a muralist known for depicting Chicano themes, Walter Baca (1947-1993) designed this paño in New Mexico in 1992.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1992
- artist
- Baca, Walter R.
- ID Number
- 1993.0150.02
- catalog number
- 1993.0150.02
- accession number
- 1993.0150
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
"Valor"
- Description
- Mexican Americans have served in U.S. armed forces since the Civil War. But it was the generation of Mexican Americans returning from World War II who mobilized their communities and changed the political landscape of the West. Laying the groundwork for the Chicano movement of the 1960s, organizations like the American G.I. Forum began advocating on behalf of Hispanic veterans who were denied the educational, health care, housing, and other rights guaranteed by the G.I. Bill. Often working in concert with the League of Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and other Latino civil rights organizations, the Texas-based G.I. Forum soon engaged in broader social battles over school desegregation and voter registration rights. Today, the G.I. Forum is a nationally recognized source of scholarships among Mexican American students. This paño, titled Valor, the Spanish word for courage, commemorates the Korean War Medal of Honor winner Rodolfo Hernández. Paños are an art form created traditionally by Chicano prisoners on white handkerchiefs. Often mailed as gifts to friends and families, the images on paños remember loved ones, depict important memories, and tell stories about the dark side of life, as well as redemption. The maker of this paño is unknown.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1988
- depicted
- Hernandez, Rudy
- ID Number
- 1993.0150.06
- catalog number
- 1993.0150.06
- accession number
- 1993.0150
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Muñeca de La Llorona
- Description
- La Llorona, or the Weeping Woman, is the frightening figure of a heartbroken woman who drowned her children and haunts the night, especially by riversides. Her story is repeated to children throughout Latin America, with numerous versions circulating throughout Mexico and the American Southwest. She has been identified as the Aztec goddess Coatlicue, who, according to one legend, was heard weeping for her Aztec children on the eve of the Spanish conquest. Some identify her as the damned ghost of a poor woman from Ciudad Juárez, who stabbed her children and disposed of them in the Rio Grande in order to win the affection of a wealthy man. According to another legend, La Llorona is actually La Malinche, the crucial interpreter and lover of Hernán Cortés. After the fall of the Aztec capital, and having borne Cortés's first son, La Malinche was replaced by Cortés's first wife (who had been awaiting him in Cuba) and was hastily married off to one of his Spanish companions. La Malinche and La Llorona, whether considered as overlapping or totally separate figures, reappear frequently in Mexican popular culture, north and south of the border.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- ca 1990-1991
- maker
- McFall, Jo Anne
- ID Number
- 1991.0859.04
- catalog number
- 1991.0859.04
- accession number
- 1991.0859
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
The Last Moment of the Emperor Maximilian
- Description
- This relief print from The Magazine of Art dramatically illustrates the final moments before the execution of the Mexican Emperor Maximilian I in 1867. An Austrian noble by birth, Maximilian was installed by Napoleon III of France. French forces had invaded Mexico in 1862, after President Benito Juárez suspended payments on its foreign debt. Despite a major victory by Mexican forces at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, the French seized control of large sections of Mexico, including the capital. Maximilian was initially supported by Mexican conservatives in a backlash against the changes instituted by the Mexican War of Reform (1857–1861). However, once on the throne, his support of a free press, open universities, land reform, and other progressive ideas of the day proved to be out of step with his conservative constituency and the Catholic Church. Menaced by the government of the United States, victorious after its own civil war, and the rising success of Mexican nationalist forces, the French withdrew their military support of Maximilian, the last emperor of Mexico. This historic image is one of 45,000 artistic and commercials prints housed in the Graphic Arts Collection of the National Museum of American History.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- ca 1890
- graphic artist
- Babbage, T.
- publisher
- Magazine of Art
- ID Number
- 1996.0197.350
- catalog number
- 1996.0197.350
- accession number
- 1996.0197
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
China Poblana Dress
- Description
- Mariachis, groups comprised of vocalists, trumpeters, violinists, and various bass and guitar players, are today considered Mexico's traditional musical ensemble. Originally from the state of Jalisco, mariachi music transformed itself from a regional to a national music between the 1930s and 1950s. Its accompanying attire is the fancy charro costume for men and the china poblana dress (like the one pictured here) for women. The thriving song, music, and dance culture surrounding mariachi today is the product of pioneering work by Mexican American educators and performers in the early 1960s. Mariachi instruction programs have since grown in popularity across Mexican American communities, with student mariachi ensembles beginning to perform as early as elementary or middle school. But Mexican American musical traditions began much earlier than the mariachi movement—they include styles as diverse as the choir music of the California missions and the corridos and ballads of San Antonio's Rosita Fernández (1925 1997). This china poblana dress, made in the 1960s, belonged to Fernández who, though performing a wide repertoire of Mexican song styles, is most identified with música norteña, rather than mariachi. Her sixty-year career as a local radio, TV, and theater star garnered her the title, "San Antonio's First Lady of Song."
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Date made
- 1960s
- user
- Fernández, Rosita
- maker
- Tenis, Mr.
- ID Number
- 2001.0130.01
- accession number
- 2001.0130
- catalog number
- 2001.0130.01
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
Selena's Leather Outfit
- Description
- From doo-wop and country blues, to polka and hip-hop, Tejano music is made by borderland musicians forced to understand the value of cultural exchange. Performing a fusion of cumbia, pop, and contemporary Tejano music, Selena Quintanilla-Pérez (1971–1995) was a young star whose rise and hard-won fame in the United States and Latin American markets was cut short at age 23, when she was murdered by a business manager fired for stealing. Selena was a commercial success in ways unimaginable for her more rootsy predecessors like Flaco Jiménez, Freddy Fender, or Little Joe. This outfit, with its leather boots, tight pants, a satin bustier, and a motorcycle jacket, is an example of Selena's idiosyncratic style, wavering between sexy rebel and Mexican American good girl. Hailing from Lake Jackson, Texas, Selena was born into a family of musicians. Because she grew up speaking English, she had to learn to sing Spanish phonetically on her early albums that targeted the Spanish-speaking market. Ironically, her "cross-over" material for English-language radio was not released until the end of her career, shortly after her tragic death. Selena, who spent her childhood in her family's band entertaining crowds at weddings, restaurants, fairs, and other modest venues along the U.S.-Mexico border, remains enshrined in the memory of many as one of the greatest stars of Tejano music.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- user
- Selena
- maker
- North Beach
- ID Number
- 1999.0104.01
- accession number
- 1999.0104
- catalog number
- 1999.0104.01
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
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