“Down and Dirty is a bold, impressive, and incisive examination of what is filthy and good about Chicane queer life that is free rather than assimilative or aspirational. Delving into innovations around language, culture, kinship, and gender and sexuality by working/underclass class folk, Down and Dirty is a reckoning with the normative project of Latino citizenship and sociology’s entanglement with racial capitalism and nationalism’s focus on respectability and civility. Provocative and indispensable!”
-- L.H. Stallings, author of The Afterlives of Kathleen Collins: A Black Woman Filmmaker’s Search for New Life

“Down and Dirty is a generous invitation to celebrate the vibrant agency and creativity of Chicana cultural producers. The songs, visual arts, and performances that form its archive break open normative strictures that prevent the flourishing and recognition of marginalized Chicanx minoritarian subjects. Down and Dirty enables us to re-think devalued objects, scorned practices, displaced subjectivities, and immeasurable lives. Deborah Vargas has written a fervent love letter to these creatives.”
-- Martin F. Manalansan IV, Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Rutgers University, New Brunswick