2023 Honorable Mention Best History Book, International Latino Book Awards
Broad and encompassing examination of Chicanx popular culture since World War II and the utopian visions it articulated
Amid the rise of neoliberalism, globalization, and movements for civil rights and global justice in the post–World War II era, Chicanxs in film, music, television, and art weaponized culture to combat often oppressive economic and political conditions. They envisioned utopias that, even if never fully realized, reimagined the world and linked seemingly disparate people and places. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Chicanx popular culture forged a politics of the possible and gave rise to utopian dreams that sprang from everyday experiences.
In Chicanx Utopias, Luis Alvarez offers a broad study of these utopian visions from the 1950s to the 2000s. Probing the film Salt of the Earth, brown-eyed soul music, sitcoms, poster art, and borderlands reggae music, he examines how Chicanx pop culture, capable of both liberation and exploitation, fostered interracial and transnational identities, engaged social movements, and produced varied utopian visions with divergent possibilities and limits. Grounded in the theoretical frameworks of Walter Benjamin, Stuart Hall, and the Zapatista movement, this book reveals how Chicanxs articulated pop cultural utopias to make sense of, challenge, and improve the worlds they inhabited.
Latinos are the fastest-growing ethnic group in America and the ascendance of their popular culture has become a huge phenomenon. But beyond J. Lo and Shakira, there is a deeper story to tell about culture, class, and community identities.
Producing Dreams, Consuming Youth takes us behind the scenes in San Antonio, Texas, a major market for Mexican American popular culture. Vicki Mayer brings readers the perspectives of those who produce and consume mass media—including music, television, and newspapers. Through the voices of people ranging from Spanish-language advertising agency executives to English-speaking working-class teenagers, we see how the media brings together communities of Mexican Americans as they pursue cultural dreams, identification, and empowerment. At the heart of the book is a debate about the future of Mexican American media, and thus of the youth market. How and why do media professionals imagine ethnic youths? How do young Mexican Americans accept, negotiate, and resist these images of themselves? Producing Dreams, Consuming Youth emphasizes the paradoxes of media industries that seek to include youths of color while profiting from their creative energies.
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