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3 books match the query 'Broyles-González, Yolanda'

cover of Earth Wisdom: A California Chumash Woman

Earth Wisdom

A California Chumash Woman

Yolanda Broyles-González and Pilulaw Khus

University of Arizona Press, 2011

Pilulaw Khus has devoted her life to tribal, environmental, and human rights issues. With impressive candor and detail, she recounts those struggles here, offering a Native woman’s perspective on California history and the production of knowledge about indigenous peoples. Readers interested in tribal history will find in her story a spiritual counterpoint to prevailing academic views on the complicated reemergence of a Chumash identity. Readers interested in environmental studies will find vital eyewitness accounts of movements to safeguard important sites like Painted Rock and San Simeon Point from developers. Readers interested in indigenous storytelling will find Chumash origin tales and oral history as recounted by a gifted storyteller.

The 1978 Point Conception Occupation was a turning point in Pilulaw Khus’s life. In that year excavation began for a new natural gas facility at Point Conception, near Santa Barbara, California. To the Chumash tribal people of the central California coast, this was desecration of sacred land. In the Chumash cosmology, it was the site of the Western Gate, a passageway for spirits to enter the next world. Frustrated by unfavorable court hearings, the Chumash and their allies mobilized a year-long occupation of the disputed site, eventually forcing the energy company to abandon its plan. The Point Conception Occupation was a landmark event in the cultural revitalization of the Chumash people and a turning point in the life of Pilulaw Khus, the Chumash activist and medicine woman whose firsthand narrations comprise this volume.

Scholar Yolanda Broyles-González provides an extensive introductory analysis of Khus’s narrative. Her analysis explores “re-Indianization” and highlights the newly emergent Chumash research of the last decade.

In the world of book publishing, this volume from a traditional Chumash woman elder is a first. It puts a 20th (and 21st) century face, name, identity, humanity, personality, and living voice on the term Chumash.
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cover of El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement

El Teatro Campesino

Theater in the Chicano Movement

By Yolanda Broyles-González

University of Texas Press, 1994

Born in 1965 as an organizing tool within César Chávez's United Farm Workers union, El Teatro Campesino became the premier Chicana/o performance ensemble to emerge out of the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. This study demythologizes and reinterprets the company's history from its origins in California's farm labor struggles to its successes in Europe and on Broadway until the disbanding of the original collective ensemble in 1980 with the subsequent adoption of mainstream production techniques.

Yolanda Broyles-González corrects many misconceptions concerning the Teatro's creation and evolution. She draws from a rich storehouse of previously untapped material, such as interviews with numerous ensemble members, production notes, and unpublished diaries, to highlight the reality of the collective creation that characterized the Teatro's work.

Writing within contemporary cultural studies theory, Broyles-González sheds light on class, gender, race, and cultural issues. Her work situates the Teatro within working-class Mexican performance history, the Chicano movement, gender relations, and recent attempts to mainstream.

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cover of Mario Barradas and Son Jarocho: The Journey of a Mexican Regional Music

Mario Barradas and Son Jarocho

The Journey of a Mexican Regional Music

Yolanda Broyles-González, Rafael Figueroa Hernández, and Francisco González

University of Texas Press, 2022

Son Jarocho was born as the regional sound of Veracruz but over time became a Mexican national genre, even transnational, genre—a touchstone of Chicano identity in the United States. Mario Barradas and Son Jarocho traces a musical journey from the Gulf Coast to interior Mexico and across the border, describing the transformations of Son Jarocho along the way.

This comprehensive cultural study pairs ethnographic and musicological insights with an oral history of the late Mario Barradas, one of Son Jarocho’s preeminent modern musicians. Chicano musician Francisco González offers an insider’s account of Barradas’s influence and Son Jarocho’s musical qualities, while Rafael Figueroa Hernández delves into Barradas’s recordings and films. Yolanda Broyles-González examines the interplay between Son Jarocho’s indigenous roots and contemporary role in Mexican and US society. The result is a nuanced portrait of a vital and evolving musical tradition.

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