BOOKS

Here you’ll find links to my academic books.

Loca Motion:  The Travels of Chicana/Latina Popular Culture (New York University Press), explores punk aesthetics in a range of independently produced Spoken Word, Performance, Film, and Music and the reception of this work by audiences in U.S. Mexico, and Germany. Featured artists include Carmen Aguirre, Luis Alfaro, Alicia Armendariz (Alice Bag), Sean Carrillo, Teresa Covarrubias, El Vez (Robert Lopez), Marga Gomez, Marisela Norte, and the Latino Theater Group from Vancover, Canada.  Click here for Loca Motion page .

Latino/a Popular Culture (New York University Press), was one of the first to focus on a pan-Latino understanding of a wide variety of cultural production.  From grassroots media, music to sports, this collection examines the negotiation of cultural politics within popular culture.  This collection is widely used in undergraduate courses.  Click here for Latino/o Popular Culture page.

Cornbread and Cuchifritos:  Ethnic Identity Politics, Transnationalization, and Transculturation in American Urban Popular Culture (WVT, Germany)

Sounds travel fast, cross national and cultural boundaries constantly, and feed on cultural exchange in a variety of ways. This volume, the second in the series, explores music’s impact on identity politics within the Americas and beyond, its interconnectedness to the emergence of fluid new ethnicities in urban contexts, and its historical links to processes of intercultural exchange. One major focus is on the ethnic impact of US American popular music with a specific emphasis on Latino/a influences both on music within the United States and on the migration of sounds and music genres across national boundaries. This collection of essays aims at differentiating and rewriting existing histories of the emergence of US American popular music, which focus primarily on intercultural exchange between European and African as well as African American forms, by exploring the yet unrecognized Latino/a influences. At the same time, the compilation counters concepts of so-called world music, a label often used to homogenize fusion forms of music in times of globalization, by emphasizing elements of ethnic as well as aesthetic difference in US American popular music and its global and local variations.

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