"This picture book biography follows Frida Kahlo's start as an artist and how she integrated her unique way of looking at the world into her art"--

Death and the Idea of Mexico is the first social, cultural, and political history of death in a nation that has made death its tutelary sign. Examining the history of death and of the death sign from the sixteenth-century holocaust to contemporary Mexican American identity politics, anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz’s innovative study marks a turning point in understanding Mexico’s rich and unique use of death imagery. Unlike contemporary Europeans and Americans, whose denial of death permeates their cultures, the Mexican people display and cultivate a jovial familiarity with death. This intimacy with death has become the cornerstone of Mexico’s national identity. It is tempting to view this rich elaboration of death imagery as yet another example of an “invented tradition,” that is, a cult shaped by the modern state’s cultural policies or by the narrow interests of contemporary identity politics. Lomnitz takes a different approach. Rather than flattening out the tradition by insisting only on the ways it is willfully manipulated, this book focuses on the dialectical relationship between dying, killing, and the administration of death, and the very formation of the colonial state, of a rich and variegated popular culture, and of the Mexican nation itself. The elevation of Mexican intimacy with death to the center of national identity is but a moment within that history ― within a history in which the key institutions of society are built around the claims of the fallen. Based on a wide range of sources ― from missionary testimonies to newspaper cartoons, from masterpieces of artistic vanguards to accounts of public executions and political assassinations ― Death and the Idea of Mexico moves beyond the limited methodology of traditional historiographies of death to probe the depths of a people and a country whose fearless acquaintance with death shapes the very terms of their social compact. This work effects a novel turn in the classical historiography of death ― a turn that can be characterized by a move from social and cultural history to political history. The move toward the politics of death gives readers a unique insight into the peculiar story of death in the Americas.

Americo Paredes, in a distinguished career spanning the last forty years, has often set the pace and the standard in the two fields with which he is most strongly identified: folklore and Chicano studies. In folklore, he has been instrumental in establishing a new theoretical and methodological framework; in Chicano studies, he has exerted a seminal influence, inspiring an entire generation of scholars. For this book, the noted folklorist Richard Bauman has selected eleven of Americo Paredes's most significant scholarly articles. The selected articles, first published during the years 1958-1987, faithfully reflect the depth and breadth of Paredes's scholarship, as well as the rigor and eloquence of his writing. They represent scholarly discourse at its best: at once erudite and clear, demanding yet accessible, rich in both substance and style. Throughout his career, Paredes has centered his work on the folklore and culture of the Lower Rio Grande Border of South Texas and northeastern Mexico. His studies have always been contextualized, though, by a deep knowledge of Greater Mexico, and by the comparative scope of the folklorist. The essays collected here illustrate the transdisciplinary richness of Paredes's perspective - a synthesis of folkloric, anthropological, literary, and historical theory and method. They also demonstrate the revisionist power of his analysis, which challenges traditionalist conceptions and constructions of Texas-Mexican culture, the social base of folklore, and folklore genres. Paredes is best known for his studies of the corrido, and several articles on this ballad form are included in the collection. Other essays focus variously on decimas, jokes, legends, and the "neighborly names" of ethnic slurs. More general subjects are also addressed, including the nature of the ethnographic encounter, machismo in the United States and Mexico, and the clash of cultures along the Lower Rio Grande Border. What emerges is perhaps the most well wrought and subtle portrait to date of the life and culture of the Mexican American people. An introduction by Richard Bauman discusses the principal themes and focuses of Paredes's work, and his substantive, theoretical, and methodological contributions to scholarship. In addition, the volume includes a complete bibliography of Paredes's scholarly writings, compiled by Linda Adams.

Stavans (Latin American and Latino culture, Amherst College, Massachusetts) offers an extended essay on Mexican poet and intellectual Paz (1914-98). Earlier versions have been published in a variety of periodicals and anthologies. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

"Ilan Stavans has emerged as Latin America’s liveliest and boldest critic and most innovative cultural enthusiast," states the Washington Post. And the New York Times described him as "the czar of Latino literature in the United States." But his influential oeuvre doesn’t address Hispanic culture exclusively. It has also opened fresh new vistas into Jewish life globally, which has prompted the Forward to portray Stavans as "a maverick intellectual whose canonical work has already produced a whole array of marvels that are redefining Jewishness." Neal Sokol devoted almost a decade to the study of Stavans’s work. He applies his substantial knowledge to this candid, thought-provoking series of eight interviews. In them Stavans is caught at the vortex where his Mexican, Jewish, and American heritages meet. He discusses everything from the formative influences that shaped his worldview to anti-Semitism, Edmund Wilson, sexuality in Latin America, Gabriel García Márquez, and the fate of Yiddish. He also contrasts the role of intellectuals in advanced and developing societies, dwells on his admiration for Don Quixote and his passion for dictionaries, and reflects on his groundbreaking, controversial research on Spanglish—the hybrid encounter of English and Spanish that infuriates the Royal Academy in Madrid and also makes people describe Stavans as "the Salman Rushdie of the Hispanic world." Sokol shrewdly tests Stavans’s ideas and places them in context. By doing so, he offers a map to the heart and mind of one of our foremost thinkers today—an invaluable tool for his growing cadre of readers.

In this English translation of the 1993 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize winner Dulcinea encantada (1992) by Mexican author Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, Dulcinea travels in a car writing novels in her mind about several Dulcineas: a medieval princess on a quest, a nineteenth-century lady-in-waiting in Mexico, and a twentieth-century young woman who was sent to Russia as a girl to escape the Spanish Civil War and later journeys to Mexico to reunite with her parents. Unsure of her identity, Dulcinea remembers, debates, and records memories of her exile. As she circles Mexico City, she examines the role of memory, speech, and writing through her fragmented narrative voice. Dulcinea explores her place in the world through storytelling, blurring the line between reality and imagination. This novel pairs a lyrical and contemplative style with experimental writing to present common themes of identity formation and exile in a unique form. Dulcinea’s quest is also one of spiritual connection with apocalyptic and mystical overtones. With allusions to both Christian and Jewish mystical traditions, this novel reveals a crypto-Jewish presence typical of Muñiz-Huberman’s writing, forming part of a Sephardic literary tradition. This edition includes an introduction and annotations by the translator, Rebecca Marquis.