meXicana Fashions

One of the greatest strengths of this work is its commitment to combatting a tendency toward essentialism in dress studies, particularly for what typically gets deemed 'ethnic,' 'minority,’ or 'subcultural' dress, by underscoring the complex, inconsistent, and sometimes contradictory ways we may experience self and how we variously perform those intersectional identities...The chapters of meXicana Fashions demonstrate many thoughtful attempts to interrogate old and invent new terms, categories, and concepts for identification and analysis...For folklorists, dress scholars, and those interested in material culture, media, and gender studies, there is a lot to value here. Journal of Folklore Research

[meXicana Fashions's] editors' intentions of initiating discussion, questioning, and exploration of the significance of fashion, self adornment, and the economics of self fashioning are well served by this diversity of current writings by meXicanas and women of Colour searching for social and self identity outside of the hegemonic fashion industry. This book would be an important point of reference within Mexican American studies and particularly in studies of dress and the creation of both personal and social identity. It is a useful source for complexities of dress, adornment, and the constructions and reconstructions of cultural identities. Journal of Dress History

This book is a jewel of fashion knowledge and should be a part of every fashion library to learn how clothing can be used for personal identity and more so, a form of respect for society as a whole – a respect through ‘fashion for all’ and one always evolving within our likes and differences. Change is what makes up the ideal of fashion. Fashion, Style & Popular Culture

[meXicana Fashions] presents the academy with an inspirational model for weaving authenticity and authority alongside the rigors of multimedium and multimethodological research. The result is an insightful and innovate book for those interested in fashion theory, cultural theory, identity politics, textile arts, Latinx/Xicana/Indigenous identity, history, art, and literature, as well as pedagogy. New Mexico Historical Review

I have been waiting years for this book...The editors are courageous in their refusal of conformity, even at the level of citation styles, and they appear to model for us what academic diversity can look like in print…the book is a delightful and recommended read. Chiricú Journal

As I read meXicana Fashions, I thought of my mother—a second-generation thrift store queen seamstress artist—and grandmother—a soft-spoken woman from Monterrey who still loves a velour track suit at age seventy—and of my own color-coded closet filled with rococo ensembles. I felt all of us situated and witnessed, challenged and archived, in these pages. From the politics of donning rebozos to what Stacy I. Macias calls 'racialized rasquache raunch,' this book thoughtfully examines an important array of questions: What is fashion? What does it do? How do we articulate dissent through what we wear? What stories are we telling? Who are we? Where did we come from? But it does more than that. All the contributors bring reverence and affection to this subject as well as to the family members, television characters, historical figures, activists, artists, and colleagues they invite into their chapters. This book is a meXicana 'look' in its own right—fashioning memories and stories from here and there, hybridizing the academic with the vernacular. This book is as much a rigorous examination of the politics of meXicana fashions as it is an homage to the people who give these aesthetics life. Virgie Tovar, Author of You Have the Right to Remain Fat

meXicana Fashions makes a unique and compelling argument about the ways in which fashion, self-adornment, and dress contribute to the making of social identities. This wide-ranging and imaginative collection explores the layered border aesthetics of meXicanas across multiple identities, bodies, nationalities, and cultural geographies. In meXicana Fashions, the authors deftly examine the cultural processes enacted in everyday practices of self-adornment and fashion and capture Chicanas’ complicated engagements with the fashion industry. Informed by theories and methodologies of feminist border thinking, mestiza consciousness, and intersectionality, meXicana Fashions explores the complex dynamics of fashion aesthetics at the heart of meXicana creativity and cultural politics of belonging and resistance. An engaging read for anyone interested in border aesthetics and feminist cultural politics! Rosa-Linda Fregoso, professor emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of meXicana Encounters: the Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands

Readers will find themselves pausing to assess the jewelry that they are wearing or to take a mental stock of what is in their closet. I can’t remember the last time I read something that made me think so profoundly about my own fashion choices and how they’re influenced by generations before me. Dolores Inés Casillas, University of California, Santa Barbara, author of Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-language Radio and Public Advocacy

meXicana Fashions is a nuanced and essential compendium of essays exploring the landscape of dress and self-adornment in Chicana identity construction. The text explores codes of self-fashioning in street fashion, ethnic dress, and haut couture. The volume defines the complex power of self-presentation and fashion consciousness expressed in the dicho ‘La buena figura, hasta la sepultura.’ Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, Independent scholar of Latina/o Art and Culture