Mestizos come home!
Subtitle: making and claiming Mexican American identity
By: Robert Con Davis-Undiano
Series: Chicana & Chicano visions of the Américas -- 19; Chicana & Chicano visions of the Américas -- 19.
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 312
ISBN-13: 9780806157191
Subjects: Mestizos; Social life and customs; Ethnic identity; Mexican American authors; Intellectual life; History and criticism; American literature; Ethnic relations; Mexican Americans; Community life
Description: "Chronicles important ways Mexican Americans have changed American culture for the better since the 1960s including attitudes towards mestizo (mixed-race) identity and the creation of a new cultural 'voice, ' debates over land policy, innovations in popular culture, the Mesoamerican view of the human body, and the rise of Chicano literature and Chicano Studies"--

"Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano has described U.S. and Latin American culture as continually hobbled by amnesia--unable, or unwilling, to remember the influence of mestizos and indigenous populations. In Mestizos Come Home! author Robert Con Davis-Undiano documents the great awakening of Mexican American and Latino culture since the 1960s that has challenged this omission in collective memory. He maps a new awareness of the United States as intrinsically connected to the broader context of the Americas. At once native and new to the American Southwest, Mexican Americans have 'come home' in a profound sense: they have reasserted their right to claim that land and U.S. culture as their own. Mestizos Come Home! explores key areas of change that Mexican Americans have brought to the United States. These areas include the recognition of mestizo identity, especially its historical development across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the re-emergence of indigenous relationships to land; and the promotion of Mesoamerican conceptions of the human body. Clarifying and bridging critical gaps in cultural history, Davis-Undiano considers important artifacts from the past and present, connecting the casta (caste) paintings of eighteenth-century Mexico to modern-day artists including John Valadez, Alma Lopez, and Luis A. Jimenez Jr. He also examines such community celebrations as Day of the Dead, Cinco de Mayo, and lowrider car culture as examples of mestizo influence on mainstream American culture. Woven throughout is the search for meaning and understanding of mestizo identity. A large-scale landmark account of Mexican American culture, Mestizos Come Home! shows that mestizos are essential to U.S. national culture. As an argument for social justice and a renewal of America's democratic ideals, this book marks a historical cultural homecoming"--
Notes: "A previous version of chapter 3 was published in Roberto Cantú, ed.,The forked juniper: critical perspectives on Rudolfo Anaya (Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, 2016"--Title page verso.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: Mestizos, Come Home!; title: Part I. Critiquing the Spanish Colonial Legacy; title: The Casta Tradition and Mestizos in New Spain; title: In Search of Mestizo Identity across the Americas; title: Part II. Remapping the Mestizo Community; title: There's No Place Like Aztlan : Land, the Southwest, and Rudolfo Anaya; title: Remapping Community : Cinco de Mayo, Lowrider Car Culture, and the Day of the Dead; title: Recovering the Body : Literature, Painting, and Sculpture; title: Part III. The Literary Response; title: Tom's Rivera and the Chicano Voice; title: Write Home! : Chicano Literature, Chicano Studies, and Resolana; title: Conclusion: A Better Future for America.