MeXicana Fashions

MeXicana Fashions: Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction, edited by Aída Hurtado and Norma E. Cantú, is a long-awaited analysis of the complexities of meXicana, Xicana, and Latinx dress and self-fashioning as it intersects with body politics and society. The editors have assembled an impressive group of anthropologists, folklorists, artists, artisans, poets, social scientists, feminist theorists, and entrepreneurs to think on and through the politics of self-adornment and the many forms and meanings it may take in the lives of cisgendered and queer Xicanas, Chicanas, Latinas, and MeXicanas.The anthology contains an array of research-based qualitative and quantitative methods, testimonios, autobiographies, and ethnographic, as well as autoethnographic approaches. The contributors include the aforementioned editors, as well as veteran and early-career authors: Josie Méndez-Negrete, Micaela Díaz-Sánchez, Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Domino Renee Perez, Rachel Valentina González-Martin, Jade D. Petermon, Laura Pérez, Sonia Alejandra Rodríguez, Marci R. McMahon, Stacy I. Macías, Chela Sandoval, Amber Rose González, and Felicia Montes. This may be the first well-rounded study in the combined fields of Chicanx, Latinx studies, anthropology, performance studies, and folklore studies.MeXicana Fashions contains three major sections that intersect but generally focus on “Rendering of Self: Personal Narratives/Personal Adornment,” “The Politics of Dress: Saying It Loud/Saying It Clear,” and “The Politics of Entrepreneurship: Making (It)/Selling (It).” As an intergenerational, multi-spatial anthology, the book is a strategic movida (maneuver) to provide a multifocal understanding of dress in the realms of self-fashioning, analysis of body politics, and entrepreneurship in meXicana dress, as the three sections indicate. The collective focus on dress as a political act is innovative on many fronts. Especially important is how social adornment publicly manifests one's individual identification while simultaneously tying one to a greater community.The anthology's title is anchored to Rosa-Linda Fregoso's innovative term “meXicana,” which serves as a guiding principle and values system for all sections and essays. The term exalts the hybridity or mezcla essential to a Mexican-ness, while referencing Chicanismo in order to also highlight “resistance and creativity.” As the editors note, meXicana also signals the Indigenous roots of Mexico while simultaneously recognizing mestizaje (mixing).The editors explain: “For the racialized and ethnicized body, self-adornment is a political act, both of compliance to existing hegemonic standards for decorum and resistance against homogenization into the mainstream (and everything in between)” (p. 17). It may also serve as “a protective shield against identity dispersion” (p. 16). Several contributing authors note how the deliberate fashioning of the traditional huipil or the rebozo is rooted in a desire to connect to one's ancestral past in efforts to challenge the effects of erasure in the colonial present with an eye toward a decolonial future. In this way, different generations have taken to these simple yet powerful pieces to assert their presence, feel beautiful, and connect to their past.Furthermore, as Diaz-Sánchez powerfully states, meXicana self-fashioning and the praxis of mixing and matching slacks and huipil in professional contexts function “like armor,” especially in the context of academia's salient white supremacy that urges assimilation (p. 81). We see this time and again as various authors conceive of dress as a protective shield against assimilation, erasure, and white supremacy. Self-fashioning may occur at various sites and social locations, including quinceañeras, Day of the Dead celebrations, academia, magazines, urban Xican/x-Indigenous fashion shows, social media blogs, and other forms of representation.Hurtado's essay on “Visuality, Corporality, and Power” is an especially important contribution to discussions of race in relation to Brown and disabled bodies asserting and de-centralizing whiteness. This chapter, like many others, provides us with a language to help explain that which has always been present in our social worlds. Throughout the anthology, I was introduced to and moved by concepts and phrases, such as the “dark Other” (p. 159), “pseudo-movidas” (p. 163), “Walking Altars” (p. 191), the body as art installation, and dress as mental and behavioral attitudes, to name but a few.To their credit, the editors also include a queer analysis in “‘Fierce and Fearless’: Dress and Identity in Rigoberto Gonzalez's The Mariposa Club” by Sonia Alejandra Rodríguez, which notes that “self-adornment can punctuate how the novel's characters create and assert their queer identity” (p. 18). The book treats gender as what sociologists term “master statuses” in that they are intimate reflections of one's identity not always identifiable as public expressions. Along similar lines, Petermon's essay uses what she terms a “fat studies” approach to self-fashioning by independent bloggers in order to counter what she identifies as the “hyper(in)visibility” of fat bodies in society.In short, MeXicana Fashion is an invaluable tool for interrogating narratives in the age of social media and digital representation—such as visual Instagram content, which has become a necessary modern utility. The editors recognize some of the limitations of the anthology by acknowledging that they might also have explored and analyzed tattooing, piercing, cross-dressing, drag shows, and other emerging aesthetics. Nevertheless, MeXicana Fashion would provide stimulating reading for undergraduates, graduates, or any individuals interested in fashion more generally. It inspires self-reflection and critical analysis around mainstream and individual fashioning by taking into account any and all contexts affected by white supremacist ideals—be it the boardroom, the digital world, the classroom, the club, or the mean streets of any urban city

Adornment · Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Ethnography · Folklore · Foregrounding · Identity (music) · Identity politics · Literature · Political science · Politics · Queer · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law