Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Porciúncula: Geografías culturales del pueblo de Nuestra Señora de Los Ángeles by Salvador C. Fernández, Juan Carlos Ramírez-Pimienta

2021; University of Northern Colorado; Volume: 37; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cnf.2021.0051

2328-6962

Gabriela Barrios,

Latin American rural development

Reviewed by: Porciúncula: Geografías culturales del pueblo de Nuestra Señora de Los Ángeles by Salvador C. Fernández, Juan Carlos Ramírez-Pimienta Gabriela Barrios Salvador C. Fernández and Juan Carlos Ramírez-Pimienta. Porciúncula: Geografías culturales del pueblo de Nuestra Señora de Los Ángeles. Mexico City, Mexico: Two Shores Publishing, 2019. 344 pp. ISBN 978-1-7329-220-3-7. Porciúncula: Geografías culturales del pueblo de Nuestra Señora de Los Ángeles (2019) is a Spanish-language edited volume of eleven chapters and a prologue that analyzes the Mexican, Mexican-American, and Chicanx communities’ cultural relationships to the Los Angeles urban setting. Editors, Salvador C. Fernández and Juan Carlos Ramírez-Pimienta, contribute to the text alongside Raúl H. Villa, Alicia Arrizón, Jennifer L. Eich, Margarita López López, Rodrigo Andrés, John Koegel, Omar Pimienta, Crystal Roxana Pérez, and Gerardo Gutiérrez Cham (in the order in which their chapters appear). This volume is intended for academic audiences interested in the fields of Chicanx and Mexican cultural studies, as well as spatial justice in Los Angeles. Porciúncula follows in the vein of such texts as Urban Humanities: New Practices for Reimagining the City (2020) by Dana Cuff, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Todd Presner, Maite Zubiaurre, and Jonothan Jae-an Crisman, Narratives of Greater Mexico: Essays on Chicano Literary History, Genre, and Borders (2004) by Héctor Calderón, and Rethinking Chicana/o and Latina/o Popular Culture (2009) by Daniel Enrique Pérez. In the first chapter, “El derecho a la ciudad en Los Ángeles,” Raúl H. Villa outlines the Mexican migrant community’s fight for their right to the city. The right to the city and the right to cultural production go hand in hand in this volume and are exemplified not only through Villa’s mapping of a migrant community in LA, but also through Juan Carlos Ramírez-Pimienta’s chapter, “La época de oro de la grabación del corrido mexicano en Los Ángeles (1928–1937),” on Mexican music production in Los Angeles from 1928–1937. These two chapters show Los Angeles to be a center for Mexican cultural production and identity formation, a type of framing that is still new outside of the field of Chicanx studies. [End Page 166] Alicia Arrizón and Salvador C. Fernández’s respective chapters include works that display levels of marginality within the community of migrants. Arrizón’s chapter titled “Espacios feministas y voces subversivas en el trabajo de tres chicanas angelinas: Helena María Viramontes, Terri de la Peña y Josefina López” explores Chicana cultural production in East LA, thus asserting Chicana presence and resistance in Los Angeles. In the chapter titled “Construcciones imaginarias angelinas en Las aventuras de Don Chipote o, Cuando los pericos mamen de Daniel Venegas y The Brick People de Alejandro Morales,” Fernández’s reading of these two novels also highlights the stigma around migrant bodies as depicted in the two works. This link between the body and the urban space connects smoothly with the rest of the volume and provides a broader view of migration in the early twentieth century. Fernández’s analysis dialogues well with Rachel Conrad Bracken’s Borderland Biopolitics: Public Health and Border Enforcement in Early Twentieth Century Latinx Fiction (2018), though this text is not included his argument. Jennifer L. Eich and John Koegel explore Chicanx theater’s community-building ability. Eich’s chapter titled “Culture Clash y Chavez Ravine: una excavación y reconstrucción colectiva de la historia de Los Ángeles,” recovers the affective work of the play Chavez Ravine by examining its audience-engaging tactics. This chapter connects back to Raúl Villa’s exploration of early twentieth century Los Angeles in that both speak of the importance of Chavez Ravine and the Latinx neighborhoods it contains. Koegel’s chapter, titled “El teatro musical mexicano y los palacios de cine en Los Ángeles, California, antes de 1950,” demonstrates the links between the cultural geography of Mexican LA and the development of musical theater. While Eich’s chapter provides a contextualized close reading of...