Soto (Chicano studies, Cal. State U., Northridge) examines women's participation in the Mexican Revolution (1910-1940) and the Mexican women's rights movement during the same period. Paper edition (unseen), $16.95. Published by Arden Press, PO Box 418, Denver CO 80201. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The contributors use a variety of theoretical approaches to analyze how women as a class have experienced specific twentieth-century revolutions. They identify the issues that prompted women to participate in the struggles, the roles they played, the contributions they made, and their hopes for better lives for themselves as women in the post-revolutionary society.

This book reinvigorates the debate on the Mexican Revolution, exploring what this pivotal event meant to women. The contributors offer a fresh look at women's participation in their homes and workplaces and through politics and community activism. Drawing on a variety of perspectives, the volume illuminates the ways women variously accepted, contested, used, and manipulated the revolutionary project. Recovering narratives that have been virtually written out of the historical record, this book brings us a rich and complex array of women's experiences in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary era in Mexico.

Soto (Chicano studies, Cal. State U., Northridge) examines women's participation in the Mexican Revolution (1910-1940) and the Mexican women's rights movement during the same period. Paper edition (unseen), $16.95. Published by Arden Press, PO Box 418, Denver CO 80201. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Mexican culture has long been the object of scholarly interest and popular curiosity, notably since the 1910 Revolution and most recently in the 1990 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit "Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries". During these eight decades in the evolution of the modern Mexican nation, shifting relations of power have constantly met with voices of opposition that have challenged the national vision of progress and unity. Textured Lives explores some of these cracks in the Mexican national edifice by examining the works of women in literature and the arts, with focus on individuals who represent crucial phases in Mexico's cultural history: Frida Kahlo and postrevolutionary nationalism, Rosario Castellanos and the promises of institutionalized revolution, Elena Poniatowska and the legacy of 1968, and Angeles Mastretta and the "golden age" of the oil boom. Schaefer argues that exploring the social context of cultural representation highlights the tensions between master narratives and these women's transgressive forays into those spaces of power. Combining literary theory, cultural analysis, gender study, and theories of artistic representation, her book embraces painting, literary journalism, the epistolary novel, and autobiographical narrative to question the traditional forms of these genres as well as to debate the boundaries between the self and the national identity.

An anniversary edition of the first full study of Mexican American women in the twentieth century, with new preface

Explores the imagery of woman in Mexican art and visual culture. Examines how woman signified a variety of concepts, from modernity to authenticity and revolutionary social transformation, both before and after the Mexican Revolution.