Juan Diego, to whom the Virgin Mary appeared in 1531 miraculously imprinting her likeness on his cape, was canonised in Mexico in 2002 by Pope John Paul II. In 1999, the revered image of Our Lady of Guadalupe had been proclaimed patron saint of the Americas by the Pope. How did a poor Indian and a sixteenth-century Mexican painting of the Virgin Mary attract such unprecedented honours? Across the centuries the enigmatic power of the image has aroused fervent devotion in Mexico: it served as the banner of the rebellion against Spanish rule and, despite scepticism and anti-clericalism, still remains a potent symbol of the modern nation. This book traces the intellectual origins, the sudden efflorescence and the adamantine resilience of the tradition of Our Lady of Guadalupe and will fascinate anyone concerned with the history of religion and its symbols.

Phoenix's Mexican American community dates back to the founding of the city in 1868. From these earliest days, Phoenicians of Mexican descent actively participated in the city's economic and cultural development, while also fiercely preserving their culture and heritage in the thriving barrios, by establishing their own businesses and churches. In 1886, Henry Garfias became the first member of the Mexican community to be elected a city official. The 20th century saw the creation of organizations, such as La Liga Protectora and Sociedad Zaragoza, that gave a stronger political voice to the underrepresented Mexican population. In 1953, another member of the Mexican community, Adam Diaz, was elected to city council. As the century progressed, the Mexican American population grew and expanded into several areas of Phoenix, and today the substantial community is flourishing.

Phoenix is the largest city in the Southwest and one of the largest urban centers in the country, yet less has been published about its minority populations than those of other major metropolitan areas. Bradford Luckingham has now written a straightforward narrative history of Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans, and African Americans in Phoenix from the 1860s to the present, tracing their struggles against segregation and discrimination and emphasizing the active roles they have played in shaping their own destinies. Settled in the mid-nineteenth century by Anglo and Mexican pioneers, Phoenix emerged as an Anglo-dominated society that presented formidable obstacles to minorities seeking access to jobs, education, housing, and public services. It was not until World War II and the subsequent economic boom and civil rights era that opportunities began to open up. Drawing on a variety of sources, from newspaper files to statistical data to oral accounts, Luckingham profiles the general history of each community, revealing the problems it has faced and the progress it has made. His overview of the public life of these three ethnic groups shows not only how they survived, but how they contributed to the evolution of one of America's fastest-growing cities.

On any given day in Arizona, thousands of Mexican-descent workers labor to make living in urban and rural areas possible. The majority of such workers are largely invisible. Their work as caretakers of children and the elderly, dishwashers or cooks in restaurants, and hotel housekeeping staff, among other roles, remains in the shadows of an economy dependent on their labor. Mexican Workers and the Making of Arizona centers on the production of an elastic supply of labor, revealing how this long-standing approach to the building of Arizona has obscured important power relations, including the state’s favorable treatment of corporations vis-à-vis workers. Building on recent scholarship about Chicanas/os and others, the volume insightfully describes how U.S. industries such as railroads, mining, and agriculture have fostered the recruitment of Mexican labor, thus ensuring the presence of a surplus labor pool that expands and contracts to accommodate production and profit goals. The volume’s contributors delve into examples of migration and settlement in the Salt River Valley; the mobilization and immobilization of cotton workers in the 1920s; miners and their challenge to a dual-wage system in Miami, Arizona; Mexican American women workers in midcentury Phoenix; the 1980s Morenci copper miners’ strike and Chicana mobilization; Arizona’s industrial and agribusiness demands for Mexican contract labor; and the labor rights violations of construction workers today. Mexican Workers and the Making of Arizona fills an important gap in our understanding of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the Southwest by turning the scholarly gaze to Arizona, which has had a long-standing impact on national policy and politics.

This book is a sociolinguistic ethnography of LGBT Mexicans/Latinxs in Phoenix, Arizona, a major metropolitan area in the U.S. Southwest. The main focus of the book is to examine participants’ conceptions of their ethnic and sexual identities and how identities influence (and are influenced by) language practices. This book explores the intersubjective construction and negotiation of identities among queer Mexicans/Latinxs, paying attention to how identities are co-constructed in the interview setting in coming out narratives and in narratives of silence. The book destabilizes the dominant narrative on language maintenance and shift in sociolinguistics, much of which relies on a (heterosexual) family-based model of intergenerational language transmission, by bringing those individuals often at the margin of the family (LGBTQ members) to the center of the analysis. It contributes to the queering of bilingualism and Spanish in the U.S., not only by including a previously unstudied subgroup (LGBTQ people), but also by providing a different lens through which to view the diverse language and identity practices of U.S. Mexicans/Latinxs. This book addresses this exclusion and makes a significant contribution to the study of bilingualism and multilingualism by bringing LGBTQ Latinas/os to the center of the analysis.

DIV“If colonial America was the melting pot of modernity, it was because it was also a fabulous laboratory of images. . . . Just as much as speech and writing, the image can be a vehicle for all sorts of power and resistance.” So writes Serge Gruzinski in the introduction to Images at War, his striking reinterpretation of the Spanish colonization of Mexico. Concentrating on the political meaning of the baroque image and its function within a multicultural society, Gruzinski compares its ubiquity in Mexico to our modern fascination with images and their meaning. Although the baroque image played a decisive role in many arenas, especially that of conquest and New World colonization, its powerful resonance in the sphere of religion is a focal point of Gruzinski’s study. In his analysis of how images conveyed meaning across linguistic barriers, he uncovers recurring themes of false images, less-than-perfect replicas, the uprooting of peoples and cultural memories, and the violence of iconoclastic destruction. He shows how various ethnic groups—Indians, blacks, Europeans—left their distinct marks on images of colonialism and religion, coopting them into expressions of identity or instruments of rebellion. As Gruzinski’s story unfolds, he tells of Aztec idols, the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe, conquistadors, Franciscans, and neoclassical attempts to repress the baroque. In the final chapter he discusses the political and religious implications of contemporary imagery—such as that in Mexican soap operas—and speculates about the future of images in Latin America. Originally written in French, this work makes available to an English audience a seminal study of Mexico and the role of the image in the New World. /div