William H. Beezley

William H Beezley

Linda Ann Curcio

Latin American Popular Culture: An Introduction is a collection of articles that explores a wide range of compelling cultural subjects in the region, including carnival, romance, funerals, medicine, monuments and dance, among others. The introduction lays out the most important theoretical approaches to the culture of Latin America, and the chapters serve as illustrative case studies. Featuring the latest scholarship in cultural history most of the chapters have not previously been published Latin American Popular Culture is an important resource for courses in Latin American history, civilization, popular culture, and anthropology.

An Introduction

Latin American Popular Culture

This unique reader offers an engaging collection of essays that highlight the diversity of Latin America's cultural expressions from independence to the present. Exploring such themes and events as funerals, dance and music, letters and literature, spectacles and monuments, and world's fairs and food, a group of leading historians examines the ways that a wide range of individuals with copious, at times contradictory, motives attempted to forge identity, turn the world upside down, mock their betters, forget their troubles through dance, express love in letters, and altogether enjoy life. The authors analyze case studies from Argentina, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, and Trinidad-Tobago, tracing as well how their examples resonate in the rest of the region. They show how people could and did find opportunities to escape, if only occasionally, their daily drudgery, making lives for themselves of greater variety than the constant quest for dominance, drive for profits, orknee-jerk resistance to the social or economic order so often described in cultural studies. Instead, this rich text introduces the complexity of motives behind and the diversity of expressions of popular culture in Latin America.

Latin American Popular Culture Since Independence

Linda A. Curcio-Nagy

This innovative work of cultural history examines the function of public rituals in colonial Mexico City. Festivals were a defining characteristic of life in the capital. For most of the colonial period, inhabitants could witness as many as 100 religious and civil celebrations in a year. The largest of these events, both civil and religious, were sponsored by the authorities and were crucial means to embody political and social concepts. The first European public rituals were introduced immediately after the conquest of the Aztec capital. Spanish priests seeking to evangelize the native population introduced Catholic festivals, and civil authorities sponsored celebrations designed to glorify the Spanish empire. Spectacle was one tool in an arsenal of colonizing agents, and over time the growing diversity of the population made festival statecraft all the more important, as government-sponsored revelry attempted to promote shared histories and values among diverse and potentially dangerous groups. Festivals organizers developed a highly sophisticated message embedded within the celebrations that delineated the principles of leadership and the duties of both rulers and vassals. The pervasiveness of festivals and the power of the political message associated with them created possibilities for individuals to assess and participate in a larger discussion of good governance in the colony.

Linda Ann Curcio

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