Explores a variety of Mexican festivals, most of which are spiritual or religious, including the holidays of Christmas, Carnival, and Holy week, and covers the Days of the Dead, the sacred arts of the Huichol ethnic group, and more, with photographs.

The devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe is one of the most important elements in the development of a specifically Mexican tradition of religion and nationality. This volume makes available to the English-reading public an easily accessible translation from the original Nahuatl, along with extensive critical apparatus dealing with various linguistic, orthographic, and typographical matters.

Since the 1980s Chicana writers including Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Alma Luz Villanueva have reworked iconic Mexican cultural symbols such as mother earth goddesses and La Llorona (the Wailing Woman of Mexican folklore), re-imagining them as powerful female figures. After reading the works of Chicana writers who created bold, powerful, and openly sexual female characters, Debra J. Blake wondered how everyday Mexican American women would characterize their own lives in relation to the writers’ radical reconfigurations of female sexuality and gender roles. To find out, Blake gathered oral histories from working-class and semiprofessional U.S. Mexicanas. In Chicana Sexuality and Gender, she compares the self-representations of these women with fictional and artistic representations by academic-affiliated, professional intellectual Chicana writers and visual artists, including Alma M. López and Yolanda López. Blake looks at how the Chicana professional intellectuals and the U.S. Mexicana women refigure confining and demeaning constructions of female gender roles and racial, ethnic, and sexual identities. She organizes her analysis around re-imaginings of La Virgen de Guadalupe, La Llorona, indigenous Mexica goddesses, and La Malinche, the indigenous interpreter for Hernán Cortés during the Spanish conquest. In doing so, Blake reveals how the professional intellectuals and the working-class and semiprofessional women rework or invoke the female icons to confront the repression of female sexuality, limiting gender roles, inequality in male and female relationships, and violence against women. While the representational strategies of the two groups of women are significantly different and the U.S. Mexicanas would not necessarily call themselves feminists, Blake nonetheless illuminates a continuum of Chicana feminist thinking, showing how both groups of women expand lifestyle choices and promote the health and well-being of women of Mexican origin or descent.

La Sombra de la dictadura es una novela de la vida real. Es una historia que vivió el pueblo paraguayo en la época de la dictadura, años de sufrimiento y de dolor, un buen día salió de la sombra a luchar por la paz y por la dignidad de su pueblo así empezó la lucha por derrocar al despiadado dictadura. Juan experimento la dictadura con su propia vida, por eso escribió tal como lo sintió los sufrimiento de su pueblo y de la familia paraguaya en aquella época. Fueron crueles los días, fueron días grises y dolorosos aquellos días para todos los pueblos. Escribió con su puño y dolor cada sufrimiento de su pueblo, quedara plasmada por siempre la historia de la familia de esta historia. Juan salió de su país en busca de nuevos horizonte, la dictadura no le dio oportunidad de sobresalir en nada así llego a la tierra de oportunidades y ahora vive en New York tratando de olvidar los tiempos sangrientos de la época de la dictadura.

The surprising true story of Mexico’s hunt, arrest, and conviction of its first female serial killer For three years, amid widespread public outrage, police in Mexico City struggled to uncover the identity of the killer responsible for the ghastly deaths of forty elderly women, many of whom had been strangled in their homes with a stethoscope by someone posing as a government nurse. When Juana Barraza Samperio, a female professional wrestler known as la Dama del Silencio (the Lady of Silence), was arrested—and eventually sentenced to 759 years in prison—for her crimes as the Mataviejitas (the little old lady killer), her case disrupted traditional narratives about gender, criminality, and victimhood in the popular and criminological imagination. Marshaling ten years of research, and one of the only interviews that Juana Barraza Samperio has given while in prison, Susana Vargas Cervantes deconstructs this uniquely provocative story. She focuses, in particular, on the complex, gendered aspects of the case, asking: Who is a killer? Barraza—with her “manly” features and strength, her career as a masked wrestler in lucha libre, and her violent crimes—is presented, here, as a study in gender deviance, a disruption of what scholars call mexicanidad, or the masculine notion of what it means to be Mexican. Cervantes also challenges our conception of victimhood—specifically, who “counts” as a victim. The Little Old Lady Killer presents a fascinating analysis of what serial killing—often considered “killing for the pleasure of killing”—represents to us.

This book is a critical English translation of a "The Book of the Virgin of Carmel" published in 1952. It is presented in a bilingual format (English side by side with the original Spanish). It is shares a Gnostic perspective on the Divine Feminine. "Mary knew the Secret Doctrine of the Tribe of Levi. Mary was educated in the august shade of the porticos of Jerusalem, among the nubile foliage of the oriental palmtrees, beneath the shade of which rested the old camel drivers of the desert." "That holy Christic doctrine was preserved in secret within the Mysteries of Egypt, Troy, Rome, Carthage, Eleusis, etc." "The greatest thing that Christ did was to make the old doctrine public on the roads of Jerusalem." "And it was Mary, the Virgin of Carmel, who was designated by Divinity to be the Mother of the Divine Redeemer of the World."