In the mid-1990s, artist and musician Alec Dempster returned to Mexico, the place of his birth, and discovered son jarocho. A genre of folk music from the Veracruz region of Mexico, son jarocho originated in the 17th century with the confluence of Indigenous, African and European peoples. In Veracruz today, musicians can still be heard singing these traditional sones, passed down orally through the generations as themes or tropes, rather than songs with set lyrics. As Dempster immersed himself in the tradition, speaking and playing with rural musicians, his exploration of the culture resulted in a series of linoleum prints, each depicting a traditional son. Dempster's imagery, playful and enigmatic, provides a window into a culture virtually unknown outside Mexico. In this stunning collection, Dempster lends his own voice to the prints for the first time, illustrating their genesis and origin in clear, unassuming prose. With Dempster as guide, Lotería Jarocha draws its reader into an infectious culture of music, laughter and dance.

Home to an ethnically and linguistically diverse population, the Huasteca region of Eastern Mexico defies geographic and political boundaries and is instead known for its kaleidoscope of indigenous cultures rich in traditional art, music and dance. In Lotería Huasteca, author, visual artist and musician Alec Dempster illustrates the traditions and music of the Huasteca region with a series of woodblock prints and accompanying explanatory texts that capture the style and history of the region and its people. Organized in the form of the popular household game of lotería, Dempster’s words and images provide a fascinating mix of cultural reference, music history and artwork, which together form an educational game that imparts a tantalizing taste of the vibrant and diverse world of the Huasteca.

The Routledge Companion to Gender, Sex and Latin American Culture is the first comprehensive volume to explore the intersections between gender, sexuality, and the creation, consumption, and interpretation of popular culture in the Américas. The chapters seek to enrich our understanding of the role of pop culture in the everyday lives of its creators and consumers, primarily in the 20th and 21st centuries. They reveal how popular culture expresses the historical, social, cultural, and political commonalities that have shaped the lives of peoples that make up the Américas, and also highlight how pop culture can conform to and solidify existing social hierarchies, whilst on other occasions contest and resist the status quo. Front and center in this collection are issues of gender and sexuality, making visible the ways in which subjects who inhabit intersectional identities (sex, gender, race, class) are "othered", as well as demonstrating how these same subjects can, and do, use pop-cultural phenomena in self-affirmative and progressively transformative ways. Topics covered in this volume include TV, film, pop and performance art, hip-hop, dance, slam poetry, gender-fluid religious ritual, theater, stand-up comedy, graffiti, videogames, photography, graphic arts, sports spectacles, comic books, sci-fi and other genre novels, lotería card games, news, web, and digital media.

Transatlantic Malagueñas and Zapateados is an exploration of two fandango dances, recording the circulations of people, imagery, music, and dance across what were once the Spanish and Portuguese Empires. Although these dance-musics seem to be mirror images, the unbreachable space between them reflects the political fault-lines along which nineteenth-century musical populism and folkloric nationalism extend into present-day debates about globalization, immigration, neoliberalism, and neofascism. If malagueñas are a fantastic incarnation of Spanishness, caught like a fly in amber by their anachronistic references to a fraught imperial past, noisy and raucous zapateado dances cut toward the future. Inherently marked by European conventions of zapatos (shoes), zapateados are nonetheless shaped by Africanist and Native American footwork traditions. In these Afro-Indigenous mestizajes, not only are European aesthetic values reordered and resignified, but the Catholic catechism which indoctrinated the New World yields to alternate spiritual systems springing out of a culture of resistance to European domination.

The latest wacky and wonderful collection of children’s poetry, Governor General’s Award winner JonArno Lawson’s The Hobo’s Crowbar presents a world of word botchers and bird watchers, of vile versifiers and vigilante interventionists, of nobodies and somebodies, big guys and small fries. Lawson’s world is one of logic and language, of wit and words, of contradictions and conundrums, but it is also a world in which looking and learning go hand-in-hand, with laughter never far behind. The book is as fun to see as it is to say, and vibrant woodcuts by artist Alec Dempster are a perfect accompaniment to Lawson’s poems. Together, they help to expose the highs and lows of life, and celebrate goofiness, absurdity and the profound truth of human experience.

As the lead singer of the Grammy Award–winning rock band Quetzal and a scholar of Chicana/o and Latina/o studies, Martha Gonzalez is uniquely positioned to articulate the ways in which creative expression can serve the dual roles of political commentary and community building. Drawing on postcolonial, Chicana, black feminist, and performance theories, Chican@ Artivistas explores the visual, musical, and performance art produced in East Los Angeles since the inception of NAFTA and the subsequent anti-immigration rhetoric of the 1990s. Showcasing the social impact made by key artist-activists on their communities and on the mainstream art world and music industry, Gonzalez charts the evolution of a now-canonical body of work that took its inspiration from the Zapatista movement, particularly its masked indigenous participants, and that responded to efforts to impose systems of labor exploitation and social subjugation. Incorporating Gonzalez’s memories of the Mexican nationalist music of her childhood and her band’s journey to Chiapas, the book captures the mobilizing music, poetry, dance, and art that emerged in pre-gentrification corners of downtown Los Angeles and that went on to inspire flourishing networks of bold, innovative artivistas.

Of the approximately 7,000 languages in the world, at least half may no longer be spoken by the end of the twenty-first century. Languages are endangered by a number of factors, including globalization, education policies, and the political, economic and cultural marginalization of minority groups. This guidebook provides ideas and strategies, as well as some background, to help with the effective revitalization of endangered languages. It covers a broad scope of themes including effective planning, benefits, wellbeing, economic aspects, attitudes and ideologies. The chapter authors have hands-on experience of language revitalization in many countries around the world, and each chapter includes a wealth of examples, such as case studies from specific languages and language areas. Clearly and accessibly written, it is suitable for non-specialists as well as academic researchers and students interested in language revitalization. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.