A border is a force of containment that inspires dreams of being overcome and crossed; motivates bodies to climb over; and threatens physical harm. This book critically examines a range of cultural performances produced in relation to the tensions and movements of/about the borders dividing North America, including the Caribbean.

In this interdisciplinary volume, contributors analyze the expression of Latina/o cultural identity through performance. With music, theater, dance, visual arts, body art, spoken word, performance activism, fashion, and street theater as points of entry, contributors discuss cultural practices and the fashoning of identity in Latino/a communities throughout the US. Examining the areas of crossover between Latin and American cultures gives new meaning to the notion of "borderlands." This volume features senior scholars and up-and-coming academics from cultural, visual, and performance studies, folklore, and ethnomusicology.

In this interdisciplinary volume, contributors analyze the expression of Latina/o cultural identity through performance. With music, theater, dance, visual arts, body art, spoken word, performance activism, fashion, and street theater as points of entry, contributors discuss cultural practices and the fashoning of identity in Latino/a communities throughout the US. Examining the areas of crossover between Latin and American cultures gives new meaning to the notion of "borderlands." This volume features senior scholars and up-and-coming academics from cultural, visual, and performance studies, folklore, and ethnomusicology.

Publisher description

"This book chronicles the child performer as part of the Mexican-American/Chicana/o theatre experience. Borderlands Children's Theatre explores the phenomenon of the Mexican-American/Chicana/o child performer at the center of Chicana/o and Latina/o theatre culture. Drawing from historical and contemporary theatrical traditions to finally the emergence of Latina/o Youth Theatre and Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences, it raises crucial questions about the role of the child in these performative contexts and about how childhood and adolescence was experienced and understood. Analyzing contemporary plays for Mexican-American/Chicana/o child performer, it introduces theorizations of "performing mestizaje" and "border crossing" borderlands performance, gender, and ethnic identity and investigates theatre as a site in which children and youth have the opportunity to articulate their emerging selfhoods. This book adds to the national and international dialogue in theatre and gives voice to Mexican-American/Chicana/o children and youth and will be of great interest to students and scholars of Theatre studies and Latina/o studies"--

In this study, I perform identity as a shifting borderlands theorized through the process and product of art, performance, writing, and pedagogy. The importance of this study is to first, address a gap in the literature on border and Chicana/o artists in relation to borderlands theories. Second, this study considers what borderlands through food, art, and performance offer spaces of art education. For this study, I employ a methodology of borderlands art practice, a practice-based research that addresses border artist practices and undervisible borderlands spaces. I engage in practices of making food, images, video/GIFs, and performative writing. Next, I use theories and concepts that emerged from the art and performative processes as well as the disciplines of food, public, and border pedagogies to create an uncertain art pedagogy. A multiplicitous mass of doings emerged from this study that performed the borderlands of identity, race/ethnicity, authenticity, and hybrid and impure food practices of the in-between. The visual and performative outcome of this study is fragmented, ambiguous, uncertain, and ambivalent. These processes sit on the borderlands of art education and are comfortable with liminality and uncertainty. Through experience and conversation, hybridized food practices generate new knowledge, or rather, uncertain knowledge. This dissertation occupies an uncertain discipline space in-between art, art education, Chicana/o and Latina/o studies, and food studies. Neither fully art, art education, food nor Chicana/o/Latina/o studies, this study is what queer Chicana writer and feminist theorist Gloria Anzalda describes as a borderland, a vague and undetermined place.