Marie Sarita Gaytán

From Sombreros to Sincronizadas: Authenticity, Ethnicity, and the Mexican Restaurant Industry

While scholars agree that performances of authenticity and ethnicity express social relations and reveal the socially constructed character of identity, we know little about how these interactions contribute to the politics of everyday life. By engaging in participant observation, drawing on open-ended interviews, and analyzing the content of available data regarding restaurant culture, the author argues that the accomplishment of Mexican authenticity is a social construction. However, despite its socially created qualities, the author contends that performances of authenticity and ethnicity affect not only how individuals understand each other, but illustrate the challenges faced by different groups of people in the commercial production and consumption of identity.

Globalizing Resistance: slow food and new local imaginaries

This article explores how members of Slow Food perform identity, establish community, and participate in a politics of consumption through the use of new local imaginaries. Building on Arjun Appadurais (1996) notion of “the imaginary,” new local imaginaries are contemporary sites, or culturescapes, where notions of the local are re-inscribed through discourses of the global. Through the use of new local imaginaries, members of Slow Food manage multiple identities in an attempt to resist and mobilize against the negative consequences of industrialization. Further, members of Slow Food reconfigure linear notions of time and space in their attempt to rediscover cultural moments that they perceive to be absent from traditions within the United States. Despite the creation of an innovative site of resistance, Slow Food members construct a limited notion of the local that excludes working-class and urban cultural expressions.

Drinking difference: Race, consumption, and alcohol prohibition in Mexico and the United States

This article examines how racialized meanings were attributed to alcoholic products (tequila, pulque, and beer) in the United States and in Mexico in the early part of the 20th century. Researchers in both countries provide a wealth of information about the politics, establishment, and enforcement of alcohol prohibition. Yet, few projects consider the effects of these measures from a transnational perspective. Drawing on newspaper articles and primary and secondary sources from the United States and Mexico, this work illustrates how, amid changing ideas regarding alcohol regulation, various actors projected racial and class meanings onto commodities and their consumption.

The transformation of tequila: From hangover to highbrow

This article examines the evolution of tequila’s reputation – from lowbrow to high class – in Mexico and the United States. Analyzing the content of novels, magazines, newspapers, ads, and song lyrics, it argues that the current cachet associated with tequila was influenced by a range of historical, political, and economic circumstances within and between Mexico and the United States. Specifically, transformations took place in three key phases including tequila’s: (1) increasing ties to national identity in Mexico; (2) changing perception – moving from feared to fun – in the United States; and (3) gaining of state-backed support and legislative protection. In explaining the shifting patterns of prestige, the roles of transnational circuits of consumption and production merit closer analysis in understanding the relations that shape cultural fields.

Queening/Queering Mexicanidad: Lucha Reyes and the Canción Ranchera

Abstract:Despite recording over one hundred songs and earning the moniker “la reina de los mariachis” (the queen of mariachis), very little is known about the life and career of the Mexican ranchera singer Lucha Reyes (1906–1944). In this article, we examine why her achievements are overlooked and often excluded in accounts that celebrate Mexico’s most prized entertainers. Drawing on analyses of her musical performances in film and audio recordings, in combination with newspaper articles, magazine stories, and biographic accounts, we contend that Reyes was marginalized because she visually and vocally violated the gender norms of the period, queered the ranchera genre, and challenged the heteronormative contours of mexicanidad (Mexicanness). For these reasons, Reyes’s influence in music culture has not been adequately valorized and has regularly been positioned in the margins of Mexican historiography. Instead, it was her male contemporaries, including Jorge Negrete, José Alfredo Jiménez, and Pedro Infante, who were credited with shaping and popularizing the canción ranchera. We analyze these exclusionary dynamics, consider Reyes’s contributions to Mexican music, and highlight her continuing significance on Mexicana and Chicana entertainers.