In the 1940's the pachuco subculture emerged within the urban youths of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. These pachucos were deterritorialized from Mexico and the United States. While the United States wasn't fully assimilating the pachuco subculture, Mexico was trying to distance themselves from the subculture. This formation of the cross-border subculture helped create the pachuco as a manner and persona. The pachuco was also known to many on both sides of the border due to Mexican comedian and film actor Germán Valdéz who created played a pachuco character Tin Tan in films.
I will analyze Javier Durán’s “Nation and Translation: The “Pachuco” in Mexican Popular Culture: Germán Valdéz’s Tin Tan” which was published by The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association in 2002. The article is about the pachuco's growth as a subculture. Durán examines how pachucos created an identity for themselves and a spot in society, here he first talks about the becoming the pachuco:
“The pachuco’s strategies of survival – appropriation, transgression, reassemblage, breaking, and restructuring the laws of language with caló and pochismos - are reflected in the codified language of the body (hair style, tattooing, dress, gestures, and dance) and in the equally codified language of space (marking territories with graffiti in the city, the barrio, and the street)... all are exaggerated to such a degree that they become an exercise in mimicry…In the case of the pachuco, the camouflage and mimicry make him visible, give him a location in (and out of) culture” (Durán 42-43).
What I understood from this section of Durán's article is that in order for the pachuco to survive, there are specific obstacles that need to be followed. Accordin...
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...founder of the pachuco subculture (Germán Valdéz’s Tin Tan), spread across borders. Although never particularly accepted in Mexico or United States, the pachuco did create an identity and a spot in society. I argue that this cross-border subculture, which was not particularly accepted, would not be a unique phenomenon if it were accepted. There had to be something that was diverse and against the norm for the “camouflage and mimicry [to] make him visible, give him a location in (and out of) culture” (Durán 43). The pachuco was known but never fully understood by others but that is how cultures are introduced until either it assimilates or not.
Works Cited
Durán, Javier. “Nation and Translation: The “Pachuco” in Mexican Popular Culture: Germán Valdéz’s Tin Tan.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 35.2 (2002): 41-49. JSTOR. Web. 25 March 2014.
side of a border town made Smeltertown residents American, Perales looks at how they also never left their Mexican culture and customs behind. The San Jose’ de Cristo Rey Catholic parish served as a place for Esmeltianos to reimagine what it meant to be racially and culturally Mexican in an American border town. The Catholic chapel on the hill became the locus of what it meant to Mexican in a border town. Through their sense of community and the Catholic parish, Esmeltianos retained many aspects of their Mexican culture: Spanish language, Mexican patriotism, Catholicism. “Blending elements of national and ethnic pride, shared language, and a common experience with Catholicism provided a foundation on which Esmeltianos reconfigured what it meant to be Mexican in a U.S.
Have you ever disobeyed your families culture? Or ever wanted to forget about something in your past culture? It’s not always easy, to follow traditions, sometimes you want to create or change your lifestyle.In the poem ‘’El Olvido’’ by Judith Ortiz Cofer and ‘’Life In The Age Of The Mimis’’ by Domingo Martinez. The authors of these texts indicate the idea that trying to hide your cultures identity is defiance against your heritage.
Traditionally history of the Americas and American population has been taught in a direction heading west from Europe to the California frontier. In Recovering History, Constructing Race, Martha Mencahca locates the origins of the history of the Americas in a floral pattern where migration from Asia, Europe, and Africa both voluntary and forced converge magnetically in Mexico then spreads out again to the north and northeast. By creating this patters she complicates the idea of race, history, and nationality. The term Mexican, which today refers to a specific nationality in Central America, is instead used as a shared historic and cultural identity of a people who spread from Mexico across the southwest United States. To create this shared identity Menchaca carefully constructs the Mexican race from prehistoric records to current battles for Civil Rights. What emerges is a story in which Anglo-Americans become the illegal immigrants crossing the border into Texas and mestizo Mexicans can earn an upgrade in class distinction through heroic military acts. In short what emerges is a sometimes upside down always creative reinvention of history and the creation of the Mexican "race (?)".
Through analyzing the underlying themes of Zoot Suit it is clear that Pacheco isn't real because sometimes he is really there and other times only Henry can hear him. The press is shown to have a lot of digression and influences on public views but this freedom has allowed a door to open and for something or someone to stand up and fight for their beliefs and make them heard. If the true goal is to have equal treatment of all people no matter color they are, what sex god made them, or what style they choose wear on the outside then this goal will be achieved. The author gives a good representation of true Mexican American beliefs and brings Pacheco to life.
The 1959 novel, Pocho, by José Antonio Villarreal is an insightful cultural exposition told primarily from the vantage point of Richard Rubio, the coming-of-age son of immigrant Mexican parents who eventually settle in Santa Clara, California, after many seasons of migrant farm work. Although fiction, the story likely mirrors some of the experiences of the author who was born to migrant laborers in Los Angeles in 1924 and was himself a "pocho" - a child of the depression era Mexican-American transition. ("I am a Pocho," he said, "and we speak like this because here in California we make Castilian words out of English words." p 165)
7. MacLachlan, Colin M. and Jamie E. Rodriguez O. The Forging of the Cosmic Race: A Reinterpretation of Colonial Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
How to tame a wild tongue is an essay by Gloria Anzaldua. This essay focuses on the different types of Spanish people spoke, and in this case, Anzaldua focuses on losing an accent to adjust to the environment she was living in. The issue that was applied in this essay was that the Spanish she spoke wasn’t exactly considered “Spanish”. The essay was divided into different sections as where the author tries to let people know, her Spanish speaking language should be considered valid just like every other Spanish speaking language out there.
In the years following the Spanish conquests, the southwest region of the United States developed into Spanish colonial territory. Indians, Spaniards, and blacks occupied this territory in which the shortage of Spanish women led to the miscegenation of these cultures. The result of mixing these races was a homogenization of the people of various cultures that came to be called mestizos and mulattos who, like present day Mexican Americans, inherited two distinct cultures that would make their culture rich, yet somewhat confusi...
In essence, the corrido genre is legendary for its hard-bitten lyrics of drug traffickers plus gunfights, and moreover functions as a genus of musical tabloid, singing of regime dishonesty, the lives of émigrés in the United States, in addition to the scuffles of the Zapatista insurgency in Chiapas. Although principally anonymous to English speakers, narco corridos top the leading Latin charts and govern radio playlists equally in the United States as well as points south. Examining diverse recent studies, the authors present in-depth examinations at the songwriters who have changed groups like the trendy Tigres del Norte into permanent celebrities, as well as the upcoming artists who are hauling the narco corrido into the 21st. In proving for the poetry as well as social demonstration at the back the ornate lyrics of in...
Anzaldua grew up in the United States but spoke mostly Spanish, however, her essay discusses how the elements of language began to define her identity and culture. She was living in an English speaking environment, but was not White. She describes the difficulty of straddling the delicate changing language of Chicano Spanish. Chicano Spanish can even differ from state to state; these variations as well as and the whole Chicano language, is considered a lesser form of Spanish, which is where Anzaldua has a problem. The language a person speaks is a part...
As Rodriguez is looking back at the rise of his “public identity”, he realizes that “the loss implies the gain” (Rodriguez 35). He believes that losing a part of who you (such as your “mother tongue” is permitted since
The frustratingly reminiscent tone encompassed in Julia Alvarez’s “Bilingual Sestina” works to emphasize the author’s difficulties of assimilating into a new culture. When she looks back and reflects on her past memories in her hometown, she yearns for the same simplistic lifestyle. Correspondingly, the constant repetition of the six end words further expresses her conflictions as she must fuse together two different cultures to truly find her identity.
Crouch, Ned. Mexicans & Americans : Cracking The Cultural Code. NB Publishing, Inc., 2004. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 21 Nov. 2011.
The chupacabra was a fast a snicky dog type creature he was always lurking in the dark ready to strike. I am the chupacabra and it sucks goats blood for a living It also has scales and It looks like a big dog. It’s from Mexico and It originated from porta Ricco it sucks goats blood instead of eating them they can’t seem to catch the chupacabra.the three important things about the chupacabra are how dangerous it is, how many are there of its kind, how long has It lived for and how long does It live for?