Latin American Icons

Every night before Dora goes to bed she makes a wish on Little Star. You too can tell Little Star your wish! She will light up for a short time and then automatically shut off.

Latinos have contributed a tremendous amount to American cultural heritage, injecting energy, a unique style, and piquant flavor. This set profiles the big names from this century and the last who represent the highest achievement in their field and who have inspired, led, educated, informed, and entertained us. A diverse representation from the world of sports, entertainment, education, music, journalism, literature, and labor is offered. Biographical essays engagingly tell the story behind the icon, with background including family and education, career trajectory and highlights, and contributions and circumstances that have led to icon status. Along with these famous figures, several essays on other types of Latino pop culture icons—iconic characters from cartoons and comics and film and even iconic Latino foods—are included. Entertaining side bars and classic photos complement the essays. Perfect for student reports and browsing, with more in-depth coverage than an encyclopedia entry but less than a full biography, there is something fascinating and informative here for everyone. Readers will find that that a number of the icons profiled were influenced by other icons profiled or have an important connection to one another. For example, Tito Puente and Celia Cruz performed together for many years. Actress Jennifer Lopez portrayed the singer Selena in a biopic. Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta made the United Farm Workers union a reality. Furthermore, in telling the story of these icons, each essay relates so much of the historical and social issues of the times. Thus, together, these essays offer a good sense of recent Latino and Latin American history and progress. Icons include Desi Arnaz; Ruben Blades; Fabiola Cabeza de Baca; Cesar Chavez; Chiles, Tortillas, and the Mexican Food Explosion; Sandra Cisneros; Roberto Clemente; Celia Cruz; Placido Domingo; Jaime Escalante; Gordo, Speedy Gonzales, Dora the Explorer, Bondo, and La Cucaracha; Dolores Huerta; Jennifer Lopez; Rita Moreno; Edward James Olmos; Tito Puente; Ruben Salazar; Carlos Santana; Cristina Saralegui; Selena; Lee Trevino; Luis Valdez; Ritchie Valens; and Zorro.

The faces of Che, Frida, Evita, Carmen Miranda, and other icons represent Latin America both to a global public that sees these faces constantly reproduced, and to Latin Americans themselves. They enter the circulation machines of Hollywood, or work as nostalgic definitions of a nation, or define a post-national condition. They become stereotypes as they go global, and the often melodramatic stories that cling to them give them a different sort of power than the one they had in their original contexts. Latin American Icons, from critics both in the United States and in Latin America, ask these faces questions; they describe the technologies and propaganda machines, whether the newspapers of Revolutionary Mexico (or Paris and New York) or the movie studios of Argentina and Mexico, which gave them power in their local context; and they return their original histories to those faces that have become abstract symbols of The Rebel or The Spitfire or The Tortured Artist. In equal parts idolatry and iconoclasm, Latin American Icons recognizes and interrogates those Latin Americans who have become larger than life. In trying to understand the meaning of iconic figures in modern Latin America, this volume ranges across every realm of political and cultural life--populist politicos, jet-setting ambassador-playboys, soccer players and superstars--to examine the complex forces at work in the making and re-making of celebrities within and across national borders.

This insightful book introduces the most important trends, people, events, and products of popular culture in Latin America and the Caribbean. In recent times, Latin American influences have permeated American culture through music, movies, television, and literature. This sweeping volume serves as a ready-reference guide to pop culture in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, focusing on Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Costa Rica, among other areas. The work encourages hands-on engagement with the popular culture in these places, making such suggestions as Brazilian films to rent or where to find Venezuelan music on the Internet. To start, the book covers various perspectives and issues of these regions, including the influence of the United States, how the idea of machismo reflects on the portrayal of women in these societies, and the representation of Latino-Caribo cultures in film and other mediums. Entries cover key trends, people, events, and products from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day. Each section gives detailed information and profound insights into some of the more academic—and often controversial—debates on the subject, while the inclusion of the Internet, social media, and video games make the book timely and relevant.

What do Madonna, Ray Charles, Mount Rushmore, suburbia, the banjo, and the Ford Mustang have in common? Whether we adore, ignore, or deplore them, they all influence our culture, and color the way America is perceived by the world. In this A-to-Z collection of essays scholars explore more than one hundred people, places, and phenomena as they seek to discover what it means to be labeled icon. From the Alamo to Muhammad Ali, from John Wayne to the zipper, the American icons covered in this unique three-volume set include subjects from culture, law, art, food, religion, and science. By providing numerous ways for the reader to engage in the process of interpreting these images and artifacts, the work serves as a unique resource for students of American history and culture. Features 100 illustrations. What do Madonna, Ray Charles, Mount Rushmore, suburbia, the banjo, and the Ford Mustang have in common? Whether we adore, ignore, or deplore them, they all influence our culture, and color the way America is perceived by the world. This A-to-Z collection of essays explores more than one hundred people, places, and phenomena that have taken on iconic status in American culture. The scholars and writers whose thoughts are gathered in this unique three-volume set examine these icons through a diverse array of perspectives and fields of expertise. Ranging from the Alamo to Muhammad Ali, from John Wayne to the zipper, this selection of American icons represents essential elements of our culture, including law, art, food, religion, and science. Featuring more than 100 illustrations, this work will serve as a unique resource for students of American history and culture. The interdisciplinary scholars in this work examine what it means when something is labeled as an icon. What common features do the people, places, and things we deem to be iconic share? To begin with, an icon generates strong responses in people, it often stands for a group of values (John Wayne), it reflects forces of its time, it can be reshaped or extended by imitation, and it often breaks down barriers between various segments of American culture, such as those that exist between white and black America, or between high and low art. The essays contained in this set examine all these aspects of American icons from a variety of perspectives and through a lively range of rhetoric styles.

Shedding light on the historicity of icons to reframe the history of the screen and dissect the visual core of a medium that is still poorly understood, this book presents new ways of seeing the mechanisms at work in our modern pictorial culture.

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.