Available From UC Press

Chapultepec Girls weaves together threads of cultural, intellectual, and social history to examine how girls articulated a unique and previously unacknowledged vision of Mexican American culture and politics distinct from—and in some cases directly oppositional to—the political cultures of adult male-led Mexican organizations. Through a vivid microhistory of Club Feminino Chapultepec, a Houston-based organization, this book identifies Mexican American girls’ radical politics in manifestos, speeches, organized labor actions, as well as in the choreography of folk-dance expositions, the planning of enchilada dinner fundraisers and birthday party entertainment, and in the contours of everyday working-class life. Chapultepec Girls reinterprets pochitas not as culturally delinquent or even passive victims but as a social and political vanguard, embedded within a sprawling, transnational web of activists, scholars, and political organizations that stretched from New York City to Mexico City and beyond.

Jordan Villegas-Verrone is Assistant Professor of History at Southern Methodist University.