A01=Luis D. Leon
A01=Luis Leon
academic
Author_Luis D. Leon
Author_Luis Leon
belief
borderlands
Category=QR
chicano
east los angeles
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
erotic
ethnicity
faith
god
goddess
healing
international
jesus
la virgen de guadalupe
mesoamerica
mesoamerican
mestiza
mexican culture
mexico
mexico city
poetics
race
racial issues
racism
religion
religious studies
scholarly
scholarship
sexuality
survival
united states
us mexico border
Product details
- ISBN 9780520223516
- Weight: 499g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 29 Apr 2004
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Luis D. Leon's compelling, innovative exploration of religion in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands issues a fundamental challenge to current scholarship in the field and recharts the landscape of Chicano faith. La Llorona's Children constructs genealogies of the major traditions spanning Mexico City, East Los Angeles, and the southwestern United States: Guadalupe devotion, curanderismo, espiritualismo, and evangelical/ Pentecostal traditions. Leon theorizes a religious poetics that functions as an effective and subversive survival tactic akin to crossing the U.S.-Mexican border. He claims that, when examined in terms of broad categorical religious forms and intentions, these traditions are remarkably alike and resonate religious ideas and practices developed in the ancient Mesoamerican world. Leon proposes what he calls a borderlands reading of La Virgen de Guadalupe as a transgressive, border-crossing goddess in her own right, a mestiza deity who displaces Jesus and God for believers on both sides of the border.
His energetic discussion of curanderismo shows how this indigenous religious practice links cognition and sensation in a fresh and powerful technology of the body--one where sensual, erotic, and sexualized ways of knowing emphasize personal and communal healing. La Llorona's Children ends with a fascinating study of the rich and complex world of Chicano/a Pentecostalism in Los Angeles, a tradition that Leon maintains allows Chicano men to reimagine their bodies into a unified social body through ritual performance. Throughout the narrative, the connections among sacred spaces, saints, healers, writers, ideas, and movements are woven with skill, inspiration, and insight.
Luis D. Leon is visiting assistant professor in Ethnic Studies and Religious Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
