latin american essays maclas

THE LATIN AMERICAN FASHION READER, Regina A. Root,
ed.,
New York: Berg Publishers, 2005.
Brian Turner
Randolph-Macon College
The Latin American Fashion Reader, edited by Regina A. Root, Associate
Professor of Hispanic Studies at The College of William and Mary, received the
Arthur P. Whitaker Prize at the MACLAS XXVII in Ponce, Puerto Rico, for the best
book published by a MACLAS member in 2004-2005. The volume is the first to
focus on Latin America in the Berg series “Dress, Body, Culture.” It includes
seventeen essays by specialists in history, anthropology, literature, women’s
studies, textiles and clothing, design and merchandising, and Latin American
studies and civilization. The essays range cross-temporally from the colonial
period to the contemporary fashion industry. While covering an extraordinary
range of topics and cultural forms, the volume successfully weaves together the
authors’ sophisticated theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches.
The book is organized into four multi-essay parts. Part one focuses on the
use of dress in colonial and early republican societies to mark ethnic, national,
and gender identities. Root’s essay, “Fashioning Independence: Gender, Dress
and Social Space in Postcolonial Argentina,” identifies women’s use, and
according to some observers abuse, of the giant peinetón, or comb, as an
adornment. With the peinetón, Root argues, women asserted their place in the
republican social order. That politicized assertion provoked its backlash, and by
the 1830s its use was interpreted by critics as immoral and anti-government.
Araceli Tinajero’s “Far Eastern Influences in Latin American Fashions” covers
much more historical time, reminding us that what we now call ‘globalization’
began at least as early as the establishment of the Manila-Acapulco trade in the
sixteenth century, and its cultural forms have influenced Latin American fashion
in a wide variety of ways.
The essays in part two provide nuanced explorations of “altered traditions”
of indigenous textile production, demonstrating that indigenous people have
agency in their interactions with the global tourist trade. Far from mourning the
loss of meaningful traditions, essays such as Blenda Femenías’ “‘Why do Gringos
Like Black’ Mourning Tourism, and Changing Fashions in Peru,” and Elyse
Demaray, Melody Keim-Shenk, and Mary A. Littrell’s “Representations of
Tradition in Latin American Boundary Textile Art,” show how highland weavers
are capable of promoting ethnic identity as well as commercializing their
production, although with a dynamic interplay that does indeed alter the
presentation and meaning of identity.
Part three, “Fashion and the Cultural Imaginary,” discusses the
intersection of fashion and national identity. Ruth Corcuera’s “Ponchos of the
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