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Inventing the Fiesta City: Heritage and Carnival in San Antonio. By Laura Hernández-Ehrisman. (Albuquerque: Published by University of New Mexico Press in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University, c. 2008. Pp. x, 238. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8263-4310-9.)
In Inventing the Fiesta City: Heritage and Carnival in San Antonio, Laura Hernández-Ehrisman recounts the history of San Antonio's Fiesta, the annual commemoration of the battle of San Jacinto that won Texas's independence from Mexico in 1836. By the mid-twentieth century, Fiesta was a days-long civic celebration that featured parades, street fairs, carnival rides, beauty pageants, and a debutante ball. As Hernández-Ehrisman convincingly demonstrates, Fiesta was far from a frivolous occasion for urban revelry; rather, it was always at the center of "changing power relations between women and men and Anglos and Mexicanos in defining the city's public culture" (p. 14).
The gender component of Fiesta is Hernández-Ehrisman's first theme. For the elite white women of San Antonio who started the Battle of Flowers Parade in...