Located in southern Texas near the site of the U.S.-Mexico border, the city of Laredo remains one rich in celebration. For Norma E. Cantú—a lifelong folklorist, scholar of the borderlands, and author of Fiestas in Laredo: Matachines, Quinceañeras, and George Washington’s Birthday—Laredo is not merely her hometown, but also a place steeped in intricate traditions. These traditions maintain community engagement and cultural continuity through faith-based and coming-of-age celebrations, as well as community festivals. As indicated by the book’s title, Cantú explores three individual traditions found within Laredo’s cultural life: la fiesta de Matachines, la fiesta de quinceañera, and la fiesta de George Washington. More precisely, it is through these noteworthy celebrations that Cantú examines how the cultural productions emerging from marginalized, particularly Latinx and migrant, communities in Laredo serve to strengthen community bonds and affirm their cultural identity. In doing so, Fiestas in Laredo also “offers a peek into traditions and contested spaces that often provide a counternarrative to the settler colonialism that the fiestas signify” (2). As Cantú points out, while the celebrations themselves are imbued with colonial legacies, ongoing systems of domination—intolerant of marginalized cultural expression—seek their erasure and devaluation. These same forces also work to sever Latinx and migrant peoples from their cultural heritage through processes of acculturation. Thus, Cantú demonstrates how the three fiestas offer varied avenues for community building, cultural affirmation, and resistance through the public celebration of historically disfavored identities.
Inspired by her experiences as both an eager participant and captivated spectator of these fiestas, Cantú draws from an insider’s perspective to illuminate the communal significance and cultural impact of each tradition. Building on this positionality, she turns to creative autoethnography—or the interweaving of personal recollections and reflections with cultural analysis—to offer readers individual insight into the layered meanings of these celebrations. Bridging the individual and intellectual, Cantú introduces a concept she developed: sentipensante folkloristics—an approach to folklore that “seeks to consider the whole human being, with both feeling and thinking having equal weight,” thereby diverging from traditional frameworks that privilege rationality over affect (10). This approach not only allows for the discussion of intellectual knowledge, but also of personal narrative and a nuanced analysis of each tradition—one that embraces the embodied dimensions of the Matachines, the spiritual and political significance of quinceañeras, and the complex, contradicting thoughts and emotions surrounding the celebration of George Washington’s Birthday.
Grounded in memory and folkloristic analysis, Cantú also incorporates vivid “images” as well as “scholarship, and a collaborative research practice” that, for example, consists of pláticas with community members (16). Alongside this methodology, Cantú integrates Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands framework, which theorizes the liminal, in-between space—nepantla—where two worlds collide and coexist. Within this framework, Cantú offers a distinct analysis of transfronteriza, or “cross-border cultural expressions,” through which the three Laredo-based fiestas can be understood as layered and hybrid in terms of cultural identifiers (12). Put differently, these celebrations are not always strictly religious or secular, Indigenous or Spanish, Mexican or United Statesian, but rather a blending of these elements. All in all, it is through these methodological and theoretical pairings that the author comprehensively investigates the intricacy and uniqueness of Laredo’s cultural traditions, and how they allow for pleasure and a sense of togetherness amid pervasive oppressive structures.
In the first chapter of Fiestas in Laredo, Cantú assesses la fiesta de Matachines, a Catholic dance occurring every May to honor the Holy Cross and every December to celebrate the Virgen de Guadalupe’s feast day. In this section, she explores the historical and precolonial roots of the embodied tradition, identifying its Indigenous and Spanish influences and examining the cultural mestizaje, or hybridity, of the tradition. Despite ongoing efforts to erase and forget an Indigenous past, this dance endures through the honoring of social roles and the intentional transmission of tradition across generations. Thus, Cantú reveals that it is through the continuation of la fiesta de Matachines that a vital aspect of the community’s identity is reaffirmed and that social relations are nurtured.
Following this chapter, Cantú delves into la fiesta de quinceañera, observing it as a ceremony that indicates a young woman’s change of social status within the family and community context. Using a Third Space Chicana Feminist approach, Cantú shows that the fiesta serves as a site of both transition and Chicana resistance, where young women enter a realm of awareness and navigate new gendered expectations upon entering womanhood. On a broader scale, this celebration relies on the efforts of others, whether familial or not, serving as a tool for unification and a means of expressing cultural identity. In the third chapter, Cantú examines la fiesta de George Washington, or George Washington’s Birthday—a celebration with complicated origins rooted in efforts by colonizing powers to suppress Mexican and Indigenous cultures in the area. Although the celebration’s initial purpose was to promote Americanization, Cantú analyzes its evolution and its role in signifying the community’s past and shaping its contemporary sense of collective self.
As demonstrated, Fiestas in Laredo is a book that thoughtfully examines the many roles of three momentous celebrations held in Laredo, Texas. Through a sentipensante folkloristic approach, Cantú guides readers through a deeply introspective and critical analysis of traditions that function uniquely in her life and the lives of Latinx and migrant communities in this specific border town, one that exists in a constant state of nepantla. As readers may note, Fiestas in Laredo incorporates a variety of cultural forms; however, this variability limits the time available to explore and analyze each tradition. Despite this, Cantú masterfully reveals the unifying nature of all three traditions, regardless of their separate historical and social meanings. In this book, readers witness Cantú’s embodiment of a folklorist—a curious scholar who seeks to understand, document, and honor the cultural expressions that bring communities together and sustain their cultural identity. Here, Cantú encourages fellow scholars to do the same, enheartening others to adopt an inquisitiveness that enables a meaningful exploration of cultural productions shaped by resilience and joy.
[Review Length: 1007 words • Review posted on November 22, 2025]