Creating Culture, Performing Community: An Angahuan Wedding Story by Mintzi Auanda Martínez-Rivera

Creating Culture, Performing Community (Indiana University Press, 2025) explores the ways in which the people of Santo Santiago de Angahuan, a P’urhépecha community in the state of Michoacán, México, create and curate their cultural practices and how, by doing so, they perform what it means to be an active member of the P’urhépecha community. Through a deep ethnographic account of ritual practices, author Mintzi Auanda Martínez-Rivera, Assistant Professor of English (Folklore) and Latinx Studies at the Ohio State University, focuses on the tembuchakua, or wedding rituals, analyzing their creation, performance, and transformation within the P’urhépecha community. By proposing alternative approaches to understanding indigeneity, Martínez-Rivera showcases how people carefully transform their cultural practices and rearticulate and perform their identities.

Creating Culture, Performing Community is made freely available by Indiana University Press as an Open Access monograph.