Jose E. Limon, in Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas, identifies himself as "an anthropological folklorist" (ix). He qualifies himself in personal terms with reference to his lower-working-class background among "the people of Mexican descent of southern Texas." The basic issues of his unique work are
the primacy of the Church; the "superstitious" character of Mexicans; the unquestioned rule of "anglos"; the "natural" submissiveness of women; the monolithic character of Mexican culture itself (x).
This personal background melded with his educational training at the University of Texas at Austin, the UCLA Chicano Studies Center, the Stanford University Humanities Center, and other universities and grant programs which furthered his education and allowed him to develop and complete this fascinating book.
Limon's book is unique because he makes himself, his life, and his passions, along with the lives and passions of his subjects, the center of his work. He seeks to understand in this work the culture of Mexican-Americans in South Texas as a culture and as a part of the larger white culture which dominates the Mexican-American culture. Because he approaches the study with his eye focused on the "poetics" of culture, Limon's work includes a great variety of topics, as does "poetics" itself, as Limon writes:
. . . A key interpretive concept in my subtitle--"cultural poetics" or the "poetics of culture"--referring to acts of cultural interpretation focused on aesthetically salient, culturally embedded textualities and enactments. . . . What I propose to offer in these pages is a cultural poetics of cultural poetics (14),
In other words, everything in the culture at hand is open for inclusion in his study, although, of course, he focuses on selected elements, particularly the devil as it is perceived by the denizens of the culture, machoism, the war between the sexes, t...