2025 Recipient

Masha Salazkina

Romancing Yesenia: How a Mexican Melodrama Shaped Global Popular Culture

Established in 1983, the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, sponsored by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at Stanford University, is awarded annually for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences published in English in the United States in the previous calendar year. 

Winner: Masha Salazkina, Romancing Yesenia: How a Mexican Melodrama Shaped Global Popular Culture (University of California Press, 2024)  

In her pioneering Romancing Yesenia, Masha Salazkina unearths and theorizes a global popular culture circuit that catapulted the Mexican melodramatic film Yesenia into unexpected blockbuster status in the Soviet Union of the 1970s. Equally at home in the history of Mexican cultural production from which Yesenia emerged and in the Soviet popular culture that received it with such enthusiasm, Salazkina’s book sparkles with sharp, unexpected insights into the intersections of gender, sentimentality, fashion, popular culture, and mass production/consumption in global contexts. Moreover, it does so in clear and jargon-free prose, drawing readers along joyfully into a riveting solution to the puzzle of Mexican melodramas’ popularity in the Soviet Union—a puzzle that has long hovered just on the edges of the vision of scholars from many disciplines in our field. The book moves away from Western-centric narratives about the place of the Global North in popular imaginations of Communist countries’ citizens, instead zooming in on the cultural ties and soft power of the Global South, from India to Mexico. Often sorely at odds with official Communist ideology, the sentimental appeal of bourgeois dramas, actors, and theatrics speaks powerfully to the agency of ordinary citizens to create footprints in cross-national cultural ties. Romancing Yesenia sets a new agenda for what the study of popular culture—Soviet and global—can achieve.  

Winner: Benjamin Nathans

Honorable Mention: Agnieszka Pasieka

Prize Committee: Douglas Rogers (chair), Sibelan Forrester, Tomila Lankina, and Willard Sunderland