Mexican American Literature

A collection of articles, poems and book excerpts reflecting the Chicano heritage and culture, and the modern problems and struggles of Mexican Americans.

"This brand-new anthology presents essential works by fifty Mexican American authors - from Américo Paredes to Josefina López."--

Presenting an up-to-date critical perspective as well as a cultural, political and historical context, this book is an excellent introduction to Mexican American literature, affording readers the major novels, drama and poetry. This volume presents fresh and original readings of major works, and with its historiographic and cultural analyses, impressively delivers key information to the reader.

Chicano Nations argues that the transnationalism that is central to Chicano identity originated in the global, postcolonial moment at the turn of the nineteenth century rather than as an effect of contemporary economic conditions, which began in the mid nineteenth century and primarily affected the laboring classes. The Spanish empire then began to implode, and colonists in the “new world” debated the national contours of the viceroyalties. This is where Marissa K. López locates the origins of Chicano literature, which is now and always has been “postnational,” encompassing the wealthy, the poor, the white, and the mestizo. Tracing its long history and the diversity of subject positions it encompasses, Chicano Nations explores the shifting literary forms authors have used to write the nation from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries.

Mexican American literature brings a much-needed approach to the increasingly urgent challenges of climate change and environmental injustice. Although current environmental studies work to develop new concepts, Writing the Goodlife looks to long-established traditions of thought that have existed in Mexican American literary history for the past century and a half. During that time period, Mexican American writing consistently shifts the focus from the environmentally destructive settler values of individualism, domination, and excess toward the more beneficial refrains of community, non-possessiveness, and humility. The decolonial approaches found in these writings provide rich examples of mutually respectful relations between humans and nature, an approach that Priscilla Solis Ybarra calls "goodlife" writing. Goodlife writing has existed for at least the past century, Ybarra contends, but Chicana/o literary history's emphasis on justice and civil rights eclipsed this tradition and hidden it from the general public's view. Likewise, in ecocriticism, the voices of people of color most often appear in deliberations about environmental justice. The quiet power of goodlife writing certainly challenges injustice, to be sure, but it also brings to light the decolonial environmentalism heretofore obscured in both Chicana/o literary history and environmental literary studies. Ybarra's book takes on two of today's most discussed topics--the worsening environmental crisis and the rising Latino population in the United States--and puts them in literary-historical context from the U.S.-Mexico War up to today's controversial policies regarding climate change, immigration, and ethnic studies. This book uncovers 150 years' worth of Mexican American and Chicana/o knowledge and practices that inspire hope in the face of some of today's biggest challenges.

Ends of Assimilation examines how Chicano literature imagines the conditions and costs of cultural change, arguing that its thematic preoccupation with assimilation illuminates the function of literature. John Alba Cutler shows how mid-century sociologists advanced a model of assimilation thatignored the interlinking of race, gender, and sexuality and characterized American culture as homogeneous, stable, and exceptional. He demonstrates how Chicano literary works from the postwar period to the present understand culture as dynamic and self-consciously promote literature as a medium forinfluencing the direction of cultural change. With original analyses of works by canonical and noncanonical writers - from Americo Paredes, Sandra Cisneros, and Jimmy Santiago Baca to Estela Portillo Trambley, Alfredo Vea, and Patricia Santana - Ends of Assimilation demands that we reevaluate assimilation, literature, and the very language weuse to talk about culture.

This interdisciplinary study explores how US Mexicana and Chicana authors and artists across different historical periods and regions use domestic space to actively claim their own histories. Through "negotiation"--a concept that accounts for artistic practices outside the duality of resistance/accommodation--and "self-fashioning," Marci R. McMahon demonstrates how the very sites of domesticity are used to engage the many political and recurring debates about race, gender, and immigration affecting Mexicanas and Chicanas from the early twentieth century to today. Domestic Negotiations covers a range of archival sources and cultural productions, including the self-fashioning of the "chili queens" of San Antonio, Texas, Jovita González's romance novel Caballero, the home economics career and cookbooks of Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, Sandra Cisneros's "purple house controversy" and her acclaimed text The House on Mango Street, Patssi Valdez's self-fashioning and performance of domestic space in Asco and as a solo artist, Diane Rodríguez's performance of domesticity in Hollywood television and direction of domestic roles in theater, and Alma López's digital prints of domestic labor in Los Angeles. With intimate close readings, McMahon shows how Mexicanas and Chicanas shape domestic space to construct identities outside of gendered, racialized, and xenophobic rhetoric.

Key Terms in Latino/a Cultural and Literary Studies is an indispensable reference source comprised of hundreds of key terms central to this important and developing field. A one-stop resource for students and teachers working in the rapidly developing fields of Latino/a cultural and literary studies Comprised of a glossary of hundreds of terms central to this important field - from "Americanization", "AIDS" and "Cultural Imperialism" to"Rap and Hip Hop" and "Zoot-Suit Riots" Represents and captures the interdisciplinary and international nature of Latino/a Studies An indispensable reference for anyone who needs a helpful guide to this dynamic and flourishing area of study.

Mexican and Mexican American women have written about Texas and their lives in the state since colonial times. Edited by fellow Tejanas Ines Hernandez-Avila and Norma Elia Cantu;, Entre Guadalupe y Malinche gathers, for the first time, a representative body of work about the lives and experiences of women who identify as Tejanas in both the literary and visual arts. The writings of more than fifty authors and the artwork of eight artists manifest the nuanced complexity of what it means to be Tejana and how this identity offers alternative perspectives to contemporary notions of Chicana identity, community, and culture. Considering Texas-Mexican women and their identity formations, subjectivities, and location on the longest border between Mexico and any of the southwestern states acknowledges the profound influence that land and history have on a people and a community, and how Tejana creative traditions have been shaped by historical, geographical, cultural, linguistic, social, and political forces.