Chicano and Chicana Literature

Chicano and Chicana Literature PDF Author: Charles M. Tatum
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816549982
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Book Description
The literary culture of the Spanish-speaking Southwest has its origins in a harsh frontier environment marked by episodes of intense cultural conflict, and much of the literature seeks to capture the epic experiences of conquest and settlement. The Chicano literary canon has evolved rapidly over four centuries to become one of the most dynamic, growing, and vital parts of what we know as contemporary U.S. literature. In this comprehensive examination of Chicano and Chicana literature, Charles M. Tatum brings a new and refreshing perspective to the ethnic identity of Mexican Americans. From the earliest sixteenth-century chronicles of the Spanish Period, to the poetry and narrative fiction of the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, and then to the flowering of all literary genres in the post–Chicano Movement years, Chicano/a literature amply reflects the hopes and aspirations as well as the frustrations and disillusionments of an often marginalized population. Exploring the work of Rudolfo Anaya, Sandra Cisneros, Luis Alberto Urrea, and many more, Tatum examines the important social, historical, and cultural contexts in which the writing evolved, paying special attention to the Chicano Movement and the flourishing of literary texts during the 1960s and early 1970s. Chapters provide an overview of the most important theoretical and critical approaches employed by scholars over the past forty years and survey the major trends and themes in contemporary autobiography, memoir, fiction, and poetry. The most complete and up-to-date introduction to Chicana/o literature available, this book will be an ideal reference for scholars of Hispanic and American literature. Discussion questions and suggested reading included at the end of each chapter are especially suited for classroom use.

Chicano Nations

Chicano Nations PDF Author: Marissa K. López
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814753299
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
Chicano Nations argues that the trans-nationalism 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 labouring 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. Lopez locates the origins of Chicano literature, which is now and always has been post-national, encompassing the wealthy, the poor, the white, and the mestizo. Tracing the long history of Chicano literature 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. Lopez argues that while national and global tensions lie at the historical heart of Chicana/o narratives of the nation, there should be alternative ways to imagine the significance of Chicano literature other than as a reflection of national identity.In a nuanced analysis, the book provides a way to think of early writers as a meaningful part of Chicano literary history, and, in looking at the nation, rather than the particularities of identity, as that which connects Chicano literature over time, it engages the emerging hemispheric scholarship on U.S. literature.

Chicano Identity in Chicano Fiction

Chicano Identity in Chicano Fiction PDF Author: Markus Widmer
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640202716
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 29

Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 1998 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2 (B), University of Aberdeen (English Department), course: Chicano Fiction, 9 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: In this essay, I will address the question of Chicano identity by investigating two very different texts, that both deal with a quest for identity in a Mexican-American context: Tomás Rivera's ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him and Richard Rodriguez' Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. I will first discuss the contextual differences between the two works. Then I will consider the definitions of identity upon which the texts are based. Going deeper into the works themselves, I will finally discuss along which lines the two quests for identity develop. In conclusion, I will connect my investigations to the question of whether Chicano identity is unified or fragmented. Both Tomás Rivera's ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him and Richard Rodriguez' Hunger of Memory are about an individual searching for his identity. In both works, the protagonist is a Mexican-American or 'Chicano'. However, the differences between the two books are huge. The generic difference is most obvious: Rivera's work is a fictional narrative, which Héctor Calderón termed 'novel-as-tales'.1 Rodriguez, referring to his book, speaks of '[e]ssays impersonating an autobiography' (p. 7). This entails that the subject searching for identity is, in Rodriguez' case, the author himself, or rather his literary image. In Rivera's case, the subject is purely fictional, although some critics have identified this literary subject with the author.

Somewhere Between Bitter and Sweet

Somewhere Between Bitter and Sweet PDF Author: Laekan Zea Kemp
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 0316460311
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description
I'm Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter meets Emergency Contact in this stunning Pura Belpré Honor Book about first love, familial expectations, the power of food, and finding where you belong. Penelope Prado has always dreamed of opening her own pastelería next to her father's restaurant, Nacho's Tacos. But her mom and dad have different plans—leaving Pen to choose between not disappointing her traditional Mexican American parents or following her own path. When she confesses a secret she's been keeping, her world is sent into a tailspin. But then she meets a cute new hire at Nacho's who sees through her hard exterior and asks the questions she's been too afraid to ask herself. Xander Amaro has been searching for home since he was a little boy. For him, a job at Nacho's is an opportunity for just that—a chance at a normal life, to settle in at his abuelo's, and to find the father who left him behind. But when both the restaurant and Xander's immigrant status are threatened, he will do whatever it takes to protect his newfound family and himself. Together, Pen and Xander must navigate first love and discovering where they belong in order to save the place they all call home. This stunning and poignant novel from debut author Laekan Zea Kemp explores identity, found families and the power of food, all nestled within a courageous and intensely loyal Chicanx community.

Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff

Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff PDF Author: Sara Borjas
Publisher: Noemi Press
ISBN: 9781934819791
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Poetry. California Interest. Latinx Studies. HEART LIKE A WINDOW, MOUTH LIKE A CLIFF is a transgressive, yet surprisingly tender confrontation of what it means to want to flee the thing you need most. The speaker struggles through cultural assimilation and the pressure to "act" Mexican while dreaming of the privileges of whiteness. Borjas holds cultural traditions accountable for the gendered denial of Chicanas to individuate and love deeply without allowing one's love to consume the self. This is nothing new. This is colonization working through relationships within Chicanx families--how we learn love and perform it, how we filter it though alcohol abuse--how ultimately, we oppress the people we love most. This collection simultaneously reveres and destroys nostalgia, slips out of the story after a party where the reader can find God "drunk and dreaming." Think golden oldiez meets the punk attitude of No Doubt. Think pochas sipping gin martinis in lowriders cruising down Who Gives a Fuck Boulevard.

Chicana/o and Latina/o Fiction

Chicana/o and Latina/o Fiction PDF Author: Ylce Irizarry
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252098072
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Book Description
In this new study, Ylce Irizarry moves beyond literature that prioritizes assimilation to examine how contemporary fiction depicts being Cuban, Dominican, Mexican, or Puerto Rican within Chicana/o and Latina/o America. Irizarry establishes four dominant categories of narrative--loss, reclamation, fracture, and new memory--that address immigration, gender and sexuality, cultural nationalisms, and neocolonialism. As she shows, narrative concerns have moved away from the weathered notions of arrival and assimilation. Contemporary Chicana/o and Latina/o literatures instead tell stories that have little, if anything, to do with integration into the Anglo-American world. The result is the creation of new memory. This reformulation of cultural membership unmasks the neocolonial story and charts the conscious engagement of cultural memory. It outlines the ways contemporary Chicana/o and Latina/o communities create belonging and memory of their ethnic origins. An engaging contribution to an important literary tradition, Chicana/o and Latina/o Fiction privileges the stories Chicanas/os and Latinas/os remember about themselves rather than the stories of those subjugating them. NACCS Book Award, National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies, 2018; MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies, Modern Language Association, 2017

Youth, Identity, Power

Youth, Identity, Power PDF Author: Carlos Muñoz
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9780860919131
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
Youth, Identity, Power is a study of the origins and development of Chicano radicalism in America. Written by a leader of the Chicano Student Movement of the 1960s who also played a role in the creation of the wider Chicano Power Movement, this is the first fill-length work to appear on the subject. It fills an important gap in the history of political protest in the United States. The author places the Chicano movement in the wider context of the political development of Mexicans and their descendants in the US, tracing the emergence of Chicano student activists in the 1930s and their initial challenge to the dominant racial and class ideologies of the time. Munoz then documents the rise and fall of the Chicano Power Movement, situating the student protests of the sixties within the changing political scene of the time, and assessing the movement's contribution to the cultural development of the Chicano population as a whole. He concludes with an account of Chicano politics in the 1980s. Youth, Identity, Power was named an Outstanding Book on Human Rights in the United States by the Gustavus Myers Center in 1990.

Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes

Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes PDF Author: Juan JosŽ Alonzo
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 9780816528684
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Book Description
Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes is a comparative study of the literary and cinematic representation of Mexican American masculine identity from early twentieth-century adventure stories and movie Westerns through contemporary self-representations by Chicano/a writers and filmmakers. In this deeply compelling book, Juan J. Alonzo proposes a reconsideration of the early stereotypical depictions of Mexicans in fiction and film: rather than viewing stereotypes as unrelentingly negative, Alonzo presents them as part of a complex apparatus of identification and disavowal. Furthermore, Alonzo reassesses Chicano/a self-representation in literature and film, and argues that the Chicano/a expression of identity is characterized less by essentialism than by an acknowldgement of the contingent status of present-day identity formations. Alonzo opens his provocative study with a fresh look at the adventure stories of Stephen Crane and the silent Western movies of D. W. Griffith. He also investigates the conflation of the greaser, the bandit, and the Mexican revolutionary into one villainous figure in early Western movies and, more broadly, traces the development of the badman in Westerns. He newly interrogates the writings of AmŽrico Paredes regarding the makeup of Mexican masculinity, and productively trains his analytic eye on the recent films of Jim Mendiola and the contemporary poetry of Evangelina Vigil. Throughout Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes, Alonzo convincingly demonstrates how fiction and films that formerly appeared one-dimensional in their treatment of Mexicans and Mexican Americans actually offer surprisingly multifarious and ambivalent representations. At the same time, his valuation of indeterminacy, contingency, and hybridity in contemporary cultural production creates new possibilities for understanding identity formation.

Chicana/o Subjectivity and the Politics of Identity

Chicana/o Subjectivity and the Politics of Identity PDF Author: C. Gallego
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780230111356
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
This book traces the influence of Hegel's theory of recognition on different literary representations of Chicano/a subjectivity, with the aim of demonstrating how the identity thinking characteristic of Hegel's theory is unwillingly reinforced even in subjects that are represented as rebelling against liberal-humanist ideologies.

Barrio-Logos

Barrio-Logos PDF Author: Raúl Villa
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 9780292787421
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Book Description
Struggles over space and resistance to geographic displacement gave rise to much of Chicano history and culture. In this pathfinding book, Raúl Villa explores how California Chicano/a writers, journalists, artists, activists, and musicians have used expressive culture to oppose the community-destroying forces of urban renewal programs and massive freeway development and to create and defend a sense of Chicano place-identity. Villa opens with a historical overview that shows how Chicano communities and culture have developed in response to conflicts over space ever since the United States’ annexation of Mexican territory in the 1840s. Then, turning to the work of contemporary members of the Chicano intelligentsia such as poet Lorna Dee Cervantes, novelist Ron Arias, and the art collective RCAF (Rebel Chicano Art Front), Villa demonstrates how their expressive practices re-imagine and re-create the dominant urban space as a community enabling place. In doing so, he illuminates the endless interplay in which cultural texts and practices are shaped by and act upon their social and political contexts.