Chicana / Chicano Studies

As the descendants of Mexican immigrants have settled throughout the United States, a great literature has emerged, but its correspondences with the literature of Mexico have gone largely unobserved. In Bordering Fires, the first anthology to combine writing from both sides of the Mexican-U.S. border, Cristina García presents a richly diverse cross-cultural conversation. Beginning with Mexican masters such as Alfonso Reyes and Juan Rulfo, García highlights historic voices such as “the godfather of Chicano literature” Rudolfo Anaya, and Gloria Anzaldœa, who made a powerful case for language that reflects bicultural experience. From the fierce evocations of Chicano reality in Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Poem IX to the breathtaking images of identity in Coral Bracho’s poem “Fish of Fleeting Skin,” from the work of Carlos Fuentes to Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo to Octavio Paz, this landmark collection of fiction, essays, and poetry offers an exhilarating new vantage point on our continent–and on the best of contemporary literature.

An excellent resource on the subject. Recommended for all libraries supporting research in Chicano literature. Reference Book Review

This award-winning multi-volume series is dedicated to making literature and its creators better understood and more accessible to students and interested readers, while satisfying the standards of librarians, teachers and scholars. Dictionary of Literary Biography provides reliable information in an easily comprehensible format, while placing writers in the larger perspective of literary history. Dictionary of Literary Biography systematically presents career biographies and criticism of writers from all eras and all genres through volumes dedicated to specific types of literature and time periods. For a listing of Dictionary of Literary Biography volumes sorted by genre click here.

Dictionary of Chicano Folklore charts the rich religious, social, artistic, and cultural heritage of Mexican Americans, who continue to evolve the customs and rituals connected to their Spanish and indigenous roots and the Spanish language. * Over 200 A–Z entries defining historical and contemporary terms, customs, legends, and rituals * 44 photos * Extensive bibliography

Home Girls makes an original, bold, and significant contribution to feminist studies, Chicana/o studies, and literature. Quintana accomplishes what few critics in Chicana/o studies have done: she applies different interpretive paradigms to her reading of Chicana texts, blending ethnography with literary criticism, ideological analysis with semiotics. Her reading of literary texts is rich in texture and detail. --Rosa Linda Fregoso, author of Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film CultureChicana writers in the United States write to inspire social change, to challenge a patriarchal and homophobic culture, to redefine traditional gender roles, to influence the future. Alvina E. Quintana examines how Chicana writers engage literary convention through fiction, poetry, drama, and autobiography as a means of addressing these motives. Her analysis of the writings of Gloria Anzaldua, Ana Castillo, Denise Chavez, Sandra Cisneros, and Cherrie Moraga addresses a multitude of issues: the social and political forces that influenced the Chicana aesthetic; Chicana efforts to open a dialogue about the limitation of both Anglo-American feminism and Chicano nationalism; experimentations with content and form; the relationship between imaginative writing and self-reflexive ethnography; and performance, domesticity, and sexuality. Employing anthropological, feminist, historical, and literary sources, Quintana explores the continuity found among Chicanas writing across varied genres--a drive to write themselves into being.

This book provides a long-needed overview of the Chicana and Chicano movement's social history as it grew, flourished, and then slowly fragmented. The authors examine the movement's origins in the 1960s and 1970s, showing how it evolved from a variety of organizations and activities united in their quest for basic equities for Mexican Americans in U.S. society. Within this matrix of agendas, objectives, strategies, approaches, ideologies, and identities, numerous electrifying moments stitched together the struggle for civil and human rights. Gomez-Quinones and Vasquez show how these convergences underscored tensions among diverse individuals and organizations at every level. Their narrative offers an assessment of U.S. society and the Mexican American community at a critical time, offering a unique understanding of its civic progress toward a more equitable social order."

Mythohistorical Interventions explores how myth and history impacted the social struggle of the Chicano movement and the postmovement years. Drawing on archival materials and political speeches as well as music and protest poetry, Lee Bebout scrutinizes the ideas that emerged from the effort to organize and legitimize the Chicano movement's aims. Examining the deployment of the Aztec eagle by the United Farm Workers union, the poem Yo Soy Joaquin, the document El Plan de Santa Barbara, and icons like La Malinche and La Virgen de Guadalupe, Bebout reveals the centrality of culture to the Chicano movement. For Bebout, the active implementation of cultural narrative was strategically significant in several ways. First, it allowed disparate movement participants to imagine themselves as part of a national, and nationalist, community of resistance. Second, Chicano use of these narratives contested the images that fostered Anglo-American hegemony. Bringing his analysis up to the present, Bebout delineates how demographic changes have, on the one hand, encouraged the possibility of a panethnic Latino community, while, on the other hand, anti-Mexican nativists attempt to resurrect Chicano myths as a foil to restrict immigration from Mexico.

As a teenager, long before Enriqueta Vasquez became a writer and activist, she wrote her first letter to complain against the injustice she saw around her while growing up in the Southwest. Why was she, a Mexican American, not allowed to eat in local restaurants, while her brothers were fighting to preserve their country's principles of freedom and democracy? Why were Mexican Americans good enough to fight and die for their country but not good enough to be treated as equals at home? And so began Enriqueta Vasquez's life-long fight for justice. Highlighting the involvement of women in the Chicano Movement, this anthology combines for the first time in one volume the columns written by Enriqueta Vasquez from 1968-1972 for the path-breaking Chicano newspaper, El Grito del Norte. Enriqueta Vasquez's columns written during the peak of the civil rights movement provided a platform for her fierce but hopeful voice of protest. In her column, entitled Despierten Hermanos Awaken, Brothers and Sisters ], she used both anger and humor in her efforts to stir her fellow Chicanos to action. Drawing upon her own experiences as a Chicana, she wrote about such issues as racism, sexism, imperialism, and poverty, issues that remain pressing today. With introductory and concluding essays by editors Lorena Oropeza and Dionne Espinoza, this collection of 44 of Vasquez's original articles arranged thematically into six chapters seeks to inform and inspire a new generation. Each is annotated to clarify references to people and events, and the editors have included English-language translations of any essays that appeared originally in Spanish. The text is complemented by six drawings by activist and artistRini Templeton that originally appeared in El Grito del Norte. The volume includes a foreword by John Nichols and a preface by Enriqueta Vasquez.

This study of Chicano rap music is truly a first of its kind. . . . a single-focus study on Chicano rap, its musicians and politics, and how rap and hip hop is a musical counter-narrative to the disenfranchisement of working class barrios. This book has strong potential to have crossover appeal to scholars in popular music, Chicano studies, urban studies, and American studies.

In San Diego, a group of Chicana women participated in a political theatre group whose plays addressed social, gender and political issues of the working class and the Chicano Movement. Here, 17 women who were part of the Teatro de las Chicanas come together to share why they joined the theatre and how it transformed their lives.