Mexican American literature is literature written by Mexican Americans in the United States. Although its origins can be traced back to the sixteenth century, the bulk of Mexican American literature dates from post-1848 and the United States annexation of large parts of Mexico in the wake of the Mexican–American War. Today, as a part of American literature in general, this genre includes a vibrant and diverse set of narratives, prompting critics to describe it as providing "a new awareness of the historical and cultural independence of both northern and southern American hemispheres".[1]Chicano literature is an aspect of Mexican American literature.[2]
Mexican Americans often adopted a dual culture in the 20th century; they speak English and adapt to U.S. culture, but are influenced by their Mexican heritage.
Some scholars argue that the origins of Mexican American literature can be traced back to the sixteenth century, starting with the chronicle written by Spanish adventurer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who published an account in 1542 of his long journey in what is now the U.S. Southwest, where he lived with various indigenous groups, learning their language and customs.[3] Literary critics Harold Augenbraum and Margarite Fernández Olmos argue that Cabeza de Vaca's "metamorphosis into a being neither European nor Indian, a cultural hybrid created by the American experience, converts the explorer into a symbolic precursor of the Mexican American".[4] Scholar Lee Dowling adds that Inca Garcilaso de la Vega also contributed to early Mexican American literature with his expeditionary work La Florida.[5]
Denise Chávez a novelist and playwright whose works often focus on the experiences of Mexican-American women.
Mexican American literature (and, more generally, the Mexican American identity) is viewed as starting after the Mexican–American War and the subsequent 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.[6] In the treaty, Mexico ceded over half of its territory, the now the U.S. Southwest, including California, Nevada, Utah, and much of Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico. Tens of thousands of former Mexican citizens became U.S. citizens.[7] Literary critic Ramón Saldívar points out, "Unlike many other ethnic immigrants to the United States... but like the Native Americans, Mexican-Americans became an ethnic minority through the direct conquest of their homelands."[8] This change in national citizenship was not immediately accompanied by a change in culture or language. Over time, however, these Mexican-Americans developed a unique culture that belonged fully neither to the U.S. nor to Mexico. In Saldívar's words, "Mexican-American culture after 1848 developed in the social interstices between Mexican and American cultural spheres, making that new cultural life patently a product of both but also different in decisive ways from each."[8] The Hispanic culture of Mexican Americans, as expressed in literature as well as other cultural practices, has been further shaped by migrations of Mexicans to the U.S. throughout subsequent eras.
María Ruiz de Burton is considered to be the first Mexican American author and the first Mexican American author to write in English.[9]
By 1900, according to critic Raymund Paredes, "Mexican American literature had emerged as a distinctive part of the literary culture of the United States."[10] Paredes highlights the significance of Josephina Niggli's 1945 novel, Mexican Village, which was "the first literary work by a Mexican American to reach a general American audience."[10] Many different genres of Mexican American literature, including narrative, poetry, and drama, now have a wide popular and critical presence.
Definition and dynamics
Gloria Anzaldúa a scholar, poet, and essayist whose work, including "Borderlands/La Frontera," explores the intersection of cultures, languages, and identities.
The definition of Mexican American encompasses both Mexicans who have moved to the United States and U.S.-born people of Mexican ancestry. The latter group includes Hispano populations who have lived in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of California since before the United States annexed these areas and who lived different experiences than those south of the annexation line. Composed mostly of Spanish-speaking Catholics living in a predominantly English-speaking Protestant country, Mexican Americans have had the status of a linguistic and cultural minority.
Mexican American literature also has a racial dynamic; most Mexican-Americans define themselves as mestizo, people with a mixture of primarily indigenous Mexican and European heritage, while others fit within the more White demographics of people with primarily European heritage. There are also people who do not fit easily in these definitions, such as Josefina Niggli, whose parents were Anglo Americans living in Mexico when she was born.[11][12]
Felipe de Ortego y Gasca offers an alternative perspective on Mexican American literature in Backgrounds of Mexican-American Literature, the first study in the field of Mexican-American literary history.
Themes
Mexican American literature focuses on many themes including history, linguistics, poetry, Hispanic culture, identity on either side of the border, politics, fantasy, and regional culture.
Sergio Troncoso writes about crossing cultural, religious, and psychological borders.
Other notable themes include the experience of migration and living between two languages. Mexican American literature may be written in either English or Spanish or even a combination of the two often referred to as Spanglish.
Border literature
Traveling across the border is becoming an important topic as the Mexican population is growing in regions close to the border, such as Texas and California. Mexican migration to the U.S. is causing an increase in literature for labor workers and studies of the Mexican-American Culture. The motivational force of Mexicans traveling across the border is viewed as an opportunity to increase their capital and expand their opportunities.[13] Mexican-Americans near the border struggle with their identity because they are mostly considered immigrants, although some may be U.S. citizens. Mexicans view crossing the border as an opportunity to improve their living conditions for themselves and their families although they have had a strong bond to their Mexican nationality and some Mexicans, with negative national memories of the Mexican American War, would look at those that became U.S. citizens as traitors.[14]
Helena Maria Viramontes whose works, including "Under the Feet of Jesus," address social issues.
Before the 1930s, many Mexicans would stay in their homeland and not seek the U.S. as an escape.[15] After the U.S.-Mexican war, Mexicans saw themselves as being denied their civil rights while having U.S. citizenship; they found themselves receiving much lower pay than White labor who disregarded their skill level.[16]
Dual-cultural identity
Author Stephanie Elizondo Griest takes a neutral standpoint where she is acting as a third person in her books. She explores what it's like to have a Mexican culture in an American society.[17] Even though Mexican Americans are bound to the Mexican culture, it seems as if they are distant from Mexico itself because of the U.S.-Mexico border, thus creating a mixture of culture for the people of the region with both U.S. and Mexican culture.[18] Mexican culture is known for being mixed. Mexicans living near the border keep their cultural identity because they live close to Mexico despite being blocked by the U.S.-Mexico border. Another factor that helps Mexican culture endure in the U.S. is people migrating from Mexico to the U.S. and bringing their culture with them, as well as influencing family members. Their culture is thought to be assimilated by later generations of immigrants to the U.S., but younger generations develop an interest in their cultural roots.[19] People born in the U.S. to immigrant parents face an assimilation process where they try to adapt to their communities, but still feel like they're considered foreign.[20]
Rudolfo Anaya, Mexican American author, educator born in 1937 in Pantura, New Mexico and published Bless Me Ultima in 1972, which's adapted to film in 2013.
"Chicano" is a label or chosen identity that a portion of Mexican Americans identify with[21][22] and refers to a person of Mexican descent in North America. It was born out of the Chicano movement of the 1970’s. Many Mexican Americans and Chicanos celebrate their cultural roots, including historical practices such as the Day of the Dead.[23]
Chicano literature tends to focus on themes of identity, discrimination, and border culture, with an emphasis on validating Mexican-American or Chicano culture in the United States. It is often associated with the social justice and cultural claims of the Chicano movement. Some Mexican Americans had been targeted racially since 1848 and many had often responded by rejecting the label "brown" throughout history when being "white" was more American.[24]
Chicano writing includes those works in which writers' sense of ethnic identity or chicanismo animates their work fundamentally, often through the presentation of Chicano characters, cultural situations, and speech patterns.[10] Chicano culture has often been politically focused on the question of the border, and how Chicanos straddle or cross that border. There is also a large amount of Chicano poetry.
The literature on Chicano history can be found in Occupied America, by Rodolfo Acuña, which offers an alternative perspective of history from the Chicano point of view.
Con Safos Magazine is an independent Chicano literary journal first published in Los Angeles between 1968 and 1972, and then revived in 1995.[25][26]
Historically, literature has faced gender gaps, and Chicano literature is no exception, with more male writers recorded than women.[27] "Machismo", a sense of overt masculinity, is often cited as part of the reason that Chicana voices have historically been silenced. During El Movimiento, in which Chicanos were fighting for social and civil rights in the United States, several Chicana writers began to write, forming an important part of the movement. [28]
The contributions of feminists such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga have been particularly pronounced over the past couple of decades. Anzaldúa, in particular, brought more attention to view the topic of the border in ways beyond the physical. Her focus primarily dealt with sexual and cultural oppression, while Moraga made significant contributions to addressing queer and lesbian identities among Chicano/a people.[29]
In 2003, author Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez published The Dirty Girls Social Club, a chick lit novel aimed at Latina women. Valdes-Rodriguez was dubbed the godmother of Chica lit by Seattle Times magazine.[30] Unlike other works of Mexican American literature, Chica lit targeted middle-class women like Valdes-Rodriguez, who described herself as "an Ivy League graduate, middle-class person who just lives a regular American life—you know, born and raised here, don't speak all that much Spanish".[30]Michele Serros was a Latina writer drawing on her own life experiences, much of her works gave voice to the complexities of lives straddling two worlds: working-classMexican-American heritage and southern California pop culture.[31][32] She described how she never quite fit in through poems and prose that were both poignant and hilarious. Pam Muñoz Ryan has written over forty books for young people, including picture books, early readers, and middle grade and young adult novels. Her novel Esperanza Rising[33] was commissioned as a play by the Minneapolis Children's Theatre and has been performed in venues around the US including the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, and the Cutler Majestic Theatre in Boston.[34]Angela Morales Her essay "The Girls in My Town" appeared in The Best American Essays, 2013, edited by Cheryl Strayed, and her essay "Bloodyfeathers, R.I.P." appeared as notable essay in Best American Essays 2015.
↑ "Introduction to Chicano Literature". anaya.unm.edu. Retrieved 2023-01-25. Although "Chicano" and "Mexican-American" are often used interchangeably, the former indicates an added political sensibility; an asserted self-awareness of a cultural identity that cannot be separated from social and material struggles for equality and inclusion.
↑ Critic Luis Leal comments, "you can go as far back as explorer Cabeza de Vaca, who wrote about his adventures in Texas in the sixteenth century". Qtd. in García 2000, p.112
↑ Allatson, Paul. "Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo", in Key Terms in Latino/a Cultural and Literary Studies, Malden, Massachusetts, and Oxford, Blackwell press, 2007, p. 234
↑ Nostrand, Richard L. (1975). "Mexican-Americans Circa 1850". Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 65 (3): 378–390. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8306.1975.tb01046.x.
↑ González, John Morán. Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican-American Literature. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2011.
↑ Blea, Irene I. U.S. Chicanas and Latinas within a Global Context: Women of Color at the Fourth World Women's Conference. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997.
↑ Rodriguez, Ralph E. (2000). "Chicana/o Fiction from Resistance to Contestation: The Role of Creation in Ana Castillo's So Far from God". MELUS. 25 (2): 63–82. doi:10.2307/468219. ISSN0163-755X. JSTOR468219.
↑ Jacobs, Elizabeth. 2009. Mexican American Literature: the Politics of Identity. London: Routledge.
Chicano or Chicana is an ethnic identity for Mexican Americans who reject any colonial ancestral roots to embrace solely their Mexican Native ancestry. Chicano was originally a classist and racist slur used toward low-income Mexicans that was reclaimed in the 1940s among youth who belonged to the Pachuco and Pachuca subculture.
Sandra Cisneros is an American writer. She is best known for her first novel, The House on Mango Street (1983), and her subsequent short story collection, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991). Her work experiments with literary forms that investigate emerging subject positions, which Cisneros, herself, attributes to growing up in a context of cultural hybridity and economic inequality that endowed her with unique stories to tell. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, was awarded one of 25 new Ford Foundation Art of Change fellowships in 2017, and is regarded as a key figure in Chicano literature.
Cherríe Moraga is a Xicana feminist, writer, activist, poet, essayist, and playwright. She is part of the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Department of English since 2017, and in 2022 became a distinguished professor. Moraga is also a founding member of the social justice activist group La Red Xicana Indígena, which is network fighting for education, culture rights, and Indigenous Rights. In 2017, she co-founded, with Celia Herrera Rodríguez, Las Maestras Center for Xicana Indigenous Thought, Art, and Social Practice, located on the campus of UC Santa Barbara.
Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa was an American scholar of Chicana feminism, cultural theory, and queer theory. She loosely based her best-known book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), on her life growing up on the Mexico–Texas border and incorporated her lifelong experiences of social and cultural marginalization into her work. She also developed theories about the marginal, in-between, and mixed cultures that develop along borders, including on the concepts of Nepantla, Coyoxaulqui imperative, new tribalism, and spiritual activism. Her other notable publications include This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), co-edited with Cherríe Moraga.
Quinto Sol was the first fully independent publishing house to surface from the Chicano movement in the Sixties. Editorial Quinto Sol was founded in 1967 at UC Berkeley by Octavio I. Romano, a professor of Behavioral Science and Public Health, in collaboration with Nick C. Vaca and Andres Ybarra. The name "Quinto Sol" is Spanish for "Fifth Sun" and it refers to the Aztec myth of creation and destruction. Since the beginning of the Chicano movement in the 1960s, this concept has become a pathway to cultural expression. The Fifth Sun has constantly been integrated into the music, art and literature of the Chicano idea.
Tomás Rivera was a Mexican American author, poet, and educator. He was born in Texas to migrant farm workers, and worked in the fields as a young boy. However, he achieved social mobility through education—earning a degree at Southwest Texas State University, and later a Doctor of Philosophy degree (PhD) at the University of Oklahoma—and came to believe strongly in the virtues of education for Mexican-Americans.
Norma Elia Cantú is a Chicana postmodernist writer and the Murchison Professor in the Humanities at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.
Chicana feminism is a sociopolitical movement, theory, and praxis that scrutinizes the historical, cultural, spiritual, educational, and economic intersections impacting Chicanas and the Chicana/o community in the United States. Chicana feminism empowers women to challenge institutionalized social norms and regards anyone a feminist who fights for the end of women's oppression in the community.
Chicano poetry is a subgenre of Chicano literature that stems from the cultural consciousness developed in the Chicano Movement. Chicano poetry has its roots in the reclamation of Chicana/o as an identity of empowerment rather than denigration. As a literary field, Chicano poetry emerged in the 1960s and formed its own independent literary current and voice.
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza is a 1987 semi-autobiographical work by Gloria E. Anzaldúa that examines the Chicano and Latino experience through the lens of issues such as gender, identity, race, and colonialism. Borderlands is considered to be Anzaldúa’s most well-known work and a pioneering piece of Chicana literature.
Josefina Niggli was a Mexican-born Anglo-American playwright and novelist. Writing about Mexican-American issues in the middle years of the century, before the rise of the Chicano movement, she was the first and, for a time, the only Mexican American writing in English on Mexican themes; her egalitarian views of gender, race and ethnicity were progressive for their time and helped lay the groundwork for such later Chicana feminists as Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo and Sandra Cisneros. Niggli is now recognized as "a literary voice from the middle ground between Mexican and Anglo heritage." Critic Elizabeth Coonrod Martinez has written that Niggli should be considered on a par with such widely praised Spanish-language contemporaries as Mariano Azuela, Martín Luis Guzmán and Nellie Campobello. She is thought to be the only Mexican-American woman to have a theatre named after her, the Niggli Studio Theater at Western Carolina University.
Chicana literature is a form of literature that has emerged from the Chicana Feminist movement. It aims to redefine Chicana archetypes, in an effort to provide positive models for Chicanas. Chicana writers redefine their relationships with what Gloria Anzaldúa has called "Las Tres Madres" of Mexican culture, by depicting them as feminist sources of strength and compassion.
Latino literature is literature written by people of Latin American ancestry, often but not always in English, most notably by Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and Dominican Americans, many of whom were born in the United States. The origin of the term "Latino literature" dates back to the 1960s, during the Chicano Movement, which was a social and political movement by Mexican Americans seeking equal rights and representation. At the time, the term "Chicano literature" was used to describe the work of Mexican-American writers. As the movement expanded, the term "Latino" came into use to encompass writers of various Latin American backgrounds, including Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and others.
Ramón Saldívar is an American author, teacher and researcher of cultural studies and Chicano literature. He is currently a professor at Stanford University, and received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2012.
This is a Mexican American bibliography. This list consists of books, and journal articles, about Mexican Americans, Chicanos, and their history and culture. The list includes works of literature whose subject matter is significantly about Mexican Americans and the Chicano/a experience. This list does not include works by Mexican American writers which do not address the topic, such as science texts by Mexican American writers.
Emma Pérez is an American author and professor, known for her work in queer Chicana feminist studies.
Mexican-American folklore refers to the tales and history of Chicano people who live in the United States.
The term Chicanafuturism was originated by scholar Catherine S. Ramírez which she introduced in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies in 2004. The term is a portmanteau of 'chicana' and 'futurism'. The word 'chicana' refers to a woman or girl of Mexican origin or descent. However, 'Chicana' itself serves as a chosen identity for many female Mexican Americans in the United States, to express self-determination and solidarity in a shared cultural, ethnic, and communal identity while openly rejecting assimilation. Ramírez created the concept of Chicanafuturism as a response to white androcentrism that she felt permeated science-fiction and American society. Chicanafuturism can be understood as part of a larger genre of Latino futurisms.
Chicano literature is an aspect of Mexican-American literature that emerged from the cultural consciousness developed in the Chicano Movement. Chicano literature formed out of the political and cultural struggle of Chicana/os to develop a political foundation and identity that rejected Anglo-American hegemony. This literature embraced the pre-Columbian roots of Mexican-Americans, especially those who identify as Chicana/os.
References
Augenbraum, Harold; Fernández Olmos, Margarite (1997), "Introduction: An American Literary Tradition", in Augenbraum, Harold; Fernández Olmos, Margarite (eds.), The Latino Reader, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ISBN978-0-395-76528-9 .
Augenbraum, Harold and Ilan Stavans, eds. The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. W.W.Norton. ISBN 978-0-393- 08007-0
Calderón, Héctor; Saldívar, José David (1991), "Editors' Introduction: Criticism in the Borderlands", in Calderón, Héctor; Saldívar, José David (eds.), Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, ISBN978-0-8223-1143-0 .
Dowling, Lee (2006), "La Florida del Inca: Garcilaso's Literary Sources", in Galloway, Patricia Kay (ed.), The Hernando de Soto Expedition: History, Historiography, and "Discovery" in the Southeast, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, ISBN978-0-8032-7122-7 .
García, Mario T. (2000), Luis Leal: An Auto/Biography, Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, ISBN978-0-292-72829-5 .
Olivas, Daniel A. (2014), Things We Do Not Talk About: Exploring Latino/a Literature through Essays and Interviews, San Diego, California: San Diego State University Press, ISBN978-1-938537-05-9 .
Prampolini, Gaetano, and Annamaria Pinazzi (eds). "The Shade of the Saguaro/La sombra del saguaro" Part II 'Mexican-American'. Firenze University Press http://www.fupress.com/ (2013): 149–342.
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