Contemporary Chicano Narrative and Public Religious Display : Recuperating the Sacred in the Barrio Street and the Literary Text

Abstract

Many Chicano literary texts employ elements of public religious display that are often linked literally and metaphorically to the street. Rituals such as pilgrimages, processions, passion plays, petitions to santos, the repaying of mandas, the offering of milagritos and retablos, and other forms of bodily religious display constitute a rich series of narrative intertexts that writers such as Mary Helen Ponce and Sandra Cisneros evoke not merely as totemic markers of ethnicity, but as complex cultural practices essential to their narrative projects. In their autobiographical and fictive texts, Ponce and Cisneros portray the sometimes troubled border crossing of literal and figurative streets in the public religious practices of U.S. Chicanos. Readers unfamiliar with these intertexts of popular Latino religion need to remedy this shortcoming in order to decode these literary works competently.