Chicana Literature Research Articles

Epistemologies of love and desire: Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About

This article provides a context for the publication of Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About (1991). As Chicana literature and feminism flourished, the visibility of Chicanas increased dramatically, and at the same it became noticeable that Chicana lesbian representations lacked considerably. During this time roughly from the 1980s through 2000, the focus on Chicana lesbian representation reached a new level of awareness which ultimately led to an increase in demand for publications by and about Chicana lesbians. However, this new visibility did not materialize so easily and there were still resistances in the academy and at national conferences that led to major, well-documented confrontations. This was a dramatic and momentous period for the establishment of a public discourse about Chicana lesbians within Chicana/o studies that still continues today. Arguably, contributions by Chicana lesbians provided many foundational theories critical to the development of Chicana feminist thought and Chicana Studies that merits recognition. Published by Third Woman Press in 1991 and edited by Carla Trujillo, this book collection signaled a turn in perceptions of Chicana/o gays and lesbians across communities and in academic circles. This article argues that the publication of Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mother Warned Us About was made possible by a confluence of social, cultural, and literary engagements with other publications that arose from a politics of love and desire. As a result, love and desire are epistemic expressions that shape the collective voices in Chicana Lesbians.

Traduire la littérature chicano en français : le cas de Caramelo de Sandra Cisneros et la traduction interlingue

Le présent article étudie la traduction française de Caramelo (2002) de l’écrivaine américaine Sandra Cisneros. En nous appuyant sur des études de pratiques linguistiques de la littérature mexico‑américaine et sur sa traduction dans d’autres langues nous nous demanderons comment cette traduction exprime l’hybridité linguistique originale. Les façons dont la traduction décrit les héritiers des migrations mexicaines aux États‑Unis reflètent‑elles le regard français sur l’immigration et l’immigré ? Que nous apprennent‑elles des défis de la traduction transnationale ?

FORGING A NEW TYPE OF FEMINIST IDENTITY: CHICANA FEMINISM, FEMININITY, AND THE INSTITUTION OF MEMORY

Drawing on Jan Assmann’s interpretation of cultural memory as devoid of any racial/biological component, as well as James Clifford’s repudiation of the notion of cultural purity, the paper redefines memory as a mentally configured cultural institution, claiming that any reconfiguration of group identity is an act of symbolic violence. By emphasizing the crucial role that identity plays in understanding the fundamental themes tackled by Chicana literature—patriarchal oppression, racial terror, domestic abuse, sexism, homophobia—, the paper illustrates the extent to which the ethnic-gender binomial, i.e. belonging to a group that faces bias on various levels (femininity, Mexican American genealogy and, sporadically, sexual minority status), stands at the very core of the desire to redefine identity that largely fuels contemporary Chicana prose.

FORGING A NEW TYPE OF FEMINIST IDENTITY: CHICANA FEMINISM, FEMININITY, AND THE INSTITUTION OF MEMORY

Drawing on Jan Assmann’s interpretation of cultural memory as devoid of any racial/biological component, as well as James Clifford’s repudiation of the notion of cultural purity, the paper redefines memory as a mentally configured cultural institution, claiming that any reconfiguration of group identity is an act of symbolic violence. By emphasizing the crucial role that identity plays in understanding the fundamental themes tackled by Chicana literature—patriarchal oppression, racial terror, domestic abuse, sexism, homophobia—, the paper illustrates the extent to which the ethnic-gender binomial, i.e. belonging to a group that faces bias on various levels (femininity, Mexican American genealogy and, sporadically, sexual minority status), stands at the very core of the desire to redefine identity that largely fuels contemporary Chicana prose.

Remembering World War I in AmericaA Shadow on Our Hearts: Soldier-Poetry, Morality, and the American War in VietnamThe Hell of War Comes Home: Imaginative Texts from the Conflicts in Afghanistan and IraqBodies at War: Genealogies of Militarism in Chicana Literature and Culture

Remembering World War I in AmericaA Shadow on Our Hearts: Soldier-Poetry, Morality, and the American War in VietnamThe Hell of War Comes Home: Imaginative Texts from the Conflicts in Afghanistan and IraqBodies at War: Genealogies of Militarism in Chicana Literature and Culture

Towards a Geography of trauma: From El plan spiritual de Aztlán to the Birth of Chicana Spìritual Feminism

The paper explores the unbreakable link between Chicana literature and its political/ ideological/militant/subversive component, based on a new interpretation of “cultural nationalism.” Explaining the sociopolitical motivations that led to the California student revolts of the 1960s and the Chicana Movement’s Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, I also discuss the ensuing falling-out between the feminine/feminist faction of the Movement and its androcentric majority. I draw on the formal/conceptual/linguistic hybridity of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera as a metaphor for the radical character of the entire Chicana literary phenomenon.

Transgressing the Boundaries of the Borderlands

Book Review| November 01 2019 Transgressing the Boundaries of the Borderlands Post-Borderlandia: Chicana Literature and Gender Variant Critique. Cuevas, T. Jackie. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018. 169 pp. Jack Caraves Jack Caraves Jack Caraves is an assistant professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies in the Department of Sociology and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences at San José State University. Their research uses community-based mixed-methods approaches to focus on the experiences of trans Latinxs in Southern California and the role of family and spirituality in serving as spaces of empowerment and resistance. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google TSQ (2019) 6 (4): 676–682. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-7771838 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Jack Caraves; Transgressing the Boundaries of the Borderlands. TSQ 1 November 2019; 6 (4): 676–682. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-7771838 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsTSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly Search Advanced Search Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Transculturation in the Chicana Women Writers Prose: Gloria Anzaldúa and Margarita Cota-Cárdenas

The aim of this paper is to discuss the concept of transculturation on the basis of Chicana literature created in the American Southwest. First, the historical, social and cultural context of the Chicana culture formation in the Mexican-American border space is explained. Secondly, transculturation is presented as a European and a genuine Latin American concept of local cultural hybridity, with the emphasis put on the contributions by Wolfgang Welsch and Fernando Ortiz. Thirdly, a general characteristic of Chicana literature is provided, with a special attention paid to linguistic and cultural identity issues. In the analysis of the discursive strategies used by Chicana women writers, two fundamental hybrid Chicana texts are taken into consideration: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/ La Frontera and Margarita Cota-Cárdenas’s Puppet. The analysis reveals that code-switching and interlinguistic translations are the basic forms of character construction and explain the complex situation of the Mexican minority in the USA. Finally, both texts seem to require a hybrid bilingual reader due to their heterogeneous bilingual form and subjects treated.

Escritoras híbridas, traducciones dobles y la influencia del poder en el proceso traductor*

La traducción de literatura chicana al español es un asunto complejo y controvertido. Las versiones publicadas hasta ahora han sido enfocadas de formas muy diversas y, por lo tanto, nos muestran técnicas de traducción diferentes. El objetivo de este artículo es analizar las distintas traducciones al español que existen de The House on Mango Street y Woman Hollering Creek de Sandra Cisneros y de How the García Girls Lost Their Accents y How Tia Lola Came To Visit Stay de Julia Álvarez, así como estudiar la posible influencia del poder en las distintas versiones

Meaning of Crossing Borderlines and Differential Movement in Chicana Literature

Meaning of Crossing Borderlines and Differential Movement in Chicana Literature

The Routledge Introduction to American Women Writers

The Routledge Introduction to American Women Writers

He Importance of Writing as a Method of Creating Identity in Feminist Chicana Literature: Terri de la Peña’s Margins (59-64)

The stronghold of the struggle of the Chicana, in general, as well as that of the Chicana writer in particular, has been that of eradicating all the prejudices which have misdescribed them as compliant women. Stereotypes had been created and sustained by their male counterparts throughout the years, becoming instrumental in the assimilation and mpassiven acceptance by the Chicanas of these deleterious preconceived ideas. The Chicana lesbian writer Terri de la Peña has endeavoured to abolish all the prejudices that had constrained the existence of the Chicanas in general, and that of the Chicana lesbians in particular, as well as the taboos they had been forced to assimilate and transmit. By means of writing, Verónica, protagonist of de la Peña´s Margins, abandons the mmarginsn of her story to take a central position in the development of her new life, in which she fights to renegotiate her space within her community as well as to re-educate its members into a more tolerant, integrative understanding of life

Contested spaces/striated spaces: Representations of the border in Reyna Grande’s The Distance Between Us: A Memoir

The border with its multiple roles and interpretations has always played an important role in Chicana and Latina discourse in the U.S. Redefinitions and redesigns of spatial paradigms that took place in the second half of the 20th century resulted in proliferation of border imagery in literature that presented complex roles of the border. The aforementioned transformations were reflected in the shift of focus in Chicana discourse on the spatial, from location to mobility, “from land to roads” (Kaup 200). This shift in turn, led to alterative constructions of space and remappings of geographic locations that included creation of in-between spaces and rewriting of the border from a demarcation line into a contact zone. Due to the interdependence between space and identity formation, the new concepts of the border predetermine a different approach towards Latina identity formation. Contemporary Chicana literature often focuses on roads rather than dwellings (Kaup 228) and discusses the issue of identity formation construed in in-between spaces. Chicana authors often examine the experience of nomadic subjects traveling both within the U.S. and/or Mexico or crossing the border, presenting multiple reasons behind such travels, as well as different experiences and outcomes resulting from these journeys. The purpose of this article is to analyze how the redefinitions of the border are reflected in Reyna Grande’s The Distance Between Us: A Memoir and how border crossings presented by the author contribute to the displacement of the main character and her family, triggering the notion of simultaneously belonging and unbelonging, or becoming “Othered,” which results in the construction of transnational identities.

Contemporary Chicana Literature: (Re)Writing the Maternal Script

Contemporary Chicana Literature: (Re)Writing the Maternal Script

Domestic Negotiations: Gender, Nation, and Self-Fashioning in US Mexicana and Chicana Literature and Art. Marci R. McMahon.

Domestic Negotiations: Gender, Nation, and Self-Fashioning in US Mexicana and Chicana Literature and Art. Marci R. McMahon.

Domestic negotiations: Gender, nation and self-fashioning in US Mexicana and Chicana literature and art by Marci R. McMahon

Domestic negotiations: Gender, nation and self-fashioning in US Mexicana and Chicana literature and art by Marci R. McMahon

Borderlands Saints: Secular Sanctity in Chicano/a and Mexican Culture Domestic Negotiations: Gender, Nation, and Self-Fashioning in US Mexicana and Chicana Literature and Art Radical Chicana Poetics

Borderlands Saints: Secular Sanctity in Chicano/a and Mexican Culture Domestic Negotiations: Gender, Nation, and Self-Fashioning in US Mexicana and Chicana Literature and Art Radical Chicana Poetics

Review: Domestic Negotiations: Gender, Nation, and Self-Fashioning in US Mexicana and Chicana Literature and Art, by Marci R. McMahon

Review: <i>Domestic Negotiations: Gender, Nation, and Self-Fashioning in US Mexicana and Chicana Literature and Art</i>, by Marci R. McMahon

International Perspectives on Chicana/o Studies ed. by Catherine Leen and Niamh Thornton (review)

Reviewed by: International Perspectives on Chicana/o Studies ed. by Catherine Leen and Niamh Thornton Elena Foulis Catherine Leen and Niamh Thornton, eds. International Perspectives on Chicana/o Studies. New York: Routledge, 2014. 208p. Lee and Thornton’s volume on Chicano/a studies provides a much needed conversation on the evolving nature of Chicano/a literature and culture within a transnational perspective. In this book, the editors and contributors provide us with various noted critics and theorists such as Ellen Mckracken, Francisco Lomelí and Maria Herrera-Sobek that make it clear that Chicano/a studies has crossed borders. This collection makes it evident that Chicano/a studies is increasingly awaking interest in comparative studies all across the world. The book is divided into three parts. Part one titled, “Critical Paradigms: Continuities and Transitions” takes us directly to the study of Chicana culture, literary production and representation. The authors in this section, including the notable critic, Ellen Mckracken, give a history of the struggle and success in publications of U.S. Latino/a literature. From the now canonical writers such as Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, and Junot Diaz, to the successful half million dollar advance Alisa Valdez-Rodríguez received for her novel, Mckracken acknowledges the very important role of small presses in developing U.S. Latino/a literature. However, she believes that U.S. Latino/a literature has reached a new height and has to seek audiences that mainstream presses provide. Imelda Martín-Junquera and Mario T. García study the use of autobiography, memory and history in the works of Pat Mora and Mary Helen Ponce’s work, respectively. In both cases, Martín-Junquero and García provide an analysis of the authors’ use of bicultural, bilingual, historical, auto-ethnography and many other traditional thematic elements found in Chicana literature to explain the connections between food, the environment, and female space. The essays help us understand the authors’ [End Page 236] role in “translating” culture to the reader, thus inviting us to consider the subtitle of this collection, “This World is My Place.” The essays found in Part two titled, “From the Regional to the Global,” study the often complicated understanding of national borders and globalization. However, Tatiana Voronchenko’s comparative approach of Chicano/a and Russian literature provides us with a keen international connection this edition represents. In her examination of American studies in Russia, Voronchenko finds that the similar geopolitical and geographic conditions of both groups, “is evident in the cultural production of the southern border region of the Unites States and is a salient feature of the cultural life of Russia, especially Siberia” (71). Even more, both Chicanos/as and Siberians are ethnic minorities, bilingual and bicultural. Throughout her essay, her careful exploration of the connection both groups share is notable in her thorough analysis of the works and motifs each group explores. For example, both groups use the sun motif and the virgin in their literature and cultural production. This shared element is clear in Voronchenko’s study of both literatures, and those of us that study and teach Chicano/a literature can engage more easily with Siberian literature. She concludes that Chicano/o studies in Trans-Baikal Siberia, “is significant in itself, but it also helps us to better understand contemporary U.S. literary discourse” (85); especially when we think of the similar challenges found in different parts of the world. In this same section, Niamh Thornton, Nuala Finnegan, and Francisco Lomelí touch on cultural traditions, human rights concerns, and the production of artifacts as both fetishisms and a vindication of Mexican-American identities. Thornton studies the internationalization of Quinceañeras. She traces the young girl’s rite of passage, but also how it has slowly acquired the pressures of a consumer culture that is often in conflict with tradition. One of the most notable analyses in this essay is Thornton’s study of Julia Alvarez’s work on this subject. Thornton finds that Alvarez, “problematically associates the maintenance and authenticity of culture purely to the working class and denies other classes the right to practice tradition, because, for her, community can only be understood in working-class terms” (59), a position...

Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas: Repression and Resistance in Chicana and Mexicana Literature

Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas: Repression and Resistance in Chicana and Mexicana Literature