Chicano Community Research Articles

SPIRITUAL HYBRIDITY IN ANA CASTILLO'S FEMALE CHARACTERS: A STUDY OF SO FAR FROM GOD AND THE MIXQUIAHUALA LETTERS

This paper explores the spiritual hybridity in Ana Castillo's novels "So Far From God" and "The Mixquiahuala Letters," focusing on the unique spiritual journeys of Mexican-American women. Castillo's storytelling delves into the complexities of spiritual identities, blending Catholicism with indigenous beliefs, curanderismo, and feminist ideologies. The paper examines how Castillo's female characters navigate the intersection of these diverse belief systems, challenging the traditional patriarchal structures within the Chicano community and the Catholic Church. Highlighting the criticism of the Catholic Church by Chicana activists, the paper discusses how Castillo's characters retain their Catholic faith while becoming politically conscious feminists. This synthesis challenges the binary view of being either a feminist or a Catholic, emphasizing the coexistence of feminist perspectives with traditional beliefs. In "So Far From God," Castillo portrays characters like Sofi, Esperanza, and Caridad, who embody spiritual syncretism as resistance, empowerment, and healing. This blend of traditions offers resilience against societal norms and historical wounds. Similarly, "The Mixquiahuala Letters" reveals the intertwined nature of feminism and spirituality through the correspondence between Teresa and Alicia, where their feminist spirituality acts as both a personal empowerment tool and a means of political resistance. The paper concludes that Castillo's portrayal of spiritual hybridity in these novels is central to the self-discovery, assertion, and communal union of her female characters. Their spirituality, a mix of endurance, survival, and empowerment, challenges stereotypes and patriarchal assumptions in Chicano communities. Castillo's narrative underscores the importance of spiritual hybridity in cultural and political resistance, offering a transformative perspective on the lives and struggles of Mexican-American women.

Images of Resistance

Barrio Logan, San Diego, California, contains Chicano Park, a small parcel of land claimed in 1970 by community members. The park has since been recognized for its numerous Chicano murals. Our article analyzes two murals that speak on the issue of gentrification in the community and the dispossession that it leads to. We employ Alvesson and Willmott’s theory on emancipation, and specifically the term “microemancipations,” to examine how the Chicano community in Barrio Logan resists dispossession. We complicate the notion of emancipation, showing how murals sometimes facilitate resistance and, at other times, impede successful emancipation.

En El Frente (On the Front): How Activist-Designers in the Chicano Movement Developed a Distinctive Visual Language to Fight for Social Justice in the U.S.

Note: In this essay, the term "Chicano" is used because it was the identifier claimed by historical participants in the Mexican American Movement in the United States throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The Mexican American Movement is a term that has been expanded since its inception in the mid-1960s and that has addressed many different social, cultural, political, and economic issues, but it mostly focused on four: land ownership. workers' rights, and educational and political equality.1 In the context of this discourse, the authors offer that the Mexican American Movement is synonymous with the Chicano Movement. The authors also utilize the contemporary term Latinx to refer to a person of Latin American origin or descent.2 Along with other civil rights movements like Black Power, women's liberation, and gay rights that were initiated and sustained in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s (and beyond), the Chicano Movement (also known as El Movimiento) advocated for social justice by using independent publications to amplify its message. Independent publications are defined in this context as periodicals produced without approval from established publishers and presses or against the wishes of a dominant governmental or institutional group.3 Newly accessible and affordable design technologies such as offset printing and production technologies brought about a rise of independent publishing in the U.S. in the 1960s--especially in urban American settings--and helped fuel the rise of the American activist-designer. The ability to utilize these types of publications to disperse information quickly to targeted audiences allowed for the correction of at least some of the disinformation about the Chicano movement that had begun to appear in the traditional, American "white press," and in the so-called mass media of the time.4 For example, the independent Los Angeles newspaper and magazine La Raza observed in 1969 that neither the Los Angeles Times nor the Herald Examiner published many stories about Mexican-Americans, and in the stories they did print, 80% had been, in the words of one scholar, "sensationalized reports of crime allegedly committed by Mexican-Americans."5 Activists within the Chicano community designed and wrote these publications to serve as a record of social, political, cultural, and economic events, and encourage their readerships to act by unionizing, boycotting products, and marching in demonstrations to advocate for social justice. After documenting and critically analyzing the Chicano publications archived at research centers at universities in California and Texas, the authors observed the repeated usage of a unique genre of formal patterns utilized in the compositions of the cover designs of many of these Chicano publications. The authors are using these critical observations to posit that these graphic compositions constitute a distinctive Chicano visual language that consists of original, stylized deployments of imagery, icons, and masthead typography, and that this visual language was operationalized to visually communicate the socio-cultural locations of the issues these publications were addressing in ways that would effectively resonate with their particular audiences. The visual languages that affected the compositions of the covers and, in some cases, the interior page spreads of these independent Chicano publications (i.e. newspapers, newsletters, flyers, and small magazines intended for readerships in areas such as Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California) were critical to the formation and sustenance of the Chicano visual and socio-cultural identity and the role these played in visually communicating the ideals of the Chicano movement across the American southwest.The visual essay and narrative organized for Dialectic is titled En El Frente, which translates from Spanish to English as "On the Front." It documents and analyzes some of the ways that the assertions and formal arrangements of these uniquely Chicano visual language elements and compositions were used in these publications by the designer activists who created them to advocate for social, economic, and political justice in and around their communities. Between approximately 1966 and late 1979, over 300 Chicano publications from 150 communities (mostly in the American southwest, but also Chicago, Illinois, Brooklyn, New York and Washington, D.C.) were designed and distributed across the United States, and together they constitute an important addition to the predominantly white American design canon.6 By making this particular historical analysis of periodical publications designed and written by Chicanos more accessible to contemporary design practitioners in the U.S. and around the world, the authors seek to expand the canon of historical approaches to engaging in and executing visual communication design processes in ways that might positively influence these processes, particularly in the U.S., so as to make them more broadly informed, equitable, and inclusive.

Challenging Stereotypes: Prosocial Racial Humor in Luís Valdez’s Actos

ABSTRACT This article examines how Luís Valdez uses prosocial racial humor in his collection of short plays to challenge the anti-Mexican racism directed against the strikers during the 1965–1970 Delano, California, grape strike as well as to address many of the other social issues faced by the Chicano community during this period. Drawing on social psychology research on the dynamics of racial group identification and focusing on the acto entitled Los Vendidos, the article analyzes how Valdez and his Teatro Campesino created the set of conditions that allowed audience members to confront and overcome the negative effects of the racial stereotyping and ethnic slurs they were experiencing on the picket lines and elsewhere and in the process to raise their Chicano cultural and political consciousness.

Editorial Commentary

Editorial Commentary

"Where's Your Birth Certificate, Pilgrim?": Analyzing Double Age In Immigration Policing and Chicano Community Organizing, 1975-1985

"Where's Your Birth Certificate, Pilgrim?":Analyzing Double Age In Immigration Policing and Chicano Community Organizing, 1975-1985 Erin Mysogland (bio) In the late 1970s, Mexican youth began migrating to the US in growing numbers, expanding the "era of undocumented immigration" beyond a circular movement of adult male workers.1 At this time, the Border Patrol, the enforcement arm of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), detained and deported migrants at increased rates, particularly in San Diego. Policing in San Diego's Chicano communities also increased as the policies of the "unconditional war on poverty" and "war against crime" criminalized youth of color.2 As the deportation machine coalesced with the carceral state, police denied Chicano and migrant youth the protections of childhood through deportation and detention.3 This article examines two cases of immigration police wrongfully deporting youth—a fourteen-year-old and a fifteen-year-old—to uncover how a "double age" based on race, ethnicity, and citizenship expanded deportability. It also uses the contemporaneous practice of detaining migrant youth at the Metropolitan Correctional Center to show how double age enabled the exclusions of older youth from reforms in detention practices. Using the lens of double age to understand the tension between the age of these detained and deported youth and their treatment by police demonstrates how the selective application of a protected childhood served to expand policing.4 However, immigration police were not the only ones that used the porous boundaries of youth to their advantage in the 1970s and 1980s San Diego-Tijuana borderlands. Herman Baca, leader of the Committee on Chicano Rights (CCR), infantilized Chicano and migrant youth to build resistance to policing. Guided by notions of Chicano self-determination, the CCR forged solidarity between Chicanos and undocumented migrants. By evoking a double age [End Page 422] based on notions of child protection, Baca built community-wide support for his demands to end the policing of Chicanos and migrants alike. Ultimately, the utility of double age for both immigration police and community organizers warns that a focus on youth can serve to uphold systems of oppression based on race, ethnicity, and citizenship status. ________ In the early 1980s, 6 percent of all Mexicans expelled from the US were younger than eighteen, amounting to 20,000 a year from California alone.5 Immigration law permitted the expulsion of undocumented youth through either formal deportation proceedings or the voluntary departure process.6 However, community organizers gathered evidence of the INS also deporting US citizens and migrants with legal status. In examining these illegal deportations of youth, it is important to note that only migrants over eighteen were required to carry their residency card at all times, meaning individuals under eighteen did not have to immediately prove legal status when apprehended.7 Guidance for deportation officers also stated that "[n]o juvenile shall be detained in a Service or non-Service adult facility whether or not he is accompanying a detained adult." Because the INS defined "juvenile" according to the law in the state where they were detaining the individual, in California the INS was not supposed to hold youth under eighteen in adult facilities prior to deportation.8 In defiance of these guidelines, immigration police denied Chicano and migrant youth a protected childhood by deporting them, serving to expand the reach of the deportation machine. In February 1984, Mario Moreno Lopez, a fourteen-year-old legal resident, was talking with friends on the street outside a store in Santa Ana when INS officers apprehended him and thirty-two other individuals they assumed to be undocumented. The INS brought Mario to a detention facility in Los Angeles and held him for a day even though Mario explained that he had residency papers. Mario eventually signed a form agreeing to a voluntary departure because, having witnessed another youth get "shoved to the ground" for not signing the form, he "didn't know it was voluntary."9 The INS deported Mario to Tijuana, where he found himself away from his father for the first time in his life. On his third border crossing attempt Mario entered San Diego, where someone who had seen his picture in the paper recognized him...

Defining Conjunto Quantitatively: Classical and Modernist Styles in a Texas-Mexican Genre

Defining <i>Conjunto</i> Quantitatively: Classical and Modernist Styles in a Texas-Mexican Genre

Концепция карнавала М. Бахтина в романах Роландо Инохосы

The article discusses Rolando Hinojosa’s novels Klail City and The Valley about the 20 th century Chicano community. The analysis bears on the carnival theory by Mikhail Bakhtin. Carnivalesque images and literary devices examined in the novels create the feeling of the infinite festivity and prove the omnipresence of Bakhtinian carnival in the novelist’s early works. The fictional world of Rolando Hinojosa operates following the rules of the carnival. The life of the Chicano community is organized around the town square, where religious ceremonies are travestied and typical carnival rituals such as “the feast of fools,” election and dethroning of the King, carnival sacrifice, and “the funeral banquet” are perfomed. The analysis of Hinojosa’s novels using Bakhtin’s carnivalesque theory sheds light on the main ideas of Klail City Death Trip Series. The festive character of the bodily imagery represents the triumph of life over death, while the macabre laughter helps Chicanos to defeat their fear of death.

Pathways in Oral History: José Ángel Gutiérrez

In this interview feature, the attorney and Chicano activist José Ángel Gutiérrez discusses founding the Voces of Tejanos Oral History Project, a project dedicated to highlighting public leaders of Mexican origin, Chicanos and Chicanas, to continue storytelling and to correct the historical record about the Chicano community. In addition, Gutiérrez recounts his introduction to oral history as a method, significant oral history interviews, useful sources, and the importance of using oral history in the classroom.

Music and Modernity among First Peoples of North America ed. by Victoria Lindsay Levine and Dylan Robinson

Reviewed by: Music and Modernity among First Peoples of North America ed. by Victoria Lindsay Levine and Dylan Robinson Ann Morrison Spinney Music and Modernity among First Peoples of North America. Edited by Victoria Lindsay Levine and Dylan Robinson. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2019. [xviii, 330 p. ISBN 9780819578624 (hardback), $85; ISBN 9780819578631 (paperback), $26.95; 9780819578648 (e-book), $21.99.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. This collection deserves a wide readership, because it exemplifies the conversations needed among the various stakeholders in traditional music to decolonize scholarship. The authors are performers, scholars, performer– scholars, and members and descendants of Native and settler communities in North America. Identities of contributors are not limited to any of these, though they are clearly stated; nor are their ideas corralled. By not imposing culture areas, census categories, musical genres, or theoretical schools in its organization, this volume demonstrates its main point: that Native North American traditions are not categorical. The music and musicking discussed are astonishing in their variety and a delight to listen to. A styles inventory would include hip-hop, powwow, pop, television soundtracks, performance art, and classical. The articles do not all supply links, but most of the music and video examples can be found easily online. Several examples in the "art music" category are significant innovations, worthy of inclusion in any contemporary-music survey course, not confined to Native American studies. By grouping many contrasting examples together here under that rubric, however, a strong point is made about the vitality of music making among first peoples of North America. The geographical coverage of the chapters is also broadly inclusive, ranging from Mi'kmaq in the Canadian Atlantic Provinces to the western United States–Mexico border; crossing the plains, encompassing both sides of the US–Canada border; and stretching from Inuit communities in Alaska east to Greenland. There are few articles limited to one community, location, or tradition. The collection is framed by two invitations, each from a Native musicologist. Heidi Aklaseaq Senungetuk opens the volume with an invitation to dance, "to consider the ideas presented here" (p. xiii), drawing from her experience of music performance in both classical and traditional styles. Trevor Reed closes with an invitation to listen, building on his work repatriating song recordings to emphasize that audience [End Page 282] experiences are central to understanding "whether the ideologies or desires the artists convey are actually being realized" (p. 263). Editor Victoria Lindsay Levine explains that rather than dividing the book into sections, they chose to let concerns and theoretical concepts weave among the articles. They will likely be read as individual pieces, but the collection has a kind of arc as it is laid out, with the most perspicacious theoretical arguments appearing in the latter chapters. (For this review, those on similar musical styles are considered together.) Ontology is a common focus throughout, as is reference to Philip Joseph Deloria's Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004). Despite the sophistication of their arguments, these articles are not jargon-filled jawbreakers, but would be appropriate readings for upper-level undergraduates. In the first case study, David Samuels gently teases apart the contradictions apparent in the famous photographs of Frances Densmore and Mountain Chief, revealing these to be assumptions, not visual facts. Introductory ethnomusicology classes will benefit from his reconsideration. Gordon Smith's contextual analysis of Mi'kmaw funerals at Eskasoni focuses on the community's use of video recordings to "preserve traditions while creating new ones" (p. 33). The video examples he provides demonstrate the relationships between past, present, and future that confound Western teleological concepts. While he does not mention autoethnography, it is a useful reference for this chapter. Christina Leza examines activism on the US–Mexico border through hiphop. Leza sensitively explores the cooperation between indigenous and Chicano communities that is needed to confront abuses of authority along the border. Over different generations, both groups have made claims to this land. The crew Shining Soul on whom she focuses seems to have disbanded, but their tracks can still be found online, and her analysis of the codemixing and switching in their songs that speaks to both groups is not limited...

Multilingualism and melodrama in Sandra Cisneros's A House of My Own: Stories from My Life

Multilingualism and melodrama in Sandra Cisneros's A House of My Own:Stories from My Life Sarah Staes Introduction This article1 focuses on Sandra Cisneros's A House of My Own: Stories from my Life, an impressive compilation of (auto)biographical texts written throughout her literary career for very different occasions and published in 2015 by Random House. Not only does the compilation map out a significant part of Cisneros's personal trajectory, but it also displays the evolution of the cultural, social and linguistic self-consciousness of her authorial 'posture,' a concept developed by Jérôme Meizoz. As we will see, the collection foregrounds important events in the development of Cisneros as a Chicana author, topics that were already well known by those who read the poetry and fiction she published throughout her 40-year career: her growing up as a migrant, middle-class subject, the desire to write and live independently that clashed with the married life that her Mexican father had in mind for her, the discovery of and love for Mexican culture, the challenges of living between cultures and languages, and the increasing importance of her role as a canonical writer, feminist and cultural mediator. To both support and stress these motives, Cisneros displays the same particular multilingual strategies used in her other works, which have already been described in detail by Ernst Rudin (1996), Lourdes Torres (2007), María López Ponz (2009), María Laura Spoturno (2010) and An Van Hecke (2017) amongst others. Rather than identifying them, we aim to analyze how the (sometimes scarce, sometimes abundant) references to Spanish throughout the English texts increase the level of theatricality and sentimentalism described by Peter Brooks (The Melodramatic Imagination, 1976) as characteristic of melodrama. It is our hypothesis that this textual "melodramatic mode," which appeals to her readers' emotions and the image Cisneros constructs of herself outside the text, facilitates identification with her bicultural subjectivity rather than overcoming Mexican-American dualisms. [End Page 144] Multilingual situations vs. multilingual strategies in the U.S. Multilingualism has long been a common practice for human beings and societies. Two centuries ago, however, the relativist2 view of languages determining thoughts and the romantic myth of monolingualism started to extend deep into the foundations of the emerging modern nation-states. Individuals were said to have a singular primary language, an innate 'mother tongue,' as described by Friedrich Schleiermacher in 1813. This 'true language' was supposedly part of a common identity shared by fellow citizens of monolingual, homogeneous territories. The monolingual paradigm became the "theoretical foundation for territorialized, nation- and ethnicity-based language/identity" (Lvovich 520). The binary view of 'native' vs. 'foreign' persists, although this historical construct has been under pressure ever since its rather artificial implementation, as Yasemin Yildiz shows in her groundbreaking book Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (2012). Describing the trajectories of five 20th- and 21st-century German writers, who in their literary productions attempt to reimagine "the identitarian force of language" (Yildiz 6), Yildiz labels their critical endeavors to challenge and overcome the limiting functioning of the monolingual paradigm 'the postmonolingual condition' (Yildiz 4). Aiming to move beyond their 'native' language, these modern multilingual writers can be categorized as 'translinguals,' a term coined by Steven Kellman in The Translingual Imagination (Kellman 16). These examples serve to demonstrate the tension between the still active monolingual paradigm and a fragmented cultural and linguistic reality which nowadays gains more visibility due to globalization, mass migration and common economies. In recent decades, interdisciplinary studies on the relationship between multilingualism and identity, culture, history and society have approached the monolingual paradigm with skepticism, actively unmasking the myth of monolithic, stable identities (Meylaerts 1). Scholars have come to agree that the relationships between a multilingual's languages and his/her sense of self must be approached carefully, taking into account that the connection between language and sense of self is not exclusively reserved for the 'mother tongue' and considering every case as an individual trajectory (Lvovich 520–521)3. Of special interest for the purposes of this research paper is the situation of the Chicano community in the United States, as Sandra Cisneros is internationally considered...

Peregrinos de Aztlán: narrando los orígenes, reconociendo la nación

The main goal of this paper is to analyze how the novel Peregrinos de Aztlan, by Miguel Mendez, takes the form of a foundational fiction in order to create an identity for a nation: the one of the Chicano community. This community needs to recognize itself as such and thereby to start its fight for its civil rights. To do so, the text approaches the Latin American foundational fictions from two directions: by questioning them and by proposing a new type of fiction that could meet the distinctive features of the emerging nation described in the novel.

Toward a Willful Rereading of The Revolt of the Cockroach People

A touchstone of Chicano letters, Oscar “Zeta” Acosta’s 1973 novel The Revolt of the Cockroach People is emblematic of a Chicano community’s coming of political age during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet the opening church movidas of Gloria Chavez and Duana Doherty, characters modeled partly on historical fi gures, have gone largely unexamined. This essay proposes a “willful” conceptual reading practice as a way of discerning otherwise overlooked Chicana activism. I demonstrate how disparate depictions of Chicana protesters in La Nueva Chicana poetics, the Católicos por la Raza Papers, and Acosta’s novel refl ect philosopher Sara Ahmed’s idea of “willfulness”—a resiliency deemed deviant but also possibly a reclaimed style of politics. Reconsidering Revolt alongside interrelated cultural texts expands our understanding of oppositional agency and the specifi c discursive sites that challenged and accommodated cultural biases of early Chicana activism linked to criminal deviance, vilifi cation (feminist baiting and lesbian stigmatization), and invisibility. I argue that the concept of willfulness renders legible the dynamism of Chicana feminism-in-nationalism within movimiento discourses that might allow us to bridge gulfs between movement-era literature and the activist archive, misogyny and Chicana feminisms, heteronormativity and queerness, faith-based activism and secular social protest.

The Thin Frontera between Visibility and Invisibility: Felicia Luna Lemus’s Like Son

The historically entrenched gender-based division of western society is also part of the cultural heritage of the Chicano community. The diverse cultural, literary and religious symbols that have defined the female and male roles have been transmitted through the generations, creating a clear gender-based hierarchy within the group. This binary division, however, has left no room for those considered (extremely) deviant such as the LGBT community. The aim of this essay is to observe the way Felicia Luna Lemus’s Like Son (2007) addresses issues of visibility and invisibility and the integration of a family past and a cultural heritage into the life of a young Chicano transgender person, in an attempt to render this group visible and voiced within the community. Keywords: Chicano/a; LGBT; identity; literature; (in)visibility

Chingonas and Chingados: Femininity and Machismo in Three Poems by Francisco X. Alarcón

This article analyzes the ways in which Queer Chicano poet Francisco X. Alarcón presents the interplay of family, sexuality, and heritage in his poetry. Three poems are analyzed: “Cuarto oscuro/Dark Room”, “Mi padre/My Father”, and “Una pequeña gran victoria/A Small but Fateful Victory”. In these pieces, Alarcón negotiates his own identity as an ‘Other’ of the Chicano Community by emphasizing the performative nature of masculinity and femininity. In so doing, he provides an insight into the dilemmas and fractures of contemporary Chicanos. Thus, this piece aims to also incorporate Alarcón to the Chicano literary canon by studying how his poems echo the theoretical paradigms established by Anzaldúa, Arteaga, and others.

The Search for Identity in Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street.

The vignettes of The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros are about the maturing of a young Chicana and the development of a writer, Esperanza Cordero. Esperanza wants to be a writer and tries to discover the complexity of the dual identity as a Chicana woman. Although she wants to escape the Chicano community, Esperanza wishes to remember the certain aspects of the poor and dirty community. She realizes that she should find it a source of her inspiration. As a writer, she believes that she can find her voice and overcome sexism, classism, and racism. Through telling stories about her own experiences, she can find her own identity as a Mexican American. In the end, Esperanza tries to find a way to bridge the gap between both Chicana women’s American and Mexican identity. (Paichai University)

A Study of Collective Identity as Manifested in Chicano Community Murals

A Study of Collective Identity as Manifested in Chicano Community Murals

Interlanguage and Cross-Generational Assimilation: Past Tense Unmarking in Hispanicized English

This study analyzes an emerging variety of North Carolina Hispanicized English in terms of the grammatical variable of past tense marking. It compares variation in Durham, North Carolina, Hispanicized English at increasing lengths of residency to generational varieties of Hispanicized English in a comparison sample, another contact-influenced ethnic variety of English, spoken by a longstanding Chicano community in south Texas. In this way, it tests the hypothesis that interlanguage (socio)linguistic development may in fact recapitulate generational changes in different sociodemographic speech settings. Results indicate that for the speakers in this study, the -t/-d variable indicates not only the constraints of the phonological process of deletion, but two morphosyntactic constraints: (1) the effects of verb class and (2) a grammatical process of past tense unmarking.

Río Grande, Bravo... y sangriento: Narcotráfico, violencia y frontera en &lt;em&gt;Ask a Policeman&lt;/em&gt;, del novelista chicano Rolando Hinojosa

En su novela policíaca Ask a Policeman (1998), un escritor chicano de prestigio como Rolando Hinojosa se adentra en el reciente subgénero de la narcoliteratura para abordar no solo la violencia y el sadismo extremos que caracterizan dicho mundo criminal, sino también cuestiones como la realidad actual de la comunidad chicana, la función que la frontera entre México y Estados Unidos desempeña hoy día, o la relación entre las comunidades hispanohablantes de ambos países.

A Single Life Reinvented: Personal Writing as the Negotiation of Identity in Richard Rodriguez’s Autobiographical Trilogy

Through ongoing circulation and discussion, personal narratives are continually resituated among different social bodies and institutions. The cultural impact of these stories then extends well beyond their initial publication. They perpetually renegotiate both the authors’ individual identities as well as their communal alliances. As an example, this essay considers how Richard Rodriguez’s autobiographical trilogy and its critical reception shifted not only his own self-description but also the boundaries of Chicano, Mexican-American, and queer communities. Personal writing becomes not a mere reflection of self, but a becoming—a way to write ourselves into other worlds and communities.