Mexicana and Chicana authors from the late 1970s to the turn of the century helped overturn the patriarchal literary culture and mores of their time. This landmark volume acquaints readers with the provocative, at times defiant, yet subtle discourses of this important generation of writers and explains the influences and historical contexts that shaped their work. Until now, little criticism has been published about these important works. Addressing this oversight, Teaching Late-Twentieth-Century Mexicana and Chicana Writers starts with essays on Mexicana and Chicana authors. It then features essays on specific teaching strategies suitable for literature surveys and courses in cultural studies, Latino studies, interdisciplinary and comparative studies, humanities, and general education that aim to explore the intersectionalities represented in these works. Experienced teachers offer guidance on using these works to introduce students to border studies, transnational studies, sexuality studies, disability studies, contemporary Mexican history and Latino history in the United States, the history of social movements, and concepts of race and gender.

This book consists of a collection of essays by Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska in their first English translation, and a critical introduction. The highly engaging essays explore the lives of seven transformational figures for Mexican feminism. This includes Frida Kahlo, Maria Izquierdo, and Nahui Olin, three outstanding artists of the cultural renaissance of the early twentieth century, and Nellie Campobello, Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos, and Pita Amor, forerunner writers and poets whose works laid a path for Mexican women writers in the later twentieth century. Poniatowska’s essays discuss their fervent activity, interactions with other prominent figures, details and intricacies about their specific works, their scandalous and irreverent activities to draw attention to their craft, and specific revelations about their lives. The extensive critical introduction surveys the early feminist movement and Mexican cultural history, explores how Mexico became a more closed society by the mid-twentieth century, and suggests further reading and films. This book will be of interest both to the general reader and to scholars interested in feminist/gender studies, Mexican literary and cultural studies, Latin American women writers, the cultural renaissance, translation, and film studies.

This delightful collection of essays by Elena Poniatowska presents readers with a wide panorama of important Mexican female artists and writers. Elizabeth Martínez's excellent translation brings Poniatowska's keen eye and searing observations beautifully into English, meaning that these extraordinary women, their lives, and their art emerge fully realized from the page. The book is a wonderful read for both those well-versed in Mexican literature and for those wanting to know more about Mexican art and culture! - Paul M. Worley and Melissa Birkhofer, Appalachian State University, North Carolina, translators of Word Mingas: Oralitegraphies and Mirrored Visions on Oralitures and Indigenous Contemporary Literatures by Miguel Rocha Vivas This book consists of a collection of essays by Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska in their first English translation, and a critical introduction. The highly engaging essays explore the lives of seven transformational figures for Mexican feminism. This includes Frida Kahlo, Maria Izquierdo, and Nahui Olin, three outstanding artists of the cultural renaissance of the early twentieth century, and Nellie Campobello, Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos, and Pita Amor, forerunner writers and poets whose works laid a path for Mexican women writers in the later twentieth century. Poniatowska's essays discuss their fervent activity, interactions with other prominent figures, details and intricacies about their specific works, their scandalous and irreverent activities to draw attention to their craft, and specific revelations about their lives. The extensive critical introduction surveys the early feminist movement and Mexican cultural history, explores how Mexico became a more closed society by the mid-twentieth century, and suggests further reading and films. This book will be of interest both to the general reader and to scholars interested in feminist/gender studies, Mexican literary and cultural studies, Latin American women writers, the cultural renaissance, translation, and film studies. Elizabeth Coonrod Martinez was Professor at DePaul University, USA, 2010 to 2020, and at Sonoma State University, USA, 1995 to 2010. Her recent books include Teaching Late Twentieth Century Mexicana and Chicana Writers (2021), Josefina Niggli, Mexican American Writer: A Critical Biography (2007), and Lilus Kikus and Other Stories by Elena Poniatowska, translation and introduction (2005). She was Editor of the academic journal Diálogo, an Interdisciplinary Studies journal from 2010 to 2020. Elena Poniatowska is one of the most powerful and important voices of Spanish American literature and journalism. Her chosen genre is literary journalism, much of which is collected in the 7 volume Todo México (1991-1999). Her prolific career has won her many awards including the Mazatlán Prize twice for Hasta no verte Jesús mío (1970) and Tinísima (1992), the Alfaguara Prize for La piel del cielo (2007), and the Cervantes Prize for Literature in 2013. .

Once relegated to the borders of literature—neither Mexican nor truly American—Chicana/o writers have always been in the vanguard of change, articulating the multicultural ethnicities, shifting identities, border realities, and even postmodern anxieties and hostilities that already characterize the twenty-first century. Indeed, it is Chicana/o writers' very in-between-ness that makes them authentic spokespersons for an America that is becoming increasingly Mexican/Latin American and for a Mexico that is ever more Americanized. In this pioneering study, Héctor Calderón looks at seven Chicana and Chicano writers whose narratives constitute what he terms an American Mexican literature. Drawing on the concept of "Greater Mexican" culture first articulated by Américo Paredes, Calderón explores how the works of Paredes, Rudolfo Anaya, Tomás Rivera, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Cherríe Moraga, Rolando Hinojosa, and Sandra Cisneros derive from Mexican literary traditions and genres that reach all the way back to the colonial era. His readings cover a wide span of time (1892-2001), from the invention of the Spanish Southwest in the nineteenth century to the América Mexicana that is currently emerging on both sides of the border. In addition to his own readings of the works, Calderón also includes the writers' perspectives on their place in American/Mexican literature through excerpts from their personal papers and interviews, correspondence, and e-mail exchanges he conducted with most of them.

Fresh perspectives and eye-opening discussions of contemporary American fiction In The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020, a team of distinguished scholars delivers a focused and in-depth collection of essays on some of the most significant and influential authors and literary subjects of the last four decades. Cutting-edge entries from established and new voices discuss subjects as varied as multiculturalism, contemporary regionalisms, realism after poststructuralism, indigenous narratives, globalism, and big data in the context of American fiction from the last 40 years. The Encyclopedia provides an overview of American fiction at the turn of the millennium as well as a vision of what may come. It perfectly balances analysis, summary, and critique for an illuminating treatment of the subject matter. This collection also includes: An exciting mix of established and emerging contributors from around the world discussing central and cutting-edge topics in American fiction studies Focused, critical explorations of authors and subjects of critical importance to American fiction Topics that reflect the energies and tendencies of contemporary American fiction from the forty years between 1980 and 2020 The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020 is a must-have resource for undergraduate and graduate students of American literature, English, creative writing, and fiction studies. It will also earn a place in the libraries of scholars seeking an authoritative array of contributions on both established and newer authors of contemporary fiction.

Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa—theorist, Chicana, feminist—famously called on scholars to do work that matters. This pronouncement was a rallying call, inspiring scholars across disciplines to become scholar-activists and to channel their intellectual energy and labor toward the betterment of society. Scholars and activists alike have encountered and expanded on these pathbreaking theories and concepts first introduced by Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La frontera and other texts. Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa is a pragmatic and inspiring offering of how to apply Anzaldúa’s ideas to the classroom and in the community rather than simply discussing them as theory. The book gathers nineteen essays by scholars, activists, teachers, and professors who share how their first-hand use of Anzaldúa’s theories in their classrooms and community environments. The collection is divided into three main parts, according to the ways the text has been used: “Curriculum Design,” “Pedagogy and Praxis,” and “Decolonizing Pedagogies.” As a pedagogical text, Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa also offers practical advice in the form of lesson plans, activities, and other suggested resources for the classroom. This volume offers practical and inspiring ways to deploy Anzaldúa’s transformative theories with real and meaningful action. Contributors Carolina E. Alonso Cordelia Barrera Christina Bleyer Altheria Caldera Norma E. Cantú Margaret Cantú-Sánchez Freyca Calderon-Berumen Stephanie Cariaga Dylan Marie Colvin Candace de León-Zepeda Miryam Espinosa-Dulanto Alma Itzé Flores Christine Garcia Patricia M. García Patricia Pedroza González María del Socorro Gutiérrez-Magallanes Leandra H. Hernández Nina Hoechtl Rían Lozano Socorro Morales Anthony Nuño Karla O’Donald Christina Puntasecca Dagoberto Eli Ramirez José L. Saldívar Tanya J. Gaxiola Serrano Verónica Solís Alexander V. Stehn Carlos A. Tarin Sarah De Los Santos Upton Carla Wilson Kelli Zaytoun

Although there have been substantial contributions to Chicana literature and criticism over the past few decades, Chicanas are still underrepresented and underappreciated in the mainstream literary world and virtually nonexistent in the canon. Writers like Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Gloria Anzaldúa have managed to find larger audiences and critical respect, but there are legions of Chicana writers and artists who have been marginalized and ignored despite their talent. Even in Chicano anthologies, the focus has tended to be more on male writers. Chicanas have often found themselves without a real home in the academic world. Tey Diana Rebolledo has been writing about Chicana/Latina identity, literature, discrimination, and feminism for more than two decades. In this collection of essays, she brings together both old and new works to give a state-of-the-moment look at the still largely unanswered questions raised by vigilant women of colour throughout the last half of the twentieth century. An intimate introductory essay about Rebolledo's personal experiences as the daughter of a Mexican mother and a Peruvian father serves to lay the groundwork for the rest of the volume. The essays delve into the historical development of Chicana writing and its early narratives, the representation of Chicanas as seen on book covers, Chicana feminism, being a Chicana critic in the academy, Chicana art history, and Chicana creativity. Rebolledo encourages "guerrillera" warfare against academia in order to open up the literary canon to Chicana/Latina writers who deserve validation.

Winner, National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Book Award, 2019 The Royal Chicano Air Force produced major works of visual art, poetry, prose, music, and performance during the second half of the twentieth century and first decades of the twenty-first. Materializing in Sacramento, California, in 1969 and established between 1970 and 1972, the RCAF helped redefine the meaning of artistic production and artwork to include community engagement projects such as breakfast programs, community art classes, and political and labor activism. The collective’s work has contributed significantly both to Chicano/a civil rights activism and to Chicano/a art history, literature, and culture. Blending RCAF members’ biographies and accounts of their artistic production with art historical, cultural, and literary scholarship, Flying under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force is the first in-depth study of this vanguard Chicano/a arts collective and activist group. Ella Maria Diaz investigates how the RCAF questioned and countered conventions of Western art, from the canon taught in US institutions to Mexican national art history, while advancing a Chicano/a historical consciousness in the cultural borderlands. In particular, she demonstrates how women significantly contributed to the collective’s output, navigating and challenging the overarching patriarchal cultural norms of the Chicano Movement and their manifestations in the RCAF. Diaz also shows how the RCAF’s verbal and visual architecture—a literal and figurative construction of Chicano/a signs, symbols, and texts—established the groundwork for numerous theoretical interventions made by key scholars in the 1990s and the twenty-first century.

Since the 1980s Chicana writers including Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Alma Luz Villanueva have reworked iconic Mexican cultural symbols such as mother earth goddesses and La Llorona (the Wailing Woman of Mexican folklore), re-imagining them as powerful female figures. After reading the works of Chicana writers who created bold, powerful, and openly sexual female characters, Debra J. Blake wondered how everyday Mexican American women would characterize their own lives in relation to the writers’ radical reconfigurations of female sexuality and gender roles. To find out, Blake gathered oral histories from working-class and semiprofessional U.S. Mexicanas. In Chicana Sexuality and Gender, she compares the self-representations of these women with fictional and artistic representations by academic-affiliated, professional intellectual Chicana writers and visual artists, including Alma M. López and Yolanda López. Blake looks at how the Chicana professional intellectuals and the U.S. Mexicana women refigure confining and demeaning constructions of female gender roles and racial, ethnic, and sexual identities. She organizes her analysis around re-imaginings of La Virgen de Guadalupe, La Llorona, indigenous Mexica goddesses, and La Malinche, the indigenous interpreter for Hernán Cortés during the Spanish conquest. In doing so, Blake reveals how the professional intellectuals and the working-class and semiprofessional women rework or invoke the female icons to confront the repression of female sexuality, limiting gender roles, inequality in male and female relationships, and violence against women. While the representational strategies of the two groups of women are significantly different and the U.S. Mexicanas would not necessarily call themselves feminists, Blake nonetheless illuminates a continuum of Chicana feminist thinking, showing how both groups of women expand lifestyle choices and promote the health and well-being of women of Mexican origin or descent.

This first book-length analysis of the Chicana literary tradition traces the development of Chicana literature from 1848 to the present. Rebolledo discusses major writers' works, important myths and archetypes, and key theoretical issues; she then shows the ways in which Chicana writers explore subjectivity and identity in their writing, the struggle Chicana writers have faced in finding their voices and developing a strong and ethnically tagged language, and the ways they have broken taboos by transgressing into traditionally male spaces.