Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities examines the crossing of literary and social forces that forms the context for being Chicano. Heterotextual poetics reveals how a poetry of the cross can influence identity, in readings ranging from the poetry of gender and race by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz to that of the fragmentary, postmodern subject of Juan Felipe Herrara. Heterotextuality is the medium in which xicanismo is articulated and comes to be a hybrid subject of textual difference.

As our millennium draws to a close, we find ourselves in the midst of great and rapid global changes with nations and political systems dissolving all around us and the world becoming one of shifting identities--of peoples unified and divided by such distinctions as nationality, ethnicity, race, religion, and colonial status. The articulation and construction of these distinctions, the very language of difference, is the subject of An Other Tongue. This collection of essays by a group of distinguished scholars, including Norma Alarcon, Gayatri Spivak, Tzvetan Todorov, and Gerald...

"Frozen Accident" is a long poem and, echoing Dante, its primary section "Nezahualcoyotl in Mictlan" narrates a trip to hell. Yet, Mictlan is not quite the Inferno. For Alfred Arteaga the place of the dead is California, the last stop for Western culture, the final limit of its reach. The West's poets and philosophers have long declared history over, god dead, and that what remains is merely the house of language. In other words, all is but frozen accident.
If the endpoint is California, the poem's point of departure is an assassination that radically shaped history. A young man witnessed...

Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities examines the crossing of literary and social forces that forms the context for being Chicano. Heterotextual poetics reveals how a poetry of the cross can influence identity, in readings ranging from the poetry of gender and race by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz to that of the fragmentary, postmodern subject of Juan Felipe Herrara. Heterotextuality is the medium in which xicanismo is articulated and comes to be a hybrid subject of textual difference.

As our millennium draws to a close, we find ourselves in the midst of great and rapid global changes with nations and political systems dissolving all around us and the world becoming one of shifting identities--of peoples unified and divided by such distinctions as nationality, ethnicity, race, religion, and colonial status. The articulation and construction of these distinctions, the very language of difference, is the subject of An Other Tongue. This collection of essays by a group of distinguished scholars, including Norma Alarcon, Gayatri Spivak, Tzvetan Todorov, and Gerald...