Gender and Place in Chicana/o Literature

"With Gender and Place in Chicana/o Literature: Critical Regionalism and the Mexican American Southwest, Melina Vizcaino-Aleman critically intervenes in the scholarly debates surrounding transnationalist and critical regionalist methodologies as these have impacted Chicana/o literary studies. Her sustained focus upon the dynamics of gender, race, and place enables a major reexamination of twentieth-century writers, who have been generally identified as 'local color,' without flattening the transnational dimensions of Chicana/o aesthetic production within the US-Mexico borderlands." (John Moran Gonzalez, Director of the Mexican American Studies Center and Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Texas at Austin, USA) "Analyzing key texts across genres, locales, and time periods, Melina Vizcaino-Aleman discredits the minimization of Chicana/o aesthetics for the sake of broader political aims and discerns instead the political efficacy of critical regionalist aesthetics on issues of gender, class, and place. This innovative study sheds new light on staid interpretations of feminine passivity to reveal the impact Chicana women have and have had in determining the social value of space, gesture, and language." (Stephanie Fetta, Assistant Professor of Spanish, College of Arts & Sciences, Syracuse University, USA) "Drawing upon a wide range of critical sources in Chicana and Chicano literary theory -including important studies by Tey Diana Rebolledo, Mary Pat Brady, Ramon Saldivar, Genaro Padilla, and Jose Limon- Melina Vizcaino-Aleman presents a compelling argument for a rethinking of critical regionalism as a tool for understanding the development of Chicana/o cultural production." (Santiago R. Vaquera-Vasquez, Associate Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of New Mexico, USA)

This book is a study of gender and place in twentieth-century Chicana/o literature and culture, covering the early period of regional writing to contemporary art.This book is a study of gender and place in twentieth-century Chicana/o literature and culture, covering the early period of regional writing to contemporary art. Remapping Chicana/o literary and cultural history from the critical regional perspective of the Mexican American Southwest, it uncovers the aesthetics of Chicana/o critical regionalism in the writings of Cleofas Jaramillo, Fray Angélico Chávez, Elena Zamora O’Shea, and Jovita González. In addition to bringing renewed attention to contemporary writers like Richard Rodriguez and introducing the work of Chicana artist Carlota d.Z. EspinoZa, the study also revisits the more recognized work of Américo Paredes, Mario Suárez, Mary Helen Ponce, and Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales to reconsider the aesthetics of gender and place in Chicana/o literature and culture.