Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space, and: Gang Nation: Delinquent Citizens in Puerto Rican, Chicano, and Chicana Narratives (review)

The vexed nature of ethnic and gender representation provides the basis for these two admirable and exciting books. Mary Pat Brady's Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies offers new, provocative readings of the ways that space renders identity in conjunction with numerous social conditions: gender construction, globalization, the political economy of empire. Brady's approach to Chicana literature proposes that space is central to understanding how Chicanas and Chicanos are affected by spatial change (such as the militarization of the U.S.–Mexico border) and are, also, the laborers of that change. Brady focuses on how Chicanas have done extensive cultural work to reshape the significance of space within a literary sphere.

Brady's study stands out among a new crop of exceptional texts addressing ethnic literature because it offers an innovative and suggestive conceptual framework for considering Chicana writing. The book should be of value not only to those interested in Chicano(a) letters but to any critic engaged in globalization and transnational studies. It incorporates a wide variety of critical and literary texts in exploring the relationship between geography and the racialized and gendered body represented in Chicana literature. Its clear, polished prose makes it as accessible as it is significant.

In revealing the connection between Chicana bodies, literary texts, and geopolitical space, Brady's incorporation of literary, critical, historical, and theoretical concerns is impressive. She considers the ever changing significance of space for Chicana(o) culture and subjectivity, from the first chapter's examination of the foundation of Arizona, along with an analysis of local literature from the 1870s, to the sixth chapter's discussion of the border's narcotics economy and its representation by Alberto Ríos and Mary Helen Ponce. Along the way, she provides an intelligent and sensitive analysis of major Chicana writers.

Brady's reading of Sandra Cisneros's "Woman Hollering Creek" and Other Stories will become one of the key critical pieces on this widely read text. Similarly, the analysis of Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera in chapter 3 and the reading of Cherríe Moraga's work in chapter 5 offer astute insights into the function of space in the work of these well-known writers. Too often such authors are the subject of overly general and facile considerations of difference and hybridity. In the hands of a critic like Brady, they become the topic of a lively and fresh discussion.

While Brady suggests we rethink the relationship of a gendered ethnic self to space, Monica Brown's Gang Nation makes the familiar observation that social disenfranchisement is central to the dynamics of gang affiliation. However, by linking this phenomenon to the function of nation and national identity, Brown is able to open her analysis wider and offer new insights into the narrative representation of Latino gang experiences.

Gang membership remains a pervasive and pernicious stereotype associated with Latino identity. From the Zoot Suit Riots to the rise of the Almighty King Nation in Puerto Rican and Dominican barrios, gangs have been viewed as the symptom of a Latino(a) pathology since at least the midpoint of the twentieth century. The prancing dancers in brownface in West Side Story underscore just how the American popular imagination has been imbued with this image. Monica Brown takes up the issue head-on.

Gang Nation looks at literary and other narrative texts to reveal how representations of Latino gangs manifest gang members' longing for a welcoming social environment and for greater participation in U.S. national culture. These representations also reveal how, when that desire is thwarted, alienation...