On Recent Chicano Literature

Margaret García. UN NUEVO MESTIZAJE SERIES. 1987–2001. Oil on canvas, oil on wood. 96"x 96" overall. Courtesy of the artist. These paintings are part of the exhibit organized by Cheech Marin titled "Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge."

For many years, it was standard practice in Chicano literary criticism to include a note on terminology, justifying the use of Chicano over other available terms such as Mexican American, Mexican, and Latino. For example, in the preface to his early and influential book Chicano Literature (1982), Charles Tatum justifies his use of the term Chicano based on its political charge and its acceptance in academic circles. He argues that the term "most accurately identifies … the preponderance of works whose theme is an outcry against the oppression of the rural farmworker and urban barrio-dweller" but proceeds later to note that "for practical purposes, it should be understood that 'Mexican-American' is an interchangeable label and is also frequently used to identify this minority group and its literature" (i, ii). There are thus two constitutive elements of Chicano-ness in Tatum's study: first, oppositional politics; and second, Mexican ethnicity.

Interestingly, in Tatum's study, there is no analogous discussion of the term literature, despite that word's long and contentious history and despite the fact that one of the crucial features of Chicano cultural production is its attempt to upset traditional notions of canonicity and the problematic bifurcation of high and low culture. I note this not to criticize Tatum, one of the foundational critics of Chicano literature, but rather to call attention to questions that are once again becoming central to the field. Who counts as Chicano? What counts as literature? And, more germane to this review, what counts as Chicano literature? In this essay, I briefly review seven recent works of fiction that pressure the definition of Chicano literature in different ways: the text's genre, the author's national identity, and the text's thematic content.

Genre fiction has for some time pushed the boundaries of Chicano literature, beginning with a rich tradition of crime and detective fiction from Rolando Hinojosa's Partners in Crime (1985) and Lucha Corpi's Eulogy for a Brown Angel (1992) to Mario Acevedo's ongoing series of vampire detective novels that began with The Nymphos of Rocky Flats (2006). Carlos Cisneros's novel The Case Runner works in a new genre, situating the legal thriller in the literal border spaces of Brownsville, Texas. The story revolves around the exploits of recent law graduate Alejandro "Alex" del Fuerte, who unwittingly stumbles into a civil litigation that could potentially implicate hundreds of lawyers, judges, and state legislators as complicit in the seedy system of case running (soliciting clients through extralegal means) that dominates the legal industry in the border region. When an undocumented worker named Pilo approaches Alex for help finding his wife and son, Alex discovers that the man's family has been dead for a year and a corporate law firm has already represented someone else claiming to be the father in a wrongful death lawsuit that netted millions of dollars. After Pilo is murdered, Alex decides to go after the law firm that perpetrated the fraud, despite the...