Conversations with Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Writers (review)

Hector A. Torres's new book provides a window into the intentions and motivations of some of Chicana and Chicano literature's most widely read and significant authors. The book is a collection of interviews with Sandra Cisneros, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Richard Rodriguez, among others. Through this work, Torres seeks to revise Juan Bruce Novoa's now decades old theorization of the Chicana/o literary canon. Moreover, the publication of interviews with many of these authors, especially the deceased Anzaldúa, are worthy projects in themselves.

Like Novoa, Torres argues that Chicana/o authors continue to work through the intercultural possibilities that the US-Mexico borderlands represent historically and culturally (2). However, he also notes this model's weaknesses for present critics. It does not predict the extent to which today's Chicana/o artists enact or represent discursive repetitions in a long historical chain of American imperial practices (2). This concern is among the chief issues that his interviews probe. It is also an issue of great significance for the study of ethnic and American literature as well as Chicana/o studies.

The book consists of an introduction and ten chapters. Each chapter is dedicated to one writer and contains a description of the interviewee's life and work, one or two interviews with the author, and a bibliography pertaining to his or her writings. In addition to Cisneros, Anzaldúa, and Rodriguez, interview subjects include Rolando Hinojosa, Erlinda Gonzáles-Berry, Ana Castillo, Pat Mora, Demetria Martínez, Kathleen Alcalá, and Arturo Islas. Torres's text is a useful supplement to all of the writers' creative works. For example, the contrarian Rodriguez's own descriptions of linguistic mimicry provide useful insight for the (re)evaluation of his texts. His invocation of James Joyce and Irish writers' ambivalent relations to their colonizers' language positions his writing differently than commonly conceived.

The overall text, however, also demonstrates the limitations of the interview format. While the introduction describes an intriguing synthetic project, it is only partially accomplished. An appreciation of the interviews themselves and the overall trajectory of the text often require significant prior knowledge of the individual author's writings as well as the more general issues of Chicano literature. The interviewees' own words only sometimes speak to the important issues described in Torres's introduction. The project he outlines at the beginning of the book requires a more systematic and sustained analysis than the interview format allows. A book that more directly engaged the writers' texts in addition to material drawn from the interviews would better serve such a program.

Conversations will be of interest to those who are experts in Chicana and Chicano literature and already know the interview subjects' writings intimately. For such experts, the stated intentions, motivations, and commentary will be extremely interesting. I am now anxiously awaiting a collection of Torres-authored essays on these subjects. The interviews and introduction suggest such a work will have major implications for those of us interested in the present and future of Chicana/o literature.