Introduction: Migration and Movement(s) in Chicano/a Literature

From its inception, chicano/a literature has been defined by formal and thematic diversity, much like the European, North American, and Latin American literary traditions from which this “new” literature emerged. As critics have argued for the past several decades, the aesthetic multidimensionality found in Chicano/a works makes this literature worthy of equal consideration alongside older and more established canons, despite its relatively young state. However, due to its (somewhat rightful) affiliation with the Chicano Movement and the civil rights activism of the 1960s, Chicano/a literature is commonly viewed as aesthetically hegemonic by readers unfamiliar with the developments that have taken place in the fields of Chicana/o and American literary studies over the past decades. As is the case with other American racialized canons, like Native American and African American literatures, Chicano/a works are often understood and discussed as focusing strictly on questions of identity, social and political injustice, economic hardship, and the various difficulties involved in managing two or more cultural traditions. Although there is little doubt that American “minority” literatures do foreground such issues, it would be erroneous to consider them hegemonic or one-dimensional in their respective approaches to such universal human concerns. After all, these questions can be found across literary traditions around the world, from the modernist works of Jorge Luis Borges, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and Franz Kafka to the contemporary writings of José Saramago, Rigoberta Menchú, and Margaret Atwood.

Additionally, and perhaps more so than any other American racial minority literary canon, Chicano/a literature has continually redefined itself in accordance with the evolving understanding of what it means to be Chicano/a in the first place. Defining a necessarily fluid, mixed, and perpetually changing subject position has been both a blessing and a curse to this literary tradition. On the one hand, it has provided the basis for fruitfully diverse literary representations of what it means to be Chicano/a, from early Chicano texts like Rodolfo Gonzales’s I Am Joaquín (1972) to contemporary works like Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo (2003); on the other hand, it has contributed to the marginalization of texts and authors that do not necessarily fit the model of Chicano/a identity that has come to define the canon. One of the first nationally recognized Chicano authors, Tomás Rivera, famously stated to Juan Bruce-Novoa in a 1977 interview that the

fact that we only have very lukewarm dogma within the Chicano literary movement is one of the basic factors that explains why it still continues to grow and expand. If we had ever set down a dogma defining Chicano literature to enable us to know which writings are and which are not, ya se habría acabado todo el mugrero, chingao [the whole mess would have ended by now, damn]. . . . I hope we never fall into all that. Some people advocate it, but I can’t see it. If you start defining you put limitations on it, absolutely. Then you won’t have anything.

(Chicano 148)

In accordance with Rivera, Bruce-Novoa published an essay in 1986 entitled “Canonical and Non-Canonical Texts” in which he argued against the marginalization of authors who thematically, existentially, or formally did not meet the standards of what is stereotypically defined as Chicano/a literature—authors who push the boundaries of the canon into unfamiliar or potentially problematic spaces. For critics and authors like Rivera and Bruce-Novoa, such uncomfortable expansion defines the essence of Chicano/a literature, while for others it signals the potential and unnecessary dismantling of an already fragile canon, even perhaps to the point of undermining an academic discipline that took decades of struggle to legitimate and institutionalize.

Regardless of what position one takes in this ongoing debate, there is no doubt that Chicano/a literature has expanded beyond the simple canonical parameters of identity formation. Thus, this special issue focuses on recent, subtle movements within Chicano/a literature, those fissures or unaccounted-for spaces that highlight the growing pains of a discipline still attempting to find permanence in a shifting academic world...