Exploring the Limits of Chicana/o and American Studies: Five Texts Every Graduate Student Should Know

When asked to contribute a literary review for this special issue, one discussing five of the most important contemporary critical works in Chicana/o studies for a graduate student to know, I found the charge somewhat daunting. Undoubtedly, such a book list cannot help but be exclusionary. Consequently, rather than focus on disciplinary specific texts or even works unique to theoretical camps, I chose to think about contributions that push the field in new directions while building on the rich tradition of scholarship already present in Chicana/o studies. This, however, meant that I had to exclude several key texts for the sake of brevity. As a result, the works I have selected for this literary review problematize the politics and processes of identity construction through various approaches while critiquing how those identities are understood, experienced, and read within structures of power. Unique to these texts is also the authors’ attempt to think through what changes or benefits their individual interventions provide to the field of Chicano studies. Simply stated, my aim is to provide a review of important works that will offer graduate students an understanding of the larger movements taking place in contemporary Chicana/o studies and provide some historical and critical context with which to frame these conversations.

Broadly, the work of the discipline has been to create a consciousness of Chicana/o existence, to locate a space from which Chicanas/os can produce criticism, enact activism for social change, and recognize an agency that has traditionally been read as elusive or at least latent. Though truncated in this essay, Chicana/o intellectual history holds a remarkable list of accomplishments. As Latina/os become a large and influential minority in the United States, the discipline is presented with new challenges, in particular new political, historical, economic, and social realities that demand a deeper engagement with and theorization of Chicano/a subjectivity.

It is important to recognize from the outset that these five selected works emerge in the early twenty-first century, in the wake of major intellectual shifts in Chicana/o studies and during a period of complex political and social transition for Latina/os. The publication of Emma Pérez’s The Decolonial Imaginary: Reading Chicanas into History (1999) and Chela Sandoval’s equally groundbreaking work, Methodology of the Oppressed (2000), brings years of Chicana and women of color feminist critiques of nationalism and essentialist identity politics to bear on the intellectual underpinnings of Chicana/o subjectivity. Pérez uses Michel Foucault’s technique of reading for archival gaps or holes in order to continue the work of earlier Chicana feminists, expanding a historical consciousness of gendered politics. She develops the concept of thirdspace feminism to challenge narratives based in hetero-patriarchy and “hegemonic feminism,” which have elided the existence of Chicanas and their critiques of Chicano identity politics by either ignoring their role altogether or by regarding Chicanas as part of the third world and thus unrelated to first world narratives. Reading these archival gaps produces a new conception of history and culture, or to borrow from Pérez herself, a new cultural “imaginary” (xiv–xv). Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed introduces the theory of differential consciousness (the ability to recognize ideological oppression and respond to it by selecting how one is perceived—in other words, interpellating one’s self) in order to resist, thrive, and work against systems of colonial and patriarchal oppression (30–31, 60).

While both works provide a way of understanding agency, unbound from ideologies of coloniality and hetero-patriarchy, they have been criticized for providing discursive spaces in which an individual can chose to reinscribe the forces of hegemony and/or the state. However, these interventions invite a new moment in cultural criticism, one in which Chicana/o identity and subjectivity provide opportunities to resist prescriptive identity categories. By this I mean that individuals can recognize their position in colonizing structures and choose how they wish to represent themselves in order to question, disrupt, and hopefully heal from such oppression. These intellectual contributions...