Chicano Nations: The Hemispheric Origins of Mexican American Literature by Marissa K. López (review)

In Chicano Nations: The Hemispheric Origins of Mexican American Literature, Marissa López explores the history of transamerican spatial imaginaries of Chicana/o literature from the mid-nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. By reorienting the reading of the Chicana/o authors from a specifically U.S. to a broader hemispheric context, López shows that since the inception of Chicana/o literature, its national imaginary always had a hemispheric—and even global—vision. From this perspective, López traces the “literary genealogy” of Latin American literature, from the deconstruction of the Spanish empire’s borders to a post-9/11 world defined by preemptive strikes on stateless terror. She stakes her central claim around three moments of “international pressure” in the history of Americas: Latin American independence and U.S. territorial expansion, the Mexican Revolution, and 9/11. This historical arc embodies a modification of meaning and literary forms in the way Chicana/o authors used to represent themselves and the nation—from both a narrative and a cartographic point of view. Moreover, she examines the significance of Chicano/a literature beyond the local spaces of chicanismo, economic conditions, and geopolitical realities that took place during this period.

Chicano Nations is divided in three main parts: the first focuses on Latin American emergence of race as an organizing principle of space through the nineteenth century’s Pan-American debates between the white and the mestizo. The second discusses the development of national imaginaries (race, nation, and history) of Mexican subjects living in the United States in the early twentieth century, and how they eventually became part of a Chicana/o collectivity. The third part examines the meaning of post-9/11 chicanismo as a terrain of global consciousness that has the potential to ground a vision of humanity’s future.

In part 1, “Habiting Americas,” Marissa López discusses the hemispheric tensions and connections between the Latin American traveling narratives from Lorenzo de Zavala (Mexico), Pérez Rosales (Chile), and Domingo Sarmiento (Argentina), and the Chicano historiography of Mariano Vallejo in the nineteenth century. Undertaking the risk of “falling into an intellectual solipsism that mirrors U.S. geopolitical dominance” (11)—a solipsism she gracefully avoids in the book—she points out the frictions between authors who, on one hand, deploy their travel narrative to unite the Americas in an utopian transamerican space and, on the other, deeply struggle to articulate this optimistic vision with the arbitrary codification of race concomitant with the formation of American spaces and states. As she argues, “Though a transamerican ideal does originate with white-identified elites, it does so in conjunction with their growing awareness of their own racialization in the U.S.-dominated American space” (12). More profoundly, López examines narratives that highlight the textual confluences of self and nation in a very original way. If many scholars before her have studied the racial dynamics and their effects on Chicana/o cultural production, her focus on the potential of Latin American imaginaries in the constitution of Chicana/o literature shifted the original U.S. perspective. Besides, López reminds us that “Chicana/o articulations of racial oppression must thus always be considered in this long history of intracommunal Chicana/o racism” (88), internal resistance to terms like “Latino” or “Hispanic,” and not only as a united and resilient nation.

Part 2 of Chicano Nations, “Inhabiting America,” concerns the hundreds of thousands of Mexicans that were displaced in the United States after the Mexican Revolution. In these chapters, López provides a rich overview of the questions of national boundaries in the context of the redefinition of Mexican and U.S. spaces through military might. As Mexico passes north of the border, authors like María Mena, Daniel Venegas, Jovita González, and Eve Raleigh develop the literary representations of Mexican subjects living in the United States in...