From the Edge: Chicana/o Border Literature and the Politics of Print by Allison E. Fagan, and: Southwest Asia: The Transpacific Geographies of Chicana/o Literature by Jayson Gonzales Sae-Saue (review)

From the Edge: Chicana/o Border Literature and the Politics of Print by Allison E. Fagan and Southwest Asia: The Transpacific Geographies of Chicana/o Literature by Jayson Gonzales Sae-Saue are both part of the Latinidad: Transnational Cultures in the United States series, published by Rutgers University Press and edited by Matt Garcia. This series, which includes critical works such as Marci R. McMahon’s Domestic Negotiations: Gender, Nation and Self-Fashioning in US Mexicana and Chicana Literature and Art (2013) and Marivel T. Danielson’s Homecoming Queers: Desire and Difference in Chicana Latina Cultural Production (2009), offers a transnational perspective on Chicana/o and Latina/o studies. Fagan’s and Gonzales Sae-Saue’s new books are significant contributions to the fields of Chicana/o literature and border studies. Written in an accessible style, these books contain original readings of classic and lesser-known Chicana/o texts and useful paradigms that readers can apply to other Chicana/o works.

Fagan’s book views Chicana/o texts as physical objects, analyzing the circumstances of their publication and their paratextual structure and contents in order to locate border literature on the physical (rather than simply metaphorical) US-Mexico border. In addition to her contribution to the study of Chicana/o literature and borderland studies, Fagan expands scholarship on the history of the book to include Chicana/o texts, arguing that the book should be interpreted as a “collaboratively produced and social text” rather than a “seamlessly transmitted uninterrupted message” between the author and reader (11). An interesting and valuable addition to Chicana/o publication history, Fagan’s book builds on the work of Manuel Martín-Rodriguez by examining publishers and presses such as Arte Público and Quinto del Sol and the ways in which they contributed to the publication of Chicana/o authors and texts.

In her introduction, Fagan offers her theory of “border textuality,” meaning “the condition under which the material text renders visible the links between narratives of struggle over border identity and the very struggle to produce those narratives” (11–12). She then uses this theory to perform close readings between different editions and publications of Chicana/o texts, looking at and reading the style of diacritical marks and the use and non-use of Spanish-denoting italics and their meanings in terms of the texts’ publication history. In her first chapter, she applies this method to Ana Castillo’s Sapogonia (1990, 1994) and Rolando Hinojosa’s Estampas del Valle (1973, 1977, 1980) and The Valley (1983), texts with multiple and significantly different editions; she illuminates the “instability of storytelling as a topic,” connecting the books through their use of multiple narrators with shifting points of view and their “physical embodiment” (18–19). Fagan then points out the differences in the way critics discuss the authors’ intentions in making these changes; critics tend to view Hinojosa as in control of the multiple versions of his text while Castillo’s changes are framed through a lens of failure and lack of authorial agency (35).

In chapter 2, Fagan looks at the texts Caballero: A Historical Novel (1996) by Jovita González and Eve Raleigh (Margaret Eimer’s pseudonym) and Barrio Boy (1971) by Ernesto Galarza, expanding on her analysis of Spanish/English translation and how glossaries function in the texts. Fagan’s readings of when and whether to use Spanish and its use in locating the author in a “powerful yet dangerous position” places the authors and their work in the physical borderlands (52). The use of Spanish, she argues, is powerfully mediated in these texts by the use of glossaries which “subtly shape[s...