Spanish Perspectives on Chicano Literature: Literary Essays ed. by Jesús Rosales and Vanessa Fonseca (review)

Spanish Perspectives on Chicano Literature: Literary and Cultural Essays, edited by Jesús Rosales and Vanessa Fonseca with a foreword by Francisco A. Lomelí and an introduction by Jesús Rosales, is a collection of essays that bridges Chicanx studies in the United States and Spain. In the prologue entitled From La Mancha to Aztlán, Lomelí skillfully traces Chicanx roots, heritage and history as he places its development on a continuum of substantiated achievements. Unlike the North American literary canon, which has been involved in an arduous polemic regarding the place of Chicanx culture and literature within the academy, Rosales and Fonseca clearly situate this literature on the vanguard of both Spain and the United States.

The text is organized in two parts. The first one, “Spanish Perspectives de Acá,” contains six chapters with a literary view of Spanish authors who are located in the United States and write from North American Universities. The authors are well versed not only in the literature analyzed, but also contribute a deep understanding of the socio-cultural and historical events that affect Chicanx. The first entry, entitled “Reading from Don Quijote de la Mancha to The House on Mango Street: Chicano/a Literature, Mimesis, and the Reader,” written by Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez, traces this technique to such early Chicanx works as Who Would’ve Thought it and The Squatter and the Don written in the nineteenth century by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton.

In chapter 2, “Mestizaje in Afro-Iberian Writers Najat El Hachmi and Saïd El Kadaoui Moussaoui through the Borderland Theories of US Third World Feminisms,” Carmen Sanjuán Pastor uses the feminist theories of Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sonia Saldivar-Hull and Chela Sandoval to analyze L’Últim Patriarca and Límites y fronteras, two novels linked by liminality, border crossing and the subsequent psychological effects of feeling like an outsider amongst the dominant culture. Hence, the author compares these processes to those of mestizaje. Moreover, the author returns to Anzaldúa’s words to explore the effects of a hegemonic system on story telling in these narratives. Chapter 3, “Toward a Transnational Nos/otr@s Scholarship in Chican@and Latin@Studies,” authored by Ricardo F. Vivancos-Pérez, expands on his previous volume Radical Chicana Poetics rationalizing positionality, writing, and analyzing Chicanx Studies from the perspective of a white, heterosexual, male scholar probing Lesbian writings. As such, Vivancos-Pérez likens his own border experiences as reminiscent to the “arrebatos” or “calls to action” that Anzaldúa uses “[to] agitate . . . into action by compelling us to write our story anew (63).”

In “Tempted by the Words of Another,” Ana Sánchez-Muñoz delves into the topic of linguistic influences, choices and negotiations that Latinx experience in the construction and evolution of a vernacular. In fact, the author traces the diversity of Latinx speakers and the myriad of influences that have an effect on Spanglish. More specifically, Sánchez-Muñoz points towards a linguistic tendency that includes bidialectalismo by some speakers and assimilation by Spanish speakers rooted in countries other than México. In chapter 5, “The Cultural Border, Magic, and Oblivion in Bless Me, Ultima (2013), Obaba (2005), and Un embrujo (1998),” Juan Pablo Gil-Osle argues the declining influences of Hispanic cultures as language and traditions fade under the effects of colonization, assimilation and globalization. Although this mindset may be grouping different cultural tendencies that are evolving rather than disappearing: a consequence inherent of colonization and globalization. In the last chapter of the first section of this volume, Victor Fuentes recounts the significant role that the newspaper El Malcriado (1964–75) played in the farmworker movement of the 1960s and 70s. The paper was in print just over ten years denoting the strongest period of the farmworkers movement. Fuentes’s essay describes the period, themes, characters and the effects that...