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notes prelude 1. See Hughes,The Big Sea 54. See also Edward J. Mullen, ed.,Langston Hughes in the Hispanic World and Haiti 39 n. 11. 2. I use “intercultural” to designate the complex historical, cultural, and literary relationships among these three cultures. For a fuller definition, see the introduction. 3. Since there is no definitive resolution on the capitalization of “black” and “white” when these terms refer to racial and ethnic identifiers, I have chosen to follow the common language practice of newspapers and magazines and use lowercase for both. However, I capitalize “black” when I use it to refer to a specific group of the African American community, such as Black Muslims, or to a speci fic location, such as Black Harlem. 4. The term “contact zone” was first used to refer to Latin American narrative by Angel Rama, Transculturación narrativa en América Latina. Mary Louise Pratt moved the term onto the English-speaking stage of literary and cultural studies; see “Arts of the Contact Zone.” The term refers to geographic spaces where “native ” cultural systems or epistemologies intersect with those of the conquerors. These spaces are shared and demand that their inhabitants continually negotiate resources, geographic areas, and vying interests. 5. Piri Thomas lived many of the same experiences he attributes to his protagonist , also named Piri Thomas. To distinguish between the author and the character, who both share the same name, I refer to the author by his surname, Thomas, and to the character by his first name, Piri. I deliberately alternate between “Thomas” and “Piri” in order to accommodate the context I am describing at the time. 6. Aztlán is an indigenous term that refers to the region north of what today is Mexico, or loosely speaking, the southwestern borderlands. To some, during the Chicano movement of the 1960s, the term meant the homeland stolen by the United States in the 1846–1848 war, and the objective was to retake the land as a Chicano nation. To others, it was a rallying cry on which to build a Chicano identity with a sense of a people and a land of origins. introduction 1. Following Spanish and English usage in Chicano communities, I use “Chicano” in its broadest sense to refer to the culture of women and men of Mexican origin living in the United States, as well as to designate Mexican American men alone. I use “Chicana” to refer to individual Chicano women and to an academic discourse that challenges the patriarchal structure of Chicano culture. However, at times I prefer to use “Chicano woman” instead of “Chicana” to stress the importance of gender that might be overlooked with the small vowel change from Chicano to Chicana. At other times I use “Chicana” to stress ethnicity first and gender second. I alternate between “Chicano woman” and “Chicana” when appropriate. 2. I follow Louis Menand’s periodization; the years 1945 to 1975, dubbed “the Golden Age,” saw dramatic growth in the size of the system of higher education. Its composition (who went to college, who taught, and the nature of the subject matter) remained much the same as before World War II. The period from 1975 to the present, says Menand, “is a period not of expansion but of diversification. Since 1975 the size of the system has grown at a much more modest pace, but the composition—who is taught, who does the teaching, and what they teach— changed dramatically.” Menand, “College” 44. 3. I realize that “minority” is a highly contested term with respect to “Latino” groups because these groups are no longer “minorities” in terms of their numbers. However, there is still much to be done to overcome the status of these groups with respect to economic, educational, and political equality and representative power. It is in this sense that I use “minority.” I use quotation marks around the term to show that I recognize its contested usage. 4. Whiteness as a category often reduces ethnic differences among western European, British, and Scandinavian immigrants for the sake of assimilation. For recent work on white ethnicity, see Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White; George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness; Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines; David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; Eric Lott, “White Like Me”; and Neil Foley, The White Scourge. 5. The title in Spanish is El laberinto de la soledad. Originally published in 1950 by Cuadernos Americanos in Mexico, it was...

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