Decolonial Voices. Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century (review)

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 309 nalistic as well fiction and non-fiction writing to be found. Perhaps reflecting the editors' current locations and local knowledge of the border, the book tends to focus on El Paso/Juárez and Tijuana with relatively little on other areas such as the border from Brownsville/Matamoros to Laredo/Nuevo Laredo and the Arizona/Sonora border srretch including Nogales, Arizona/Nogales, Sonora. However , these criticisms aside, Puro Border stands as a very good introduction for the general reader on some of the issues that plague the U.S.-Mexico border at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Chuck Tatum The University of Arizona Decolonial Voices. Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century Indiana University Press, 2002 Edited by Arturo J. Aldama and Naomi H. Quiñónez The past decade has seen the publication of a string of groundbreaking studies focusing on Chicana/o criticism and cultural studies including Ramón Saldivar, Chicano Narrative: The Diabetics of Difference (1990); José David Saldivar, The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History (1991); José David Saldivar and Héctor Calderón, editors, Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature and Ideology (1991); Rafael Pérez Torres, Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Margins, Against Myths (1995); Renato Rosaldo, CultureandTruth: The Remaking of Social Analysis; José David Saldivar, Border Matters: RemappingAmerican Cultural Studies ( 1997) ; Alfred Arteaga, Chicano Poetics : Heterotexts and Hybridities (1997); Carla Trujillo, ed., LivingChicana Theory (1998); David Maciel and Maria Herrera-Sobek, Chicano Renaissance : Contemporary Cultural Trends; and Sonia Saldivar Hull, Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature (2000). Decolonial Voices includes eighteen essays appearing for the first time and two essays by José David Saldivar and Norma Alarcón previously published. This anthology is a showcase of intellectual originality and keen insight from borh wellestablished scholars such as Saldivar, Alarcón, Vicki Ruiz, Cordelia Candelaria, Patricia Penn-Hilden, and Rolando Romero and a broad spectrum of emerging scholars who are beginning to make their mark on the rapidly expanding field of Chicana/o cultural studies. In compiling a first-rate collection of essays that in many cases expand the limits of current Chicana/o scholarship, the editors have set out a most ambitious set of goals that more cautious editors might have avoided. Aldama and Quiñónez have, in large part, succeeded in stunning fashion to offer, in their words, "a range of interdisciplinary essays that discuss racialized, subaltern, feminist , and diasporic identities and the aesthetic politics of hybrid and mestiza/o cultural productions" (2). They have also taken a very significant step towards reflecting key directions in Chicana/o cultural studies including die charting of: how subaltern cultural productions of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands [...] speak to what Walter Mignolo [...] considers the intersections of 'local,' 'hemispheric,' and 'globalized' power relations of the border imaginary. (2-3) The editors have also taken at least some important , if tentative steps, towards creating an "interethnic , comparative, and Transnational dialogue" between Chicana/o, African American, Mexican feminist, and U.S. Native American cultural vocabularies . "Tentative" in the sense that the volume does not include a genuine dialogue that might have been enhanced by a series of responses by African American, Native American, and Mexican critics and theorists to some of the anthologies key essays. This is not meant so much as a criticism but rather as a recommendation and an opportunity for some enterprising scholar/editors who might put together such an anthology in the future . To have included additional essays would have expanded this current volume way beyond its final substantive length of over 400 pages. Academic presses do not tend to look favorably on such voluminous works. 310 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies The U.S.-Mexico border is a contested physical, geopolitical, globalized, militarized, socioeconomic , and historical site that has been studied extensively by both Mexican and U.S. scholars. Less studied is diis 3,000-mile stretch of land widi its many points of contact on a daily basis as a discursive, linguistic, cultural, and representational space. Decolonial Voices focuses on the latter particularly in Part I and Part III titled, respectively, "Dangerous...