Narratives of Greater Mexico: Essays on Chicano Literary History, Genre, and Borders (review)

Until recently, Mexican American cultural history was marked by a focus on Aztlán as the heart and soul of Chicano existence. Displaced by an all-encompassing real and metaphoric Border, Aztlán's power to invoke Chicano discourse has lost some of its glitter. Héctor Calderón's Narratives of Greater Mexico may likewise signal a decline in the valence associated with the term "Chicano." Alongside this, however, Calderón makes strides to expose how in the current globalized and post-national era, even all things "Mexican" might not be strictly so. In his Introduction, Calderón states that "I would offer this book as a revisionary endeavor, altering traditional Mexican studies. We can no longer continue to think of Mexican people and culture in the United States as if they were completely dislocated from the nation of Mexico, its culture and artistic traditions… the interrelatedness of Mexicans on both sides of the border is inescapable" (xiii). It is this position that puts stress on the meaning of both Chicano and Mexican. To make his point, while alternating between Chicano and Mexican without distinction, Calderón reintroduces the notion of "Greater Mexico" first proposed by Américo Paredes in the 1950s and 1960s. This other "Mexico in a cultural sense" (22) exceeds political and geographic limits and encompasses "all areas inhabited by people of Mexican culture" (Paredes qtd. in Calderón 23). These people of Mexican traditions, whether in Mexico or the United States, are therefore culturally residents of Greater Mexico.

To support his case for a Greater Mexico, Calderón carefully plots out a reading of what are now classic Chicano authors and texts, and reads them through a lens that focuses on the cross-border traffic that binds them to their Mexican origins. Américo Paredes, Rudolfo Anaya, Tomás Rivera, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Cherríe Moraga, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, and Sandra Cisneros, while contributing to or emerging from the Chicano Movement, are all found here "to both embrace and transform Mexican culture" (27). Indeed, while the first chapter addresses the push for and maintenance of a near-aristocratic "Spanish Southwest" immediately after the annexation of the region by the United States, the second lays witness to the reclaiming of the same region by the Mexican, mestizo, and working class in the work of Rudolfo Anaya. This lays the foundation for the re-encounter with Mexico that is highlighted in subsequent chapters.

If Anaya's novels help debunk the myth of direct Spanish ascendancy in the Southwest by laying a claim on Mexican and mestizo origins, Tomás Rivera's foundational fiction ...Y no se lo tragó la tierra is read as "a Mexican novel that crossed borders: the reformulation of the Mexican mestizo cultural diaspora into the beginning of a Chicano narrative tradition" (69). To call this sacred text of the Chicano canon a Mexican novel is a bold statement. But Calderón's point is well taken: a student of Mexican literature, Rivera's genealogical link to the Mexican cultural past—and to writer Juan Rulfo in particular—is undeniable. As with Anaya and the former Spanish Southwest, Calderón makes a case, not for the Mexican American, but for what he calls the American Mexican, and by extension the América Mexicana.

This notion of the American Mexican is best seen in the chapters dedicated to the writings of Cherríe Moraga and Sandra Cisneros. It is here that Calderón delineates the intricacies of this writing as it dialogues directly with Mexican culture. True, the original interpretations of Moraga's poetry and prose are read as a direct challenge to the Chicano Movement's exclusivity regarding the male and heterosexual experience. In light of Greater Mexico, while Moraga "writes to find a place for herself within the Mexican/Chicano family and society" she has more distinctly "written a Mexican book...