This article complements the existing body of Ruiz de Burton scholarship by providing the first sustained examination of her literary representations of American Indians in both "Who Would Have Thought It?" (1872) and "The Squatter and the Don" (1885), and by exploring how these representations serve her broader aims of social and political…

By reading Helena Maria Viramontes's "Cariboo Cafe" and Daniel Chacon's "Godoy Lives," this essay argues that Chicana/o fiction articulates what I call a "borderlands ethics." Both Viramontes and Chacon give the undocumented migrant the power to merge the United States and Latin America, self and other, citizen and…

Based on an oral history interview, this essay examines the work of Yolanda M. Lopez, one of the most significant Chicana artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It posits that her work portrays feminist intersectionality and oppositional consciousness, predating the Chicana feminist literature on these paradigms. Documenting her…

This essay examines the uneasy relationship that Arturo Islas's "The Rain God" has had with narratives of identity, focusing on how the representation of Felix's sexuality makes him a problematic figure for certain strains of Chicana/o and queer studies. In other writings, Islas criticizes Quinto Sol, the chief publishing house of Chicano…

Despite their differences in place and time, the woman-centered Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral and the Chicana lesbian feminist writer Gloria Anzaldua both looked to a transnational intellectual American history that frequently connected discourses of esotericism, indigenismo, and mestizaje. My comparative approach shows how both women used these…

This essay seeks to intervene in critical discussions about Arturo Islas's 1984 novel "The Rain God", as well as to suggest the potential for synthesizing discourses heretofore deployed in disparate conversations about disability, sexuality, and ethnicity. I first demonstrate how the novel's queer characters, Miguel Chico and Felix, pose critical…

This essay is a cursory examination of 1972 and the early 1970s. These were foundational years for Chicana/o literature. The author has only been able to offer a suggestive analysis of some of the literary production during this period. The author has not discussed the numerous periodicals and journals of the period, some underground, some with…

The autobiographically modulated poetry and prose collection "City of God" (1994) and other published works by the late Gil Cuadros (1962-96) survive as an important set of AIDS testimonials, the first of their kind in Chicano literary production. This paper explores Cuadros's preoccupation with processes of identificatory signification and…