This critical essay describes and demonstrates the uses and unique contributions of performative writing as a form of inquiry into the materialities and mobilities of sociocultural communicative phenom- ena. Embracing an Anzaldu an approach, the author utilizes Mesoamerican Aztec and Chicanx history, iconography, and mythos to argue for an ontological reimaging of where research should begin and end. As a methodological intervention, this article chal- lenges traditional impulses regarding where knowledge generation occurs, which knowledges are valid, and who counts as a valuable knowledge producer. By shifting genres, breaking grammatical rules, and creatively constructing poetics and rhythm (flor y canto), this “flight of the imagination” focuses on what Chicana, Latina, and indi- genous scholars have termed “fleshing the spirit” or “spiriting the flesh.” By embracing the soul work and spirituality of writing, this piece offers an art-based approach to methodological inquiry that functions as a sharp critique of the White capitalist cisheteropatriar- chal structure of higher education that maintains status quo under- standings of knowledge. When rerouting our methodological impulses toward a critical and decolonial telos and embracing the soul and spirit of performative writing, I argue that our first move must be to make an ontological shift in how we see the world and our place in it—we must begin and end with “theories in the flesh.”

El filme Mosquita y Mari (Aurora Guerrero, 2012) es la historia de crecimiento, amistad y amor de dos adolescentes chicanas, cuyas experiencias transcurren en Huntington Park, Los Ángeles, en un barrio mayoritariamente latino, de clase media baja y obrera, donde viven con sus fam ilias y en torno a las cuales giran sus responsabilidades y comportamientos. Hija de una sacrificada y trabajadora familia inmigrante mexicana, Yolanda es una disciplinada estudiante, la mejor de su clase, en quien sus padres han cargado la obligación del éxito y la esperanza del ascenso social. A la acera de enfrente de su casa se muda Mari, una joven rebelde e hija de una madre inmigrante ilegal, que no encuentra en el estudio la motivación de Yolanda, porque Mari ocupa el papel del padre recientemente fallecido, además cuida a su hermana menor y debe trabajar para ayudar a su madre a pagar el alquiler y cubrir un mínimo de necesidades familiares básicas.

In this essay, I describe the nexus of global capitalism, the precipitous rise in US deportations and return migration over the last decade, and the criminalization of Latino youth and immigrants in Mexico and the United States as manifested in the “call center narratives” of call center employees in Mexico City. The call center is the setting for an emergent transnational subculture within the economic imperatives of neoliberal globalization. For a disproportionate number of returning and deported youth, the transnational call center figures as an uncertain safe haven, a community of support and a temporary economic safety net. Even as the presence of former and active Latino gang members threaten the seeming safety in numbers, the call center narrators deconstruct the dominant discourse of “every immigrant is a (potential) criminal” in both the United States and in Mexico. And, as testimonios, the call center narratives speak from the “elsewhere” of deportation and return to US-based readers, voicing new perspectives on transnational and immigrant identity and solidarity.

The celebration of Spanglish para mi es un sueno completo. Nunca in my wildest dreams did I think that this rasquache way of speaking, la lengua de los pochos, would be something worthy of celebration. En el mundo de academia para una persona como yo, it has not been an easy undertaking, navegación no ha sido sin estrés, pero to be able to see la celebración de lo que es mi lengua hasta cierto punto, me consuela.

When the republican candidate Donald Trump in campaigning in 2016 for the U.S. presidency, expresses his negative opinions of Latinos, Hispanics and Mexican-Americans, and even promises to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, a relatively recent period in U.S. history is transformed into shameful memories, even historical amnesia. The Mexican-American war in the mid 19th century ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe, by which the U.S.-Mexico borderline was moved further south, the Mexican nation-state lost more than half of its geographical territory, and Mexicans living north of the new border lost their Mexican citizenship and became U.S. citizens. Since then, Mexican Americans and Chicanas/os have been disconnected from family and friends south of the border, treated as second-class U.S. citizens, and been subjects of ethnic and racial discrimination. How can memories of this historical process and its geopolitical repercussions be articulated and expressed? Can memorializing homeland, displacement and belonging be used as means of voicing protests against historical amnesia and consequences of the U.S.-Mexico border history? Since the rise of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, visual articulations of border history have been expressed in various forms of visual art. This paper presents a case study of visual articulations from the 1970s to the 2010s of displacement, homeland and belonging in collaborative performance projects around the world by Chicano artist Guillermo Gomez-Peña.

In "Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth" (1998), Michel Foucault states that before a person can reach a spiritual transformation, they should seek the very truth that will leave one transformed, a phenomenon he describes as "techniques of the self." Additional theorists and philosophers, such as explore the relationship of the self to "the other" in their theoretical texts. Through a careful analysis of decolonial and philosophical ideas about identity, I critically analyze the journey and eventual transformation that fictional character Micaela (also known as Lorenzo) undertakes in Emma Pérez's novel "Forgetting the Alamo, or, Blood Memory." Micaela struggles with the resilience of the "coloniality of power" in her everyday life as it leaves her angry, hateful and "uncivilized." I address questions about barriers that make personal transformations difficult. Micaela's retelling demonstrates that cycles of violence can stop if one begins with the self. In this manner, she repudiates the dominant power structures while transforming her soul.

When I started my dissertation work on Chicana mother-daughter pedagogies, I was looking for Chicana first-generation college students who considered their mothers to be integral to their educational success. 1 I was interested in documenting the teaching and learning practices of immigrant mothers who had little formal education but had raised high-achieving daughters who were now professors or in doctoral programs. I wanted to disrupt the narrative that Chicana immigrant mothers do not care about their children's education by showing how these mothers envisioned higher education for their daughters, despite never being part of that world themselves. This was my story after all; my mother did not attend college, yet I know that without her, I would not have gone on to pursue higher education. The daughters in my research were all raised in predominantly Latinx working-class communities in Los Angeles, and the mothers were all immigrants from Mexico. 2 They immigrated to escape poverty or abusive relationships, or to support their families financially. When I sat down with the mothers, they all spoke about the substantial role religion played in raising their daughters. Many attributed their daughters' educational success to Dios. 3 The daughters ranged in

Nepantla Familias brings together Mexican American narratives that explore and negotiate the many permutations of living in between different worlds—how the authors or their characters create, or fail to create, a cohesive identity amid the contradictions in their lives. Nepantla—or living in the in-between space of the borderland—is the focus of this anthology. The essays, poems, and short stories explore the in-between moments in Mexican American life—the family dynamics of living between traditional and contemporary worlds, between Spanish and English, between cultures with traditional and shifting identities. In times of change, family values are either adapted or discarded in the quest for self-discovery, part of the process of selecting and composing elements of a changing identity.

Edited by award-winning writer and scholar Sergio Troncoso, this anthology includes works from familiar and acclaimed voices such as David Dorado Romo, Sandra Cisneros, Alex Espinoza, Reyna Grande, and Francisco Cantú, as well as from important new voices, such as Stephanie Li, David Dominguez, and ire’ne lara silva. These are writers who open and expose the in-between places: through or at borders; among the past, present, and future; from tradition to innovation; between languages; in gender; about the wounds of the past and the victories of the present; of life and death.

Sergio Troncoso, David Dorado Romo, Reyna Grande, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Francisco Cantú, Rigoberto González, Alex Espinoza, Domingo Martinez, Oscar Cásares, Lorraine M. López, David Dominguez, Stephanie Li, Sheryl Luna, José Antonio Rodríguez, Deborah Paredez, Octavio Quintanilla, Sandra Cisneros, Diana Marie Delgado, Diana López, Severo Perez, Octavio Solis, ire'ne lara silva, Rubén Degollado, Helena María Viramontes, Daniel Chacón, Matt Mendez.

This is an oral history of a Chicana who migrated as a child to the state of Washington. Her lived experience provides insight to the Chicana experience in the Northwest. The oral interview is also analyzed to provide additional insight and awareness of the gendered experience.

This interdisciplinary study explores how US Mexicana and Chicana authors and artists across different historical periods and regions use domestic space to actively claim their own histories. Through "negotiation"-a concept that accounts for artistic practices outside the duality of resistance/accommodation-and "self-fashioning," Marci R. McMahon demonstrates how the very sites of domesticity are used to engage the many political and recurring debates about race, gender, and immigration affecting Mexicanas and Chicanas from the early twentieth century to today.

This article analyzes how documentaries and docudramas about the homicides of 1,500-plus women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico offer competing narratives about the respectability of victims, yet reinforce the “virgin-whore” dichotomy and their corresponding spatial formations. For instance, activist mothers of disappeared women in Juárez have publicly denounced the official government’s theory that each disappeared woman led a secret “double life” that made them vulnerable to a dangerous lifestyle: virgin by day and whore by night. Activists seeking redress for their daughters emphasize so-called virgin values. However, in popular media, the state’s explanation of the double life as the cause of these murders has been recreated for film audiences in local docudramas distributed on the streets of Juárez. I argue that both genres of cinematic representations rebuild a case against the victims rather than the perpetrators. I demonstrate that, in casting blame upon victims, the spatial politics embedded inside the logics of the double life reinforce binaries about public and private spheres. Spatial discourse about public space as posing considerable risk and harassment threats for women has been interpellated in a complex and important way in struggles to prevent further sex crimes. This analysis interrogates the limitations of the rebuttals made against mainstream discourses by activist mothers as they reinscribe the virgin-whore binary.

National borders are often taken for granted as normal and necessary for a peaceful and orderly global civil society. Roberto D. Hernández here advances a provocative argument that borders—and border violence—are geospatial manifestations of long histories of racialized and gendered colonial violence.

In Coloniality of the U-S///Mexico Border, Hernández offers an exemplary case and lens for understanding what he terms the “epistemic and cartographic prison of modernity/coloniality.” He adopts “coloniality of power” as a central analytical category and framework to consider multiple forms of real and symbolic violence (territorial, corporeal, cultural, and epistemic) and analyzes the varied responses by diverse actors, including local residents, government officials, and cultural producers.

Based on more than twenty years of border activism in San Diego–Tijuana and El Paso–Ciudad Juárez, this book is an interdisciplinary examination that considers the 1984 McDonald’s massacre, Minutemen vigilantism, border urbanism, the ongoing murder of women in Ciudad Juárez, and anti-border music.

Hernández’s approach is at once historical, ethnographic, and theoretically driven, yet it is grounded in analyses and debates that cut across political theory, border studies, and cultural studies. The volume concludes with a theoretical discussion of the future of violence at—and because of—­national territorial borders, offering a call for epistemic and cartographic disobedience.

https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/coloniality-of-the-us-mexico-border

In this essay, I argue that familial development was a key concern for Chicanas, and was intertwined with their broader aims to revolutionize their communities and the rest of society along with them. The variety of claims they articulated, from reproductive rights, education, child care services, and sexual freedom bore a special relation to the development of la familia towards a more liberal, feminist, conception of it, while maintaining it as a central identity marker.
Because of this, the conception of la familia under Xicanisma was tailored specifically to their particular experiences as both Chicanas and women. Mothers were both victims and enactors of patriarchal and oppressive structures, while grandmothers offered rest from the strict gender roles enforced by mothers. Fathers were unwanted protectors of “their women” and, along with brothers, were benefactors of the patriarchy.
In a sense, Chicanas hoped to change their immediate surroundings, la familia, in order to be better equipped to fight for the Chicano cause, in a more integrated and egalitarian community which offered women the possibility of participating in their community’s struggle, while retaining their gender identity and individualism.
In this way, Xicanisma worked both at the level of the community and at the level of the individual, which is why I emphasize the importance of the (single) Chicana in the title. Each individual Chicana fought to be included in both the Chicano and the mainstream feminist narratives, which left out their particular experiences. In their journey towards gender equality, they hoped to reform the family structure, that would in turn impact their individual wellbeing as well as that of their community, so that one day there might be equality for all.

This article explores the 1960s welfare rights movement in Los Angeles as one example of social justice activism based on Black-Brown coalition building and solidarity across various social movements. Within the larger welfare rights movement, a fundamentally feminist cause, Esca-lante advocated for the specific cultural, linguistic, and legal needs of the Spanish-speaking community. Participating in Black-Brown solidarity for multiple social justice causes in Los Angeles and nationally, Alicia Esca-lante faced arrests and police violence, modeling and inspiring her children and others, then and now, to militant dignity work.

Latino migration to the US South is not a new phenomenon. Claims of a "Nuevo New South " are thus products of the scholarly and popular imaginations rather than the historical record. Indeed, the claim of a rupture with the past has the potential to obscure the fact that contemporary relationships of race and class have their roots in the dilemmas that have confronted white and black Southerners since Emancipation. If the times and places of " the New South " meant something different to African Americans than it did to white observers and boosters, what have the times and places of the " Nuevo " South meant to Latino immigrants? Do those meanings, in fact, originate in a novel globalizing moment at the turn of the twenty-first century? And how can teasing out Latino immigrants' own narratives about the region help social scientists and historians find more appropriate ways of conceptualizing Latino immigration's meaning for the South as a whole?

Through a consideration of the "Peace and Dignity Journeys," a hemispheric indigenous movement that coordinates a spiritual run from the southern tip of Tierra de Fuego, Argentina in South America and the northern reaches of Chickaloon, Alaska in the North, this essay looks at Chicana/o engagements with indigeneity from the 1960s Chicano Movement period through the turn of the century.

The Mexican-American war in the mid 19th century ended with a devastating outcome: the borderline between Mexico and the USA was moved further south. As a consequence, the Mexican nation state lost half of its geographical territory and Mexicans living in its northern parts unexpectedly lost their Mexican citizenship. By this process, minority groups in the US referred to as Mexican Americans and Chicanas/os were disconnected from their families and distant relatives on the Mexican side of the border, have been treated as second class US citizens, and are up until today subjects within US society of several kinds of ethnic and racial discriminations. Since the rise of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, social traumatic experiences of a redrawn line on the map representing a new US-Mexico border have been described with verbal expressions such as ‘the border felt as a scar that never heals’ and ‘we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us’. These experiences have also been articulated in visual art by Mexican Americans and Chicanas/os. Memories of the geopolitical process and its contemporary sociocultural consequences are dealt with in various ways and in various kinds of art medias. This paper presents a case study of visual practices of representation in performance art by Chicano artist Guillermo Gomez-Peña.

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 literature in the 1970s, for its emphasis on ethnonationalist novels that featured “positive images” of Chicanos, and he suggests that Quinto Sol rejected The Rain God for failing to conform to this mold. I speculate that the simple fact that the novel includes homosexual characters would have been enough for it to be deemed too negative in that era. I argue that Islas’s representations of homosexuality continue to disrupt notions of identity, but now the disjuncture is not that homosexuals are represented but that they are incoherent with the closet paradigm that is predominant in significant strains of queer studies. Drawing on recent scholarship that warns against a fixation on identity as the grounding principle for sexual experience and politics, I read Felix as a character whose transgressive expressions of homosexuality are shaped by a tangled web of power dynamics that are associated with his feelings of ethnic and masculine insecurity. Ultimately, I show that the very qualities that make Felix discomfiting to readers and resistant to narratives of identity are generative points of analysis for Chicano literary studies.

This essay explores colorism, or the ranking of individuals based on skin color or racialized phenotype, with a focus on women of Mexican descent. I offer a history of skin color consciousness, linking it to Spanish and Anglo American colonial beliefs about the value of women as reproductive objects and to contemporary articulations of lived experiences with colorism. First, I trace colorism historically, considering how discourses of difference built on sixteenth-century notions of gendered contamination and nineteenth-century notions of purity and prestige were used to construct and privilege whiteness. Next, I draw from interviews with four women who self-identify as Mexican-descent to document how personal experiences with colorism are remembered and understood. These narratives reveal the importance of the family as an institution within which a collective memory of historical white supremacy is continuously performed through colorism. The recognition that colorism is both reproduced and resisted through intimate familial relations opens a space to ask questions about the relationships between contemporary experience and histories of colonization and suggests, finally, that the family is a critical site for decolonial healing.

My Poem: “How to be La Llorona for the City of Sullivan that has no Sidewalks," (For Domino Renee Perez). Published in the 2014 New Border: Contemporary Voices from the Texas/Mexico Border, Texas A&M University Press, College Station, TX

Edited by Brandon D. Shuler, Robert Johnson and Erika-Garza Johnson

This short article provides a brief historical overview of some of the people and events that led to the historic Mendez et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County et al. (1947) decision. This article can be found in: 50 Events that Shaped Latino History: An Encyclopedia of the American Mosaic, vol. 1, edited by Lilia Fernandez (Greenwood Press, March 2018).

This article analyzes the structural composition of the chicana/o novel . . .y no se lo tragó la tierra, by Tomás Rivera, a book that has become a collec- tive point of reference for chicana/o culture and community. Its structure will be explained, including the importance of personal and collective memory as elements that evolve every chapter as a fragmentary part of a whole. The classi- cal concept of “art of memory” joined to the rhetoric of discourse opens a new perspective to analyze this fragmentation and helps the reader to understand the connection of its elements. Finally, the idea of “theater of memory” may be applied to the novel’s chicana/o universe as a dramatic device for structuring the narrator’s personal memories, achieving a final literary composition similar to a memorable, collective altarpiece full of impressive images from this community’s daily struggle in the 1960s.

While teaching about race, ethnicity, and class from a critical pedagogical standpoint, we might not only encounter student resistance to learning about systems of domination but we should also be aware of the ways in which power, privilege, and exclusion in the larger society may be reproduced in our own classrooms. In this article, we recount how we used freewriting and discussions in an attempt to deconstruct the power dynamics in an upper-division seminar on Latinas/os and education. Though a majority of the students in the course were first-generation Latinas, several middle-and upper-middle-class White students tended to participate the most. This dynamic resulted in a situation in which class discussions were steered away from the focus on Latinas/os and unequal educational practices to a perspective that reinforced an ideology of equality and a climate that privileged dominant modes of classroom communication. Since these patterns were precisely the ones the course topics and readings were meant to deconstruct, we turned the gaze onto the classroom as we observed the reproduction of inequality there and used freewriting and discussions to uncover the unequal ways in which students were experiencing the space.