Colonial Legacies in Chicana/o Literature and Culture

Piecing together fragments of Chicana/o literary and cultural legacies via the metaphor of the kaleidoscope, Fonseca-ChÁvez asks what it means to truly consider how fragmented identities, colonial histories, and literary archives can lead to new decolonial insights and epistemologies. She offers a powerful reading of celebrated pre-Chicana/o and contemporary Chicana/o literature, historical monuments, and embodied practices, and shares her personal narrative to remind us how our colonial histories continue to haunt us. Moving beyond the ‘Sins of our Fathers,’ Fonseca-ChÁvez raises critical questions about how, by bursting the kaleidoscope of our multilayered past, we can develop a new consciousness—one that exposes, deconstructs, and reenvisions Chicana/o/x and mestiza/o identity in the present." —Karen R. Roybal, author of Archives of Dispossession: Recovering the Testimonios of Mexican American Herederas, 1848–1960

"Colonial Legacies in Chicana/o Literature and Culture does the difficult work of placing pre-Chicano texts such as Jovita GonzÁlez’s Dew on the Thorn in dialogue with later Chicanx, Indigenous, and Chicana texts. Doing so allows Fonseca-ChÁvez to directly address the politics and power of memory, representation, and canon. What is the relationship between the statue of ‘the Equestrian’ at the El Paso airport and the decolonial texts of Miguel MÉndez, Jaisey Bates, and Emma PÉrez? Fonseca-ChÁvez argues that by addressing literary heritages with eyes wide open, we can produce honest critiques of the canon. Only by doing so will we be able to account for the very diverse body that is Chicanx literature. In relation, only by doing so will we be able to form the critical coalitions we need as we move into the twenty-first century." —Linda Heidenreich, author of “This Land Was Mexican Once”: Histories of Resistance from Northern California