Chicano literature is the literature written by Mexican American

Mexican American

Mexican Americans are Americans of Mexican descent. As of July 2009, Mexican Americans make up 10.3% of the United States' population with over 31,689,000 Americans listed as of Mexican ancestry. Mexican Americans comprise 66% of all Hispanics and Latinos in the United States...

s in the United States. Although its origins can be traced back to the sixteenth century, the bulk of Chicano literature dates from after 1848, when the USA annexed large parts of what had been Mexico in the wake of the Mexican-American War. Today, it is a vibrant and diverse set of narratives, prompting (in the words of critics) "a new awareness of the historical and cultural independence of both northern and southern American hemispheres."

Definitional problems

The definition of Chicano/Mexican American literature is not set in stone, as the term could conceivably encompass both Mexicans who have moved to the United States and US-born people of Mexican ancestry; this latter group includes many Spanish-speaking families who have been in the United States for generations, often living on the land (e.g., in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California) before it was part of the United States, and have often faced a different set of issues than their Mexican neighbors because of their status as a linguistic and cultural minority, that is, because they are Spanish-speaking Catholics in a predominantly English-speaking Protestant country. Thus, people from Southern Texas have historically had different issues than people in Northern Mexico (who themselves have different issues than those coming from Southern Mexico, etc.). We might also wonder whether the term applies to American families who have assimilated to US culture.

Other issues arise when we try to add race into the mix, as some Mexicans are of mostly Spanish heritage, whereas many others come from the intermixture of Spanish and indigenous peoples: how different are the perspectives of the mestizo

Mestizo

Mestizo is a term traditionally used in Latin America, Philippines and Spain for people of mixed European and Native American heritage or descent...

Mexican population from those of the hispano

Hispanos

Hispanos is a name given to people of colonial Spanish descent in what is today the United States who retained a predominantly Spanish culture. The distinction was made to compensate for flawed U.S. Census practices in the 1930s which used to characterize Hispanic people as non-white...

 population? Further, there is the issue of people from Mexico who are neither of Spanish nor Mexican stock, such as Josefina Niggli

Josefina Niggli

Josefina Niggli was a Mexican-born Anglo-American playwright and novelist. Writing about Mexican-American issues in the middle years of the century, before the rise of the Chicano movement, she was the first and, for a time, the only Mexican American writing in English on Mexican themes; her...

, whose parents were Euro-Americans living in Mexico when she was born; although she is considered Anglo

Anglo

Anglo is a prefix indicating a relation to the Angles, England or the English people, as in the terms Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-American, Anglo-Celtic, Anglo-African and Anglo-Indian. It is often used alone, somewhat loosely, to refer to people of British Isles descent in The Americas, Australia and...

 in the broader ethnic sense of the term, she felt more connected to Mexican culture and wrote most of her novels and plays around Mexican themes.

History

Some scholars argue that the origins of Chicano literature can be traced to the sixteenth century, particularly to the chronicle written by Spanish adventurer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was a Spanish explorer of the New World, one of four survivors of the Narváez expedition...

, who published an account in 1542 of his long sojourn in what is now the United States South and Southwest, when he lived with various indigenous groups, learning their language and customs. Literary critics Harold Augenbraum and Margarite Fernández Olmos argue that Cabeza de Vaca's "metamorphosis into a being neither European nor Indian, a cultural hybrid created by the American experience, converts the explorer into a symbolic precursor of the Chicano/a". Scholar Lee Dowling adds that the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega

Inca Garcilaso de la Vega

Garcilaso de la Vega , born Gómez Suárez de Figueroa, was a historian and writer from the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru. The son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca noblewoman, he is recognized primarily for his contributions to Inca history, culture, and society...

 can be seen as contributing to the Chicano heritage: his 1605 text "La Florida too qualifies superbly as an early work of Chicano literature, with Garcilaso suffering from many of the same ills as Núñez".

Chicano literature (and, more generally, the Chicano identity) is more usually dated, however, to some time after the Mexican–American War

Mexican–American War

The Mexican–American War, also known as the First American Intervention, the Mexican War, or the U.S.–Mexican War, was an armed conflict between the United States and Mexico from 1846 to 1848 in the wake of the 1845 U.S...

 and the subsequent 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo is the peace treaty, largely dictated by the United States to the interim government of a militarily occupied Mexico City, that ended the Mexican-American War on February 2, 1848...

. In this treaty, Mexico ceded over half of its territory–now in the US Southwest, including California, Nevada, Utah, and much of Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico, which had all previously been part of the Spanish Empire–to its northern neighbor. In a stroke, hundreds of thousands of former Mexican citizens became US citizens. As literary critic Ramón Saldívar points out, "unlike many other ethnic immigrants to the United States... but like the Native Americans, Mexican Americans became an ethnic minority through the direct conquest of their homelands." This change in legal status was not immediately accompanied by a change in culture or language. Over time, however, these Mexican-Americans or Chicanos developed a unique culture that belonged fully neither to the US nor to Mexico. In Saldívar's words, "Mexican American culture after 1848 developed in the social interstices between Mexican and American cultural spheres, making that new cultural life patently a product of both but also different in decisive ways from each." The Chicano culture, which is expressed in literature as well as in other practices and genres, has been further shaped by migrations of Mexicans coming to the USA in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

By 1900, according to critic Raymund Paredes, "Mexican American literature had emerged as a distinctive part of the literary culture of the United States." Paredes highlights the significance of Josephina Niggli's 1945 novel, Mexican Village, which was "the first literary work by a Mexican American to reach a general American audience." It was, however, the first of many, and Chicano literature from many different genres (narrative, poetry, drama) now has a wide popular and critical presence.

Themes

Chicano literature tends to focus on themes of identity, discrimination, culture, and history, with an emphasis on validating the Mexican American experience or Chicano culture in the United States. It is often associated with the social and cultural claims of the Chicano movement. It is a vehicle through which Chicanos express and represent themselves, and also often a voice of social critique and protest.

Other important themes include the experience of migration, and the situation of living between two languages. Chicano literature may be written in either English or Spanish, or even a combination of the two: Spanglish

Spanglish

.Spanglish refers to the blend of Spanish and English, in the speech of people who speak parts of two languages, or whose normal language is different from that of the country where they live. The Hispanic population of the United States and the British population in Argentina use varieties of...

. Politically, too, Chicano culture has been focused on the question of the border, and the ways in which Chicanos straddle or cross that border.

The contributions of feminists such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga

Cherríe Moraga

Cherríe L. Moraga is a Chicana writer, feminist activist, poet, essayist, and playwright.-Biography:Moraga was born in Whittier, California. She earned her Bachelor's degree from Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles, California and her Master's from San Francisco State University in 1980...

 have been particularly pronounced over the past couple of decades.

Major figures

Major figures in Chicano literature include Rudolfo Anaya

Rudolfo Anaya

Rudolfo Anaya is an Mexican-American author. Best known for his 1972 novel Bless Me, Ultima, Anaya is considered one of the founders of the canon of contemporary Chicano literature.- Biography :...

, Américo Paredes

Americo Paredes

Americo Paredes was a Mexican-American author born in Brownsville, Texas who authored several texts focusing on the border life that existed between the United States and Mexico, particularly around the Rio Grande region of South Texas. His family on his father’s side, however, had been in the...

, Rodolfo Gonzales

Rodolfo Gonzales

Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzáles was a Mexican American boxer, poet, and political activist. He convened the first-ever Chicano youth conference in March 1969, which was attended by many future Chicano activists and artists. The conference also promulgated the Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, a manifesto...

, Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros is an American writer best known for her acclaimed first novel The House on Mango Street and her subsequent short story collection Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories...

, Gary Soto

Gary Soto

Gary Soto is a Mexican-American author and poet.Mexican-American parents Manuel and Angie Soto . In his youth, he worked in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley and in factories in Fresno. Gary's father died in 1957, when he was just five years old...

, Oscar Zeta Acosta

Oscar Zeta Acosta

Oscar Zeta Acosta was an American attorney, politician, minor novelist and Chicano Movement activist, perhaps best known for his friendship with the American author Hunter S. Thompson, who characterized him as his Samoan Attorney, Dr...

, Luis Valdez

Luis Valdez

Luis Valdez is an American playwright, writer and film director.He is regarded as the father of Chicano theater in the United States.-Education:...

, John Rechy

John Rechy

John Francis Rechy, , is an American author, the child of a half-Scottish and half-Mexican father, Roberto Rechy, and a Mexican-American mother, Guadalupe Flores. In his novels he has written extensively about homosexual culture in Los Angeles and wider America, and is among the pioneers of modern...

, Luis Omar Salinas

Luis Omar Salinas

Luis Omar Salinas was a leading Chicano poet who published a number of well-received collections of poetry, including the Crazy Gypsy, which has been described as "a classic of contemporary and Chicano poetry"), I Go Dreaming Serenades, and Afternoon of The Unreal...

, Tino Villanueva

Tino Villanueva

Tino Villanueva is an American poet and writer.-Life:In 1963, he was drafted into the United States Army, and spent two years in the Panama Canal Zone. There he became immersed in Hispanic literature, reading Rubén Darío and José Martí. He graduated from Texas State University–San Marcos, on the...

, Denise Chavez

Denise Chavez

Denise Elia Chavez is an American author, playwright, and stage director. She was born to an Hispano family in Las Cruces, New Mexico, United States, and graduated from Madonna High School in Mesilla. She received her Bachelor's from New Mexico State University and Master's degrees in Dramatic...

, Benjamin Alire Saenz

Benjamin Alire Saenz

Benjamin Alire Sáenz is an award-winning American poet, novelist and writer of children's books.-Life:He was born at Old Picacho, New Mexico, the fourth of seven children, and was raised on a small farm near Mesilla, New Mexico....

, and Alicia Gaspar de Alba

Alicia Gaspar de Alba

Alicia Gaspar de Alba is a scholar, cultural critic, novelist, and poet whose works include historical novels and scholarly studies on Chicana/o art, culture and sexuality.-Biography:...

. María Ruiz de Burton

Maria Ruiz de Burton

María Amparo Ruiz de Burton was the first female Mexican-American author to write in English. In her career she published two books: Who Would Have Thought It? , The Squatter and the Don , and one play: Don Quixote de la Mancha: A Comedy in Five Acts: Taken From Cervantes' Novel of That Name...

 was the first female Mexican-American author to write in English around 1872. Literature on Chicano history can be found in Occupied America, by Rodolfo Acuña

Rodolfo Acuña

Rodolfo Francisco Acuña, Ph.D., is an historian, professor emeritus, and one of various scholars of Chicano studies, which he teaches at California State University, Northridge. He is the author of Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, which approaches the history of the Southwestern United...

, which offers an alternative perspective of history from the Mexican American/Chicano point of view. Felipe de Ortego y Gasca offers an alternative perspective on Chicano literature in Backgrounds of Mexican American Literature, first study in the field of Mexican American/Chicano literary history (University of New Mexico, 1971).