Current Book

I Am Aztlán: The Personal Essay in Chicano Studies. Edited by Chon A. Noriega and Wendy Belcher.

© 2004 Paper: $19.95. 266 pp. ISBN number: 0-89551-099-5.

This anthology brings together twelve essays by scholars, writers, and artists reflecting on the role of the “I” in Chicano and Latino culture and the diverse ways in which personal voice and experience inform their research.

Advance Praise

“This important book will be welcomed by students of Chicano autobiography. Its first-rate essays, full of humor, pathos, and challenges to orthodoxy, well documents contemporary scholars’ search for the collective self.”
—Genaro M. Padilla, author of the landmark study My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography

“This important book brings a deeper focus to the Quixotesque quests for identity that Chicano writers have been undertaking for generations now. Combining scholarship, testimonio, and chisme, the essays throw open a panoramic view onto mystic and fascinating landscapes of memory and imagination that will help readers envision the collective Latino self.”
—John Phillip Santos, author of Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation, National Book Award finalist

Contents

To read the introduction or the table of contents, click here.

Max Benavidez remembers learning English, listening to his great-grandmother’s stories, reading Don Quixote, seeing the bruises on a beautiful bride, and following a Hopi Indian painter.

Harry Gamboa Jr., the artist, deconstructs the freeway, perceptual pollution, fine dining, call-in shows, solipsistic conversations, and the death of self.
Santa C. Barraza, the painter, reflects on her journey home, after a twenty-five-year absence, to the Texas town where she was born.
Chon A. Noriega writes about his father’s Mexican LPs to come to a more compassionate
understanding of the man who shaped his own career.
Frances Negrón-Muntaner, the filmmaker, presents home as an unresolved and politically charged problem to which film gives witness.
Vincent Pérez tells the story of his grandfather and the secret rape that shaped his family history.
Jerry Garcia addresses the role of cocks in his father’s life, playing with ideas of masculinity and machismo.
tatiana de la tierra provides a personal testimony on the history of two groundbreaking Latina lesbian journals in the early 1990s.
Alma Lopez, the artist, reports from the field on recent censorship attempts New Mexico against her work on Our Lady of Guadalupe.
Ruben Ochoa, the artist, responds to the glass walls and ceilings that have limited Chicano access to institutions with … a glass zoot suit!
Alvina E. Quintana offers a self-critical pedagogy through her experiences teaching mostly white East Coast students about Los Angeles.
Arlene Dávila analyzes how her access to marketing agencies and employees was mediated by their perceptions of her as a Latina.