Academic literature on the topic 'Mexican americans – juvenile fiction'

This creative non-fiction piece written in Spanglish called “Gringos Mexicanos" stems from feelings of nostalgia and unrest within biculturalism and national identity. The piece centers around the degrees of belonging that two Americans siblings raised in Mexico have when contrasted to each other and to (Mexican or American) peer groups. The narrative voice in this piece provides a unique perspective broadening dialogue(s) on Mexican American identity.

I Have Been Teaching Literatures in English for Over Twenty-Five Years at the Universidad Nacional AutóNoma de México (Unam), Mexico's national university, where I received my undergraduate degree. My formative years were marked, undoubtedly, by the universalist ideal that defines the motto of the university, “Por mi raza hablará el espíritu” (“The spirit will speak on behalf of my race”). I cannot recall whether I was aware of the motto's real meaning, or of its cultural and social implications, but I suppose I took for granted that what I was taught as a student was as much part of a Mexican culture as it was of a “universal” one. Reading English literature at the department of modern languages and literatures in the late 1970s meant that I was exposed to a canonical view of literature shaped as much by The Oxford Anthology of English Literature and by our lecturers' (primarily) aesthetic approach to it as by the idea of “universal” literature conveyed in the textbooks for elementary and secondary education in Mexico. This conviction that as a Mexican I belonged to “Western” civilization greatly diminished when in the early 1980s I traveled to London for graduate studies and was almost shattered by the attitudes I encountered while conducting my doctoral research on the image of Latin America in British fiction. I was often asked whether I had ever seen a car (let alone ridden in one), or if there was electricity in my country, and the ambivalent, mostly negative, view of Latin Americans and Mexicans in what I read (authors like Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, and Aldous Huxley, as well as more than three hundred adventure novels set in the continent) forced me to question the idea that one ought to read literature merely for the enjoyment (and admiration) of it or to analyze it with assumptions that fall roughly in the category of “expressive,” or “mimetic,” criticism, which was common in those days and often took the form of monographic studies, which relied heavily on paraphrase.

Illegal Immigration: Six Stories from an American Family is a collection of stories derived from and inspired by the author's personal life experiences, dreams, and family history, as a Mexican American woman. The stories also hold distinct archetypal patterns, images, storylines and symbolism due to the author's connection to the collective unconscious through meditation. The stories tell character driven stories of adversity, and the search for home, and identity by linking main characters to their family members in each story. The collection as a whole reveals generational patterns, histories and connections not only present in the matriarchal bloodline of the collection, but from one human to another. The stories beckon the reader into an alternate reality created by these archetypal patterns inherent in all humans, in an attempt to transcend genres and find a place within the psyche where anything is possible.
Illegal immigration -- Marco and Margarita -- La muerte de mi padre -- Together again -- Vivi and Ricardo -- The healer.
Department of English

This Thesis collection contains a critical preface and five stories. The preface, “Reflejos y Reflexiones” (translated: Images and Thoughts), addresses the issues of writing the cultural or gendered Other; these issues include methodology, literary colonialism, a dialogue between works, and creating distance through defamiliarizing the self. “Perennials” is the story of Noemi Tellez, an immigrant to the U.S. who must choose between working and taking care of her family. In “Load Bearing” Luis, the eldest child, faces his family and friends on one of his last days before moving away to college. “La Monarca” deals with Lily's, the youngest daughter, struggle to mediate a place between her friends and her family. In “Reflections in the River,” Arabela, the second youngest, faces the ghost of an unwanted pregnancy and La Llorona. “La Cocina de Su Madre” is the story of Magda, the oldest daughter, and her own teenage girl, Natalia, as they attempt to find themselves in a new town after moving a thousand miles from home.

This story cycle focuses on the members of the Ordoñez family of Castroville, California from the time of the first generation’s migration from Mexico in the 1950s to the most recent generation who moves out of the town in the 2000s. “The Ordoñez Pride” shows the entire family as they experience a miracle. Cecilia, the matriarch, receives a belated wedding ring that bursts into flame that doesn’t burn her, but everything else it comes into contact with. The flame also magically sparks hers and her husband’s sex life into overdrive and, late in life, they produce three more children, for a total of nine. Following this framing story, we see snapshots of all the other family members at life-changing moments. In “After the Revolution” we see Ray Ordoñez , the family patriarch, grow from a boy into a man, as he defends his sister from what he perceives to be the American ranch owner practicing the right to first night—a custom that was still practiced in rural Mexico in the twentieth century. Eventually, Ray migrates to California and begins his family, becomes assimilated into American culture, and reluctantly welcomes an American boy—his oldest daughter’s boyfriend—into his household.

Chicana literature is often discussed in relation to broad literary or theoretical movements (post-modernism, magic realism, or feminism) but these approaches often fail to account for or even consider other culturally derived sources of critical interrogation. For example, Chicana authors, through direct references or allusions, demonstrate that Spanish-language soap operas, known as telenovelas, have a cultural currency that can bridge people across generations, nationalities, and class differences. Telenovelas also have theoretical value, for these productions often feature stories that address issues of race, class, gender, nationality, language, and violence. Reading contemporary Chicana literature through the lens of the telenovela, including its history and status as a cultural form, reveals the ways in which Chicana authors not only rely on but also revise the form. They disrupt the rigid Manichean world view present in telenovelas by challenging heteronormative romance and traditional gender roles to allow for alternate stories, where endings are not always tidy or happy. Drawing on recent ethnographic research in communication studies, I examine the history of Spanish-language television within the U.S. to substantiate the cultural currency of and show how the telenovela permeates and informs Mexican-American identity. Relying on the work of Jesús Martín-Barbero, I trace the development of the melodrama and romance genres out of which telenovelas emerge, evolving from newspaper serials, radionovelas, fotonovelas, to comic strip novels or libros semanales. I focus on the literary roots of the telenovela genre (with its origins in 19th century European serialized fiction) in relation to early Mexican-American historical romance narratives (María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Jovita González, and Eve Raleigh). Based on Gustavo Aprea and Rolando C. Martínez Mendoza's definition of the telenovela genre, I examine how contemporary Chicana fiction (Denise Chávez, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, and Nina Marie Martínez) both conforms to and deviates from the generic conventions. I provide a culturally based critical strategy for offering alternate readings of Chicana literature to show how these authors use the popularity of the telenovela form to reach a specific audience and lend new insight into how viewers, familiar with the genre conventions, are comparable to literary critics.
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