Colonial Legacies in Chicana/o Literature and Culture exposes the ways in which colonialism is expressed in the literary and cultural production of the U.S. Southwest, a region that has experienced at least two distinct colonial periods since the sixteenth century. Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez traces how Spanish colonial texts reflect the motivation for colonial domination. She argues that layers of U.S. colonialism complicate how Chicana/o literary scholars think about Chicana/o literary and cultural production. She brings into view the experiences of Chicana/o communities that have long-standing ties to the U.S. Southwest but whose cultural heritage is tied through colonialism to multiple nations, including Spain, Mexico, and the United States. While the legacies of Chicana/o literature simultaneously uphold and challenge colonial constructs, the metaphor of the kaleidoscope makes visible the rupturing of these colonial fragments via political and social urgencies. This book challenges readers to consider the possibilities of shifting our perspectives to reflect on stories told and untold and to advocate for the inclusion of fragmented and peripheral pieces within the kaleidoscope for more complex understandings of individual and collective subjectivities. This book is intended for readers interested in how colonial legacies are performed in the U.S. Southwest, particularly in the context of New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona. Readers will relate to the book’s personal narrative thread that provides a path to understanding fragmented identities.

In recent decades, Chicana/o literary and cultural productions have dramatically shifted from a nationalist movement that emphasized unity to one that openly celebrates diverse experiences. Charting this transformation, Postnationalism in Chicana/o Literature and Culture looks to the late 1970s, during a resurgence of global culture, as a crucial turning point whose reverberations in twenty-first-century late capitalism have been profound. Arguing for a postnationalism that documents the radical politics and aesthetic processes of the past while embracing contemporary cultural and sociopolitical expressions among Chicana/o peoples, Hernández links the multiple forces at play in these interactions. Reconfiguring text-based analysis, she looks at the comparative development of movements within women's rights and LGBTQI activist circles. Incorporating economic influences, this unique trajectory leads to a new conception of border studies as well, rethinking the effects of a restructured masculinity as a symbol of national cultural transformation. Ultimately positing that globalization has enhanced the emergence of new Chicana/o identities, Hernández cultivates important new understandings of borderlands identities and postnationalism itself.

Decolonial Voices brings together a body of theoretically rigorous interdisciplinary essays that articulate and expand the contours of Chicana and Chicano cultural studies.

Celebrating more than forty years of creative writing by Chicana author Margarita Cota-Cárdenas, this volume includes critical essays, reflections, interviews, and previously unpublished writing by the author herself to document the lifelong craft and legacy of a pioneering writer in the field. This volume's essays analyze her work's themes of Chicana identity, the Chicanx movement, and the sociopolitical climate of Arizona and the larger U.S.-Mexico border region, as well as issues of gender, sexuality, and identity related to the Chicanx experience over time.

New Mexico cultural envoy Juan Estevan Arellano, to whom this work is dedicated, writes that querencia “is that which gives us a sense of place, that which anchors us to the land, that which makes us a unique people, for it implies a deeply rooted knowledge of place, and for that reason we respect it as our home.” This sentiment is echoed in the foreword by Rudolfo Anaya, in which he writes that “querencia is love of home, love of place.” This collection of both deeply personal reflections and carefully researched studies explores the New Mexico homeland through the experiences and perspectives of Chicanx and indigenous/Genízaro writers and scholars from across the state. The importance of querencia for each contributor is apparent in their work and their ongoing studies, which have roots in the culture, history, literature, and popular media of New Mexico. Be inspired and enlightened by these essays and discover the history and belonging that is querencia.

Nuclear Nuevo México recovers the voices and stories that have been lost or ignored in the telling of U.S. nuclear history. By recuperating these narratives, Myrriah Gómez tells a new story of New Mexico, one in which the nuclear history is not separate from the collective colonial history of Nuevo México but instead demonstrates how earlier eras of settler colonialism laid the foundation for nuclear colonialism in New Mexico.

This collection of academic essays introduces new research on Latina histories and cultures from the mid-nineteenth century to 1980. Examining a wide range of source materials, including personal and institutional archives, literature and oral history, the authors of the fifteen articles use transnational approaches and Latina feminist theory to remind us of a principle that is still too often forgotten: that sex and gender should be centered as crucial problematics in the study of the long history of Latina/o/x literature and culture. Applying an intersectional methodology that analyzes gender in relation to numerous identities—race, class, sexuality, language and nationality—the scholars explore diverse subjects such as the literary work of historical Latina authors Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton and Maria Cristina Mena; the travails of Basque women in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and Chicana activism in Wyoming in the 1970s and 1980s. The book is divided into four sections: Feminist Readings of Latina Authors; Gender, Politics and Power in the Spanish-Language Press; Radical Latinas’ Politics; and Reclaiming Community, Reclaiming Knowledge. In their introduction, editors Montse Feu and Yolanda Padilla map significant elements in the practice of Latina feminist recovery and suggest the importance of using queer studies frameworks and speculative approaches to archives in order to amplify queer, Afro-Latina/o and indigenous voices. Published as part of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Series, Latina Histories and Cultures continues the efforts to rescue the written legacy of the Hispanic population in what has become the United States and will be required reading for academics and students in a variety of disciplines.