In this collection of poetry and essays, Gaspar de Alba incorporates the Mexican archetypal wailing woman who wanders in search of her lost children. La Llorona is more than an archetype: she is a tour guide through the ruins of love and family and the constant presence of the poet's voice. She transcends time, place, and gender. The lines of the poems breathe that haunted spirit as they describe her movidas, both geographic and figurative, in search of the lost mother, the absent father, the abandoned child, the lover, the self. These essays track other movements of thought: reflections on identity, sexuality, and resistance. As a leading interpreter of border life and culture, poet, storyteller, and essayist Gaspar de Alba explores the borders and limits of place, body, and language through a painful series of moves and losses. She prevails and becomes the forger of her own destiny, her own image on the landscape, the interpreter of her own dreams and history. These vibrant poems and essays of self-creation, even to the basic task of choosing her own name, are a testament to the phoenix-like quality of art: the poet can create beauty out of destruction and desolation.

"How is it that there are so many lloronas?" A haunting figure of Mexican oral and literary traditions, La Llorona permeates the consciousness of her folk community. From a ghost who haunts the riverbank to a murderous mother condemned to wander the earth after killing her own children in an act of revenge or grief, the Weeping Woman has evolved within Chican@ imaginations across centuries, yet no truly comprehensive examination of her impact existed until now. Tracing La Llorona from ancient oral tradition to her appearance in contemporary material culture, There Was a Woman delves into the intriguing transformations of this provocative icon. From La Llorona's roots in legend to the revisions of her story and her exaltation as a symbol of resistance, Domino Renee Perez illuminates her many permutations as seductress, hag, demon, or pitiful woman. Perez draws on more than two hundred artifacts to provide vivid representations of the ways in which these perceived identities are woven from abstract notions—such as morality or nationalism—and from concrete, often misunderstood concepts from advertising to television and literature. The result is a rich and intricate survey of a powerful figure who continues to be reconfigured.

Since the 1980s Chicana writers including Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Alma Luz Villanueva have reworked iconic Mexican cultural symbols such as mother earth goddesses and La Llorona (the Wailing Woman of Mexican folklore), re-imagining them as powerful female figures. After reading the works of Chicana writers who created bold, powerful, and openly sexual female characters, Debra J. Blake wondered how everyday Mexican American women would characterize their own lives in relation to the writers’ radical reconfigurations of female sexuality and gender roles. To find out, Blake gathered oral histories from working-class and semiprofessional U.S. Mexicanas. In Chicana Sexuality and Gender, she compares the self-representations of these women with fictional and artistic representations by academic-affiliated, professional intellectual Chicana writers and visual artists, including Alma M. López and Yolanda López. Blake looks at how the Chicana professional intellectuals and the U.S. Mexicana women refigure confining and demeaning constructions of female gender roles and racial, ethnic, and sexual identities. She organizes her analysis around re-imaginings of La Virgen de Guadalupe, La Llorona, indigenous Mexica goddesses, and La Malinche, the indigenous interpreter for Hernán Cortés during the Spanish conquest. In doing so, Blake reveals how the professional intellectuals and the working-class and semiprofessional women rework or invoke the female icons to confront the repression of female sexuality, limiting gender roles, inequality in male and female relationships, and violence against women. While the representational strategies of the two groups of women are significantly different and the U.S. Mexicanas would not necessarily call themselves feminists, Blake nonetheless illuminates a continuum of Chicana feminist thinking, showing how both groups of women expand lifestyle choices and promote the health and well-being of women of Mexican origin or descent.

Throughout history, men have prayed to gods and poets have interpreted ancient myths for new audiences. But what about women? With sections on teaching and modern writing, this collection of new essays examines how modern female poets--including H.D., Louise Gluck, Ruth Fainlight, Rita Dove, Sylvia Plath and others--have subverted classical expectations in interpreting such legends as Persephone, Helen and Eurydice. Other mythological figures are also explored and rewritten, including Buddhism's Kwan Yin, Celtic Macha, the Aztecs' Coatlicue, Pele of Hawaii, India's Sita, Sumer's Inanna, Yemonja of the Yoruba and many more.

A native of the El Paso / Ciudad Juarez region, acclaimed author and scholar Alicia Gaspar de Alba writes that she grew up with “a forked tongue and a severe case of cultural schizophrenia, the split in the psyche that happens to someone who grows up in the borderlands between nations, languages and cultures.” Border dwellers struggle with place and identity in the short fiction included in this collection. An El Paso-born American citizen with a high school diploma and a talent for writing seeks a job as a reporter at the El Paso Herald after World War I but gets hired as a janitor and research specialist instead. A Mexican woman takes her young daughter north to protect her from sexual abuse, only to leave the girl with relatives while she crosses the river in search of a job and a new life. And a college student gets a Tarot reading to help her discern the historical symbolism of her bicultural identity. The award-winning writer explores other “crimes of the tongue” in the essays in this volume: pochismo, or the mixing of English and Spanish, as both a family taboo and a politics of identity; the haunting memory of La Llorona, protector of undocumented immigrants and abandoned children, and her blood-curdling cry of loss and revenge; the intersection of the personal and the political in the transgressive work of Chicana/Latina artists; the sexual and linguistic rebellions of La Malinche and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz; and the reverse coyotaje, or border crossing, of Chicana lesbian feminist theory translated into Spanish and visual art as a way of sneaking this counterhegemonic pocha poetic thought into Mexico. These essays and stories are always intellectually rigorous and often achingly personal.

U.S. Latino Literature is defined as Latino literature within the United States that embraces the heterogeneous inter-groupings of Latinos. For too long U.S. Latino literature has not been thought of as an integral part of the overall shared American literary landscape, but that is slowly changing. This dictionary aims to rectify some of those misconceptions by proving that Latinos do fundamentally express American issues, concerns and perspectives with a flair in linguistic cadences, familial themes, distinct world views, and cross-cultural voices. The Historical Dictionary of U.S. Latino Literature contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has cross-referenced entries on U.S. Latino/a authors, and terms relevant to the nature of U.S. Latino literature in order to illustrate and corroborate its foundational bearings within the overall American literary experience. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about this subject.

One of America's leading interpreters of the Chicana experience dismantles the discourses that "frame" women who rebel against patriarchal strictures as "bad women" and offers empowering models of struggle, resistance, and rebirth.