Chicano Literature - History

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, 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 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 and the subsequent 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. 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.