Retrospace: Collected Essays on Chicano Literature

Spanish-language Chicano literary production is rich in tradition and scope. This article intends to provide a brief comprehensive summary of the Chicano literary representation of some of the most important writers and works written in Spanish. Most critics of Chicano literature will agree the Mexican American or Chicano had its symbolic birth in 1848, at the end of the Mexican-American War. It is important, however, to begin by talking about this as a literary tradition that predates the war: Spanish colonization and Mexican independence from Spain are important in establishing an essential foundation for this literature. Representative Chicano literature in Spanish will be highlighted from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, with those from the second half of the 20th (1965 to 1990s) receiving more emphasis. It is during this period that Spanish-language Chicano literature offered its most important contributions: not only in the number of texts produced but more importantly in how this literature reflected the social and cultural manifestation of the Chicano ethos. (Note that the term “Mexican American literature” will be used to describe work leading up to the Chicano Movement, approximately 1965; “Chicano literature” will be used to identify the Chicano’s new post-1965 political and social consciousness.)

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Chacón, Eusebio

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.430 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Francisco A. Lomelí

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Mexican American ◽

The United States ◽

Mexican Descent ◽

Turn Of The Century ◽

Social Conditions ◽

Chicano Literature ◽

Social Activists ◽

American Experience ◽

Look Back

Eusebio Chacón was a Mexican American (sometimes referred to as Chicano) figure who straddled the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is someone who was forgotten and overlooked for about eighty years within the annals of Southwestern literature. He resurfaced in the mid-1970s as a key missing link in what is now called Chicano literature, at a time when its literary lineage was blurry and unknown. He was, therefore, instrumental in allowing critics to look back into the dusty shelves of libraries to identify writers who embodied the Mexican American experience within specific moments in history. Both his person and his writings provide an important window into subjects that interfaced with identity, literary formation and aesthetics, and social conditions, as well as how such early writers negotiated a new sense of Americanism while retaining some of their cultural background. Eusebio Chacón stands out as an outstanding example of turn-of-the-century intelligence, sensibility, versatility, and historical conscience in his attempts to educate people of Mexican descent about their rightful place in the United States as writers, social activists, and cultural beings. He fills a significant void that had remained up to the mid-1970s, which reveals how writings by such Mexican American writers were considered marginal.

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