The Latino body : crisis identities in American literary and cultural memory /

Lima (Bryn Mawr College) charts the strategies used to construct Latino (specifically Mexican American) identities at different points in US history, from the Mexican American War, through the Chicano movement of the 1960s, through the culture wars of the Reagan era and the institutionalization of Latino literature in the academy, to the recent murders in Mexico's Ciudad Juarez. These "crisis moments" move Latino authors from assimilationist to contestatory positions, but it is clear that one cannot trust mainstream constructions of citizenship that consider the Latino body as foreign or marginal. Lima chooses interesting texts--Cabeza de Vaca's Shipwreck (1542), Tomas Rivera's ... And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (1971), and Alicia Gaspar de Alba's Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders (2005), among others--to illustrate how Latinos have used memory, along with racial and ethnic denominations, to become subjects of US national history. An engaging, original, readable work. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. A. A. Edwards Mercyhurst College