I was a graduate student at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln when during one of my weekly phone call home in Laredo, Texas, I excitedly tell my father that I am about to teach my very first class on Chicano Literature. He says “Que bueno, mija, pero ¿qué es eso? No hay tal cosa,” quickly dismissing my excitement. His questioning the existence of what I saw as the future was not unexpected. In 1977, we were a handful of graduate students or professors teaching in English departments and those of us teaching Xicana/o/x literature had a problem for the dearth of published material made it extremely difficult to find texts for classes. Literatura Chicana: Texto y Contexto (1972) co-edited by Joseph Sommers, Antonia Castañeda and Tomas Ybarra Frausto was the first anthology of Xicanx literature.  African American and Xicana/o/x literature were forcing major shifts in the American literary canon, but it was incremental change and the resistance was massive. My father was not alone in proclaiming that there was no such thing as Chicano Literature; except for a few who could see the potential and the promise of a literature that reflected the life of a population that had endured erasure for over a century, it seemed to me that the entire academic world agreed with him. But I persisted and I am still teaching Xicana/o/x literature. I am pleased to say that now, my problem is that too many books exist and it is difficult to choose which to bring to my students.

We can divide the literary production that can be classified as Xicana/o/x literature into three periods: the pre-Chicano Movement (1848-1965) the Chicano Movement 1965-1990), and Post-Chicano Movement (1990 to now). Scholars have argued that this literature must not include the writing by other Latinx authors. For me, the key is the focus on chicanidad in whatever place it happens to be in Greater Mexico as Don Américo Paredes called “all the areas inhabited by people of Mexican descent—not only within the present limits of the republic of Mexico but in the United States as well in a cultural rather than a political sense” (Paredes 1976: xiv). The ethos found in “chicanidad” for me centers on certain class and cultural markers. So, in this brief essay, I offer an overview of the three major genres of Chicanx literature—poetry, fiction—regrettably there is no space to include a major genre in the Movimiento Chicano and in our literary production, theater. Moreover, the other genres of creative non-fiction, autobiography, memoir and most recently Speculative fiction also merit attention. I focus on a few authors and works from each genre anchoring along the three literary historical periods.

Poetry

In my classes, I begin my discussion of Chicano poetry citing two pre-Columbian poets: Netzahualcoyotl and Macuilxochitxin. The former also known as the King of Texcoco and the latter, the daughter of Tlacael, I consider the first feminist poet of the Americas because in her “Song of Macuilxochitzin” she includes women who are present at a battle.  I then go quickly to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s poem “Hombres Necios” and finally arrive at the 1960s Movimiento poets and poetics and conclude with the 1980s to the present. Moreover, I hold that the poetic landscape must acknowledge the role of declamación in the desarrollo de la poesia como expression artística de les chicanes. In my view, the memorized declamation of poetry is the precursor of spoken word poetry slams that are also reminiscent of the Floricantos, the poetry and arts gatherings of the 1970s and 80s.

During that era of the Movimiento and the struggle for civil rights, the Floricanto gatherings held in various locations throughout the southwest drew crowds of poets and other creatives to celebrate and champion the arts and to join in solidarity with the political actions of the day. Early Xicana/o/x poets like Alurista, Ricardo Sánchez, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Nephtalí De León Dorinda Moreno, Inés Hernández Ávila (at the time Tovar), and Antonio Burciaga among countless others, su servidora included, traced a path that drew literary critics like Juan Bruce Novoa and Marta Sánchez to write about the poetic production of the period. Not surprising many of the poets wrote from an oppositional vantage point breaking genre boundaries and breaking strict language rules; many of us used Spanglish, or TexMex and in an early book, Bernice Zamora joined with Burciaga to publish Restless Serpents (1976). Alurista’s inclusion of Nahuatl in his poetry collection Nationchild plumaroja, 1969-1972 (1972) set the stage for other non-traditional poetry.  Pinto poets Raúl Salinas, Ricardo Sánchez, and Jimmy Santiago Baca lay the ground for such poetry by inmates or formerly incarcerated Chicanos. Lesbian poets like Gloria Anzaldúa and Alicia Gaspar de Alba continued to push the envelope as it were by writing truth to power. In the 90s it was Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros and many others who soared to the forefront with important poetry collections. In California, Luis Rodriguez followed in the footsteps of an earlier generation (Quinto Sol Publications) and established Tia Chucha Press. In San Antonio, M&A Editions founded by Angela and Moises Sandoval and in San Jose Lorna Dee Cervantes’s Mango Press offered Xicana/o/x were publishing poetry.  In the 21^st century, the Juan Felipe Herrera became the first Chicano poet laureate and the organization, CantoMundo a homeland for Latine poets was founded by five Xicana/o/x  poets—Pablo Martínez, Carmen Tafolla, Deborah Paredes and Celeste Guzman and myself–the organization filled a need and with its annual writing retreat has set as its goal the celebration and support of Latine poets, albeit it is not exclusively a Xicana/o/x  poetry space. The current status of Xicana/o/x poetry is bright as new publication houses have emerged to continue publishing and hosting a lively poetry scene in spaces created by Chicanx poets. In Texas Aztlan Libre press founded by Juan Tejeda and Anisa Onofre and Edward Vidaurre’s Flowersong Press are but two of these. In bookstores and cultural centers across Aztlan, we find Xicana/o/x literary events. The poetry book series at the University of Arizona Press and the established Arte Público Press also offer an outlet for poets and for fiction writers.

Fiction

We love to talk and to tell stories; every family has at least one storyteller who carries the personal stories of the family but who may also tell stories like La Llorona and who may sing corridos, those sung ballads that tell stories. So, in my view, Xicana/o/x fiction begins with the oral tradition of storytelling. Tales like La Llorona and the oral literary tradition is rich and has continued to emerge and be published in major presses as well as university presses, especially in the southwest. In the nineteenth century the presses published novels, mostly in Spanish, but the first Chicano to publish with a major New York publisher by Jose Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho (1954). We can track the three stages of our literature by looking at the novels from before the movimiento to now. In that first period, the novels were in Spanish and published generally in Mexico or in Chicano owned small presses; the novels mostly focused a critique of the social conditions for Mexican origin people who had been in what was now the United States all along.  Scholars consider Las Aventuras de Don Chipotle, o cuando los pericos mamen (1928/1999) the first Chicanx novel, because of its style and themes. The novels of the Xicana/o/x movement were largely published by the two publishers what is now Arte Público Press and Bilingual Review Press, founded by Nick Kanellos and Gary D. Keller respectively. At least one novel, Lucha Corpi’s Brown Angel chronicles the times as it begins during the Chicano Moratorium. Writers like Rolando Hinojosa, Tomas Rivera, and Margarita Cota Cardenas published in Spanish and emerged as the Movimiento storytellers. Some writers who are not as well-known include Max Martinez and Sabine Ulibarri.  In the 80s, at the cusp of the post Movimiento literature, we see women take center stage: Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, Denise Chavez. In the post-Chicano Movement era, writers like Reyna Grande, and Fernando Flores are chronicling the life of Xicana/o/x s. LGBTQ writers have been there all along. Xicana/o/x LGBTQ characters are at the core of writers like Terri de la Peña, Gloria Anzaldúa, John Rechy, Arturo Islas and Michael Nava, Felicia Luna Lemus and others. Anzaldúa’s work changed the literary canon with her hybrid text, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.

Just like during the Movimiento, Quinto Sol Publications was publishing and offering the Premio Quinto Sol, nowadays we have Xicana/o/x  publishers like Flowersong Press, Tia Chucha Press, and Aztlan Libre Press helping to provide venues for writers of fiction and to provide readers access to a literature that reflects Xicana/o/x  life and experiences.  

I am still excited when I teach Xicana/o/x literature because I still see students discover themselves in what they read, and question why they haven’t heard about some of these writers before, writers with whom they can identify, writers who are working to prevent the erasure of Xicana/o/x literature, of our language, of our culture. My father passed away in 2004, the same year that Anzaldúa died, and by then I had been teaching Chicano Literature for many years. Before his passing, he was able to see my published novel and to recognize what Xicana/o/x literature is all about. Now, I could proudly answer his rebuke: Sí, Papi, sí hay literatura Chicana, ¡y es buenísima!