Threshold Time: Passage of Crisis in Chicano Literature

Threshold Time provides an introductory survey of the cultural, social and political history of Mexican American and Chicano literature, as well as a new in-depth analyses of a selection of works that between them span a hundred years of this particular branch of American literature. The book begins its explorations of the ?passage of crisis? with Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don, continues with Americo Paredes? George Washington Gomez, Tomas Rivera's ?And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory, and ends with Helena Maria Viramontes? Under the Feet of Jesus and Benjamin Alire Saenz? Carry Me Like Water. In order to do justice to the idiosyncrasies of the individual texts and the complexities they embrace, the analyses refer to a number of other texts belonging to the tradition, and draw on a wide range of theoretical approaches. The final chapter of Threshold Time brings the various readings together in a discussion circumscribed by the negotiations of a temporality that is strongly aligned with a sense of memory peculiar to the history of the Chicano presence in the United States of America.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction: The Open Totality of Thresholds I. A History of Borderland Routes II. Literary Blossoming III. Disillusion and Defiance in Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don IV. The Appropriate(d) Hero: Americo Paredes? George Washington GomezV. Exercises in Liminality: Tomas Rivera's ?And the Earth Did Not Devour Him VI. The Dialogic Mind: The Education of Richard Rodriguez VII. Memories of Landscape1. The Meaning of Place in Helena Maria Viramontes? Under the Feet of Jesus 2: The Threshold ? Benjamin Alire Saenz? Carry Me Like Water VIII. The Aesthetics of Time in Chicano Literature Bibliography Index