Collective Identity and Cultural Resistance in Contemporary Chicana/o Autobiography

The first book length study of this genre, Collective Identity and Cultural Resistance in Contemporary Chicana/o Autobiography facilitates new understandings of how people and cultures are displaced and reinvent themselves. Through the examination of visual arts and literature, Juan Velasco analyzes the space for self-expression that gave way to a new paradigm in contemporary Chicana/o autobiography. By bringing together self-representation with complex theoretical work around culture, ethnicity, race, gender, sex, and nationality, this work is at the crossroads of intersectional analysis and engages with scholarship on the creation of cross-border communities, the liberatory dimensions of cultural survival, and the reclaiming of new art fashioned against the mechanisms of violence that Mexican-Americans have endured.

Juan Velasco is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Modern Languages at Santa Clara University, USA where he teaches courses in non-fiction creative writing, autobiography and Latina/o literature. He is the author of Las fronteras móviles: tradición, modernidad y la búsqueda de ‘lo mexicano’ en la Literatura Chicana contemporánea (2003) and his academic publications have appeared in Latino/a Literature In The Classroom: 21^st Century Approaches to Teaching, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama; Expanding the Circle: Creating an Inclusive Environment in Higher Education for LGBTQ Students and Studies, edited by John Hawley; and in Ethnic Literatures and Transnationalism, edited by Aparajita Nanda. 

“This is the book I wanted to write. Combining film study, political theory, historical analysis, and theories of autobiography, Velasco traces the tensions imminent in any notion of a stable ‘self’ identity in order to configure the ways in which fracture can be ameliorated through a healing connection to ancient sources of a collective identity located in automitografía.” (Genaro M. Padilla, English Department Chair, University of California, Berkeley, USA and the author of “My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography”)

“A brilliant reconceptualization of the autobiography genre in Mexican American literary production. Velasco has identified a splendid Chicano/a literary technology for inscribing individual self-experience and affirmation coupled with a will to resist and struggle against political, social and economic oppression for their community.” (Maria Herrera Sobek, Professor of Chicana/o Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA and the author of “Northward Bound: The Mexican Immigrant Experience in Ballad and Song”)

“Velasco situates Chicana/o autobiographical writing within the critical geography of the borderlands and the temporalities of postcolonial trauma, political and aesthetic revolution, and future collective transformation. His new readings are historically grounded, theoretically-informed, and elegantly arranged to represent a movement and a literature of mutual construction.” (Leigh Gilmore, Visiting Scholar, Brown University, USA and the author of “The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony“)

 “Velasco’s compelling study powerfully redefines a genre and makes a decisive case for the centrality of Chicana/o writings in contemporary American literature.” (Ramon Saldivar, Hoagland Family Professor of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University, USA and the author of “Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference”)