5 - Migratory Readings: Chicana/o Literary Criticism and the Postmodern

Summary

And these are the days

when our work has come asunder

And these are the days

when we look for something other.

–U2

We have seen the multiple worlds of the Chicana/o, the rocky terrain of Aztlán cum borderlands, construed in a number of different ways. In Chapter 2 those worlds, considered from a critical perspective, break down roughly into the Anglo-American, the Spanish, the pre-Cortesian indigenous, the Mexican-American, and extant North American indigenous cultures. In Chapter 3, that terrain is viewed from a postnationalist perspective, shifting from a search for homeland to a migration across borderlands. The landscape here is mapped along the lines of separatism, foundationalism, essentialism, resistance, and migration. Chapter 4 configures those worlds in terms of the regions in which Chicana cultural figures engage and resist antagonistic sociopolitical systems. These worlds break down into micropolitical realms where particular figures – the migrant, the pinto, the pachuco – search for justice and empowerment. The politics of locality evoked by poetic texts do not abjure a vision of global change; they do focus on the immediacy of political configurations.

From a discursively theoretical perspective, the worlds explored in the previous chapters of this book can be viewed as three distinct but interrelated realms: the postcolonial, the postnational, the postrevolutionary. I would like to offer a couple more terms – the postmodern and the multicultural – as signs for two of the critical landscapes across which Chicano poetry moves.