Another recent addition to the Greenwood Press Folklore Handbook series, Chicano Folklore, edited by María Herrera-Sobek, uniquely synthesizes the history of Chicanos in the United States by drawing on a tripartite cultural heritage that encompasses Indigenous, European, and African influences brought into explicit dialogue through folklore. Chicanos occupy an interesting and liminal niche in American history. Herrera-Sobek notes that the term “Chicano” was a pejorative, in-group term, used by members of a Mexican-American middle class to refer to new working-class immigrants (xi). The term however was refunctionalized by politically conscious Mexican Americans in the midst of the 1960s civil rights demonstrations as a mark of cultural pride. The author’s remarkably accessible and vibrant text explicitly uses the social and cultural histories of Mexican-descent communities in the United States to elucidate phases of intertextual creativity, culminating in the celebration of a hybrid Chicano identity. Not bound by purely print resources, Herrera-Sobek offers readers access to multiple, varied research tools including film, online resources, an extensive bibliography, and a glossary of terms that facilitates access to this rich body of primary and theoretical resources to those without Spanish language skills.

Chapter 1 contextualizes the history of Chicano folklore within the highly politicized position of Chicanos in the United States. Herrera-Sobek notes the seven main historical periods influencing Chicano folklore, beginning with the Spanish colonial period (1492-1821) and ending with the Chicano movement of the mid-1960s, and how these shape the trajectory of current research. The author focuses on the early colonial period of cultural contact as the root of mestizaje, the controversial mixed cultural heritage that is the hallmark of contemporary Chicano identity. It is clear that the author does not only mean to guide the reader through the basics of Chicano folklore, but also wishes to highlight the implicit role of culture-histories in political and philosophical thought. As she follows scholarship through the American Southwest, real and imagined borderlands, and the cultural threads binding vaqueros and vatos, one is able to see that each era serves as a catalyst for the development of different genres and the relative propagation of nascent ones, all of which have contributed to the identity of contemporary Chicanos and Chicano folklore.

Chapter 2, “Definitions and Classifications,” provides a broad overview of popular genres including their definitions and the finer points of the classificatory system in which they work. This section complements chapter 3, where the author provides diverse examples of the genres of Chicano Folklore, which in turn, are recontextualized in chapter 5. Switching between contemporary classificatory systems and vivid memories of a Mexican-American childhood, the author illuminates how these scholars and communities alike manage the socio-political history of Mexican-American communities in the United States through personal and communal creativity. Traditions of Latin America, particularly Mexico, continually contribute to the production of a Chicano identity, and the author draws on the work of Alan Dundes (1965), William Bascom (1965), and Stith Thompson (1928) to provide a framework for the development of genres of Chicano folklore reflects both emic and etic perspectives. In addition, this confluence of perspectives reinforces the place of Chicano folklore within the canon of mainstream American folkloristics.

Mirroring other contributions to the series, this work’s largest section is devoted to “Examples and Texts.” This section is a window into a deep history of Mexican-American heritage that has repeatedly been re-envisioned by contemporary Chicanos and which features a myriad of broad genres and subgenres reflecting the various inherited traditions found in the public and private lives of Chicano communities. Herrera-Sobek includes multiple genres that illustrate the breadth and depth of Mexican-American culture in the United States, ranging from the myth of Aztlan to family recipes for capirotada, Mexican bread pudding. At each step the author incorporates her examples into macro social discourses that implicitly posit a breach between the identity politics of vacillating transnational communities and long-established American-born Chicano enclaves, clarifying complexities in maintaining an autonomous cultural identity in the United States under the extreme pressures of Americanization. The reader is able to see the intertextuality of these genres through synchronic analyses, which show the transformation of texts from oral, to written, and then to material texts that differentially resonate with each subsequent generation. Herrera-Sobek shows how each of these texts is geographically, culturally, and temporally hybridized, blurring the boundaries between Mexican and American, north and south, history and folklore, insider and outsider. While the author offers commentaries for most texts, she leaves others open for audience engagement, where the reader may participate in the interpretation of texts--a point particularly interesting for Chicano audiences.

Chapter 4 offers the reader a remarkably detailed intellectual history of Chicano folklore scholarship, highlighting both practitioners and key theoretical frameworks. Focusing on the transformation of methodological frameworks, Herrera-Sobek illustrates the evolution of Chicano folklore studies from an initial grounding in American folklore scholarship with its concerns for collection and classification, to a subsequent focus on culture clash and border politics, and at last to a discussion of broader social and historical contexts invested with post-colonialist, feminist, postmodern, semiotic, and structuralist ideologies. The author guides the reader through four generations of Chicano folklore scholarship in North America, focusing on the influence of Mexican and Chicano materials and on the diverse group of scholars who worked with them. Herrera-Sobek lingers on the influential works of Américo Paredes and the role of reflexive research informed by cultural liminality and border politics which helped Chicano folkloristics transition from a comparative, diffusion-centered perspective to a convergence on critical cultural studies. While this text appeals to diverse reading audiences, it also specifically spotlights contemporary Chicano folklorists and their contributions to the field as well as a myriad of scholarly sources, both textual and digital, that facilitate further independent research at any level.

In the final section, “Contexts,” Herrera-Sobek offers the reader multiple contexts in which Chicano folklore continues to thrive amongst contemporary Chicano communities. She discusses the role of folklore in politics, literature, the visual and theater arts, community celebrations, and modern film. This section synthesizes not only texts, but also their integral role in “cultural production” at the individual, communal, and national levels.

This text fills a void in contemporary folkloristics. Herrera-Sobek brings the history of Mexican-American political struggle in the United States to a discussion of bilingualism and biculturalism, and shows how changes over time are mirrored in the form and content of contemporary Chicano folklore. She also shows how these dramatic shifts of generation have come to influence the way in which contemporary scholars approach the study of Chicano folklore. This work takes the reader into the heart of cultural production in the Unites States through a lens of Chicano identity. Despite the potential for its broad applications and wide readership, will this text ever leave the hands of Chicano audiences? A self-oriented history, it provides access to a broad swath of Chicano folklore that resonates with a particular audience, but we might wonder who and what this text leaves out. This book alternates among the terms Mexican, Mexican-American, Hispanic-descent, and Chicano almost interchangeably, and perhaps too quickly. However, through this use of variable identifiers one is able to see how this text aspires to capture a broad Chicano experience in the United States and therefore navigates a fine line along an ambiguous cultural divide; creating a text that is inclusively Chicano by forging intellectual and historical connections across Mexican, American, African, and Indigenous cultural discourses.

Herrera-Sobek offers audiences a wonderful text they can actively utilize to consider and reconsider the political implications of self-labeling and the implicit struggle of various culturally-hybridized communities in the United States today other than Chicanos. Chicano culture is where this text begins, but not where it should end. What would also have been useful, but perhaps beyond the purview of this text, is a more salient discussion of how language politics plays out in the realm of Chicano folklore, which is gradually becoming a space of both bilingual and monolingual English-speaking performers. Also, with such a permeable border, does it make sense to think of Mexican-descent communities as bounded communities, when they have always been in flux, being continually influenced by Mexican and American cultural bodies? This book is a balanced text exemplifying how communities transform themselves and are transformed by their cultural, social, and political surroundings, and revealing how folklore helps Chicanos rightfully become a stable part of the ever-growing cultural landscape of the United States.

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[Review length: 1402 words • Review posted on May 31, 2007]