Every academic discipline creates its own emergence story. To observe a half-century of multi-disciplinary achievements in Chicano Studies (CS), the renowned literary scholar and editor Roberto Cantú assembled a group of social historians, cultural critics, and literary scholars to recount it. The result is one of his signature anthologies whose depth and breadth is astounding. Cantú's expansive introduction serves as the thread that leads the reader through the labyrinth. The leader of the title, Homecoming Trails... at first is puzzling. For "home-coming" to happen, the parameters of home-making must first be demarcated. Successive generations of CS scholars have succeeded in defining their querencia as center-space, not periphery. In developing their counter-narratives, they dwell not on the victimhood of their people, but on their resilience and historical agency. In this anthology, history-making is charted through a succession of narrative genres, beginning with memoir, oral history, and biography, broadened into cultural history and ending with literary criticism and linguistic assessments.
The seminal texts of CS were folklorist Américo Paredes's With his Pistol in his Hand, and journalist-historian Cary McWilliams's North from Mexico: The Spanish Speaking People of the United States. Another of Cantú's landmark anthologies, Border Folk Balladeers: Critical Studies on Américo Paredes (2018), reviewed in JFRR (October 2018), acknowledges the foundational contributions of folklore to border studies.
Mario García and David Montejano, two first-generation stalwarts of Chicano sociology-cum-history offer fascinating first-person accounts of their career trajectories, their struggle to more fully understand their families and write their people into history. Three academic generations later the CS reading lists offer comprehensive histories of the southwest and greater Mexico from a Chicano perspective. Unlike Antonio María Osio, the nineteenth-century Californio who refused to turn over his memoir-history to the team of George Bancroft, CS historians leap ahead to stake out Chicano history as American history.
To emphasize the complexities of hybrid border identities, the German historian Heribert von Feilitzsch tracks the career of Frederico Stallforth, the Mexican-German-American mining magnate born in Parral Chihuahua, who survived all the economic crises of the late-nineteenth century except the last one in 1910, when his largest mine was flooded by striking miners. He fled to the U.S. to become a banker and later a spy for Germany from WWI through the start of WWII.
Next, Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita's panoramic survey of successive waves of globalism, from the Spanish Empire to Neo-Liberalism, provides an expansive contextualization of Chicano history through the study of global currents of colonialism and capitalism. They proceed to elucidate the intimate and symbiotic connections between history and historical fiction with examples from five novels that dramatize the traumas of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. Through emplotment, imagined and documentary dialogue, and characterization, history is recoded into literary representation. Historical characters are animated in the allegorical romance, where characters personify social contradictions and are further refined in the multi-vocal novel.
María Herrera-Sobek deploys her skill as a literary critic and folklorist to showcase Alejandro Morales's novel River of Angels, in which the Los Angeles River takes center stage as a bio-regional protagonist in the history of the City of Angels. Morales skillfully deploys folklore, the Spanish language, and magical realism into what Herrera-Sobek calls aesthetic activism. Fiction serves as a link to denounce environmental exploitation and environmental racism. The anthology concludes with Julio Puente García's assessment of the battle for the Spanish language itself through the fiction of the late Rolando Hinojosa. It is especially poignant, since CS has consolidated itself as a discipline largely articulated in the English language.
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[Review length: 589 words • Review posted on January 27, 2023]