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.