Exemplified by the groundbreaking anthology Criticism in the Borderlands (1991), a first wave of critical work in Chicanx literary studies was based in Movement-era notions of difference and resistance. But the field has since come to consider longer historical formations. A second critical wave has turned away from the 1960s and instead sought to define the emergence of Chicanx literature relative to 19th-century US expansion. The number of recent books attests to the growing importance of the period. Examples include John Morán González’s Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican American Literature (2009), the edited collection The Latino Nineteenth Century (2016), Karen R. Roybal’s Archives of Dispossession: Recovering the Testimonios of Mexican American Herederas, 1848-1960 (2017), Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán’s Gender and Place in Chicana/o Literature (2017), Alberto Varon’s Before Chicano: Citizenship and the Making of Mexican American Manhood, 1848-1959 (2018), and José F. Aranda’s The Places of Modernity: Mexican American Literature, 1848-1948 (2022).
Each talk in this panel addresses a genre, implicitly asking about its typical audiences. These genres are triptych, textbook, and novel. Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán introduces a genre of the church called triptych. This is defined as a series of three Christian images hinged together on a church’s altar. She focuses on a written adaptation of the visual genre called New Mexico Triptych (1940) by Nuevomexicano friar Angelico Chavez. She argues that Chavez’s text refutes the subordination of New Mexico as regional backwater to the east coast metropole. Vizcaíno-Alemán moves us to think about the formation of critical consciousness by appealing to a church congregation's expectations. Her talk prompts us to consider, how does the triptych genre appeal to faith in order to cultivate dissent?
Next, Alexandria Ramos introduces a second genre—a textbook written by Tejana Jovita González. Ramos uncovers resistant communal pedagogy in González’s textbooks of Spanish grammar. Yet this resistant pedagogy, Ramos notes, clashes with González’s praise of assimilationist schooling in her folkloric compendium Dew on the Thorn (1934). Ramos elaborates on where exactly González stands. Ramos builds, as well, on Vizcaíno-Alemán’s talk: Like a triptych, a textbook comes with a strong idea of typical audience. Ramos implicitly asks how a textbook creates its audience of schoolchildren.
To finish the panel, Carlos Alonso Nugent reads the New Mexico novels (1925-1927) of Willa Cather written at and for her New Mexican art colony. Even if Cather did not biographically identify as Nuevomexicana, her depictions of Hispanos in New Mexico are influential. Nugent asks whose environmental consciousness is enhanced and whose is debilitated by Cather’s dazzling impressionistic landscapes. Nugent encourages us to think about the different audiences created by reading Cather’s novels. Nugent also adds a third locale to the discussion of typified social life: a congregation’s church, a children’s schoolroom, and an artist’s salon. So, too, does his talk add to the panel’s concern with genre’s role in responding to and creating a typical audience. The first talk considers appeal to an audience, and the second talk suggests creation of an audience. The third talk gestures toward differentiation of two audiences. If a mythic frontier presumes a general truth that unifies a culture, genre suggests something different. Genre registers the politics that attend the formation of typical audiences.
The session will have three 18-minute presentations and at least 15 minutes of questions. The panel is balanced in terms of gender and career stages. Latinx/Chicanx topics will be discussed by scholars who identify with these positionalities.