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Hector Calderón
University of Texas Press, Austin, 2004
284pp. Paperback
ISBN:
0 2927 0582 4
As its subtitle suggests, Narratives of Greater Mexico offers not a single thesis about Chicano literature but a series of chapter-length essays tied loosely together by a common thematic of borders. Identified on the book's back cover as "one of the founders of Chicano literary criticism" - he co-edited the widely cited 1991 anthology, Criticism in the Borderlands - Calderón has structured the book around his position as a participant, not just an observer, in the birth of a new field. Narratives of Greater Mexico interweaves analysis with anecdote, describing the author's textual and personal encounters with Américo Paredes, Rudolfo Anaya, Tomás Rivera, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, Cherríe Moraga, and Sandra Cisneros. Since many of these writers themselves worry the boundaries between memoir and fiction, observation and engagement, this kind of personalism is not out of place. Indeed, networks of relation between "critical" and "creative" writers were crucial to that seminal moment when the Movimiento , having lost political momentum, took its cultural turn in the 1980s, and in brief but vivid passages we glimpse the younger Calderón's sense of excitement and discovery as he witnesses Chicano literature's parallel coming of age.
Unfortunately, Calderón does not capitalize on his front-row seat to tell the history of this process of institutionalization in any depth, and the book too often lapses into admiring descriptions of "my writer friends" (218). A chapter on the nuevomexicano tradition, for instance, describes Calderón's road trip to Jémez Springs, where he plans to interview Anaya about the epic sweep of his later novels and...