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Ethnography and the Place of Gender: Jovita González, Mario Suárez, Mary Helen Ponce

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Gender and Place in Chicana/o Literature

Part of the book series: Literatures of the Americas ((LOA))

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Abstract

This chapter discusses gender and place in Jovita González’s The Woman Who Lost Her Soul and Other Stories, Mario Suárez’s Chicano Sketches: Short Stories by Mario Suárez, and Mary Helen Ponce’s Hoyt Street: Memories of a Chicana Childhood. These three writers are more recognizable in Chicana/o literary studies, but they also complicate the gender, genre, and geography of the Southwest in ways that are similar to O’Shea, Chávez, and Rodriguez. Drawing on Norma E. Cantú’s deployment of the photograph in Canícula: Snapshots of Girlhood en la Frontera, the chapter makes visible the visual aesthetics of gender and place in the ethnographic writings of González, Suárez, and Ponce. These visual aesthetics of gender and place characterize Chicana/o critical regionalism, from the early to the late twentieth century and across the vast geography of the Mexican American Southwest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA

    Melina V. Vizcaíno-Alemán

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  1. Melina V. Vizcaíno-Alemán
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Correspondence to Melina V. Vizcaíno-Alemán .

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Vizcaíno-Alemán, M.V. (2017). Ethnography and the Place of Gender: Jovita González, Mario Suárez, Mary Helen Ponce. In: Gender and Place in Chicana/o Literature. Literatures of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59262-6_4

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