Chicana Poetry: Writing the Feminine into the Landscape

Abstract

Chicana poetry emerges in contemporary poetry as a genre deliberately demarcated from its male counterpart, a feminine construct based on a gendered perception of external reality that reverberates, or is reverberated upon by the intense perception, with the women poets of a distinct feminity delineated by the specific Mexican origin. Therefore, we might venture to say that a social, economic, or even anthropological determinism is at work, harking back to ethnic roots, but that at the same time, the gendered poetry transcends ethnicity to blend into a biologically determined perception of reality, when women discover themselves to be different, assert themselves as different from the men of the same community, affirming therefore that Chicano/a perceptions of reality are at odds if not diverging and that ethnicity and genre are not to be superimposed, or associated in an ethnocentric nebulae, but rather be separated by a feminine-masculine rift.