“A Broader and Wiser Revolution”: Refiguring Chicano Nationalist Politics in Latin American Consciousness in Post-Movement Literature

Abstract

In a 1999 essay addressing Chicano politics and society in the late twentieth century, Martín Sanchez Jankowski asks, “Where have all the nationalists gone?” This article will explore how the contemporary post-movimiento Chicano/a literary productions of Rolando Hinojosa, Graciela Limón, Helena María Viramontes, and Cherríe Moraga have effectively answered that question by developing narratives of political consciousness and struggle that do not discard the Chicano nationalist politics of self-determination and decolonization but rather reassert the urgency and necessity of those politics by elaborating and resituating those politics in both an international context and in the context of a diversifying Latino/a culture and identity in the United States. Part of the social and historical context in which I will study these works is that articulated by Juan Gómez-Quiñones when he writes,

[I]n 1980 the Mexican was only one group among a growing Latin American population in the United States, a population which now comprises all Latin American nationalities. The ‘Mexican de Afuera’ became part of the phenomenon of “America Latina de Afuera” For better or for worse, this phenomenon impacts to what extent Mexicans can pursue strictly Mexican interests. Ironically, the political coming together of ‘La Raza Cósmica’ is occurring in the United States, but the immediate result in public discourse has been to diminish adamant Mexican or Chicano assertion.

(Gómez-Quiñones 1990, 195)