Contemporary Chicana Literature

Motherhood, maternity, and intergenerational relations have formed a popular vector for critics of ethnic women’s writing for some time now, as Cristina Herrera acknowledges in the introduction to her study. Such an approach facilitates interpretations of such issues as ethnic feminine identity formation, prescriptive patriarchal stereotypes, and the family as a productive matrix of ethnic sociocultural roles. Contemporary Chicana Literature: (Re)Writing the Maternal Script integrates several of Herrera’s previously published essays into an extensive account of contemporary Chicana literary engagements with these issues, highlighting in important ways the revisionist work achieved in these texts. Focusing on the cluster of character relations defined by maternity – grandmother, mother, and daughter – Herrera shows the sustained critique of patriarchal Chicano “life scripts” as a dominant concern in contemporary Chicana literature. The first substantive chapter addresses the three central stereotypes of the Chicana mother (La Malinche, La Virgen de Guadalupe, and La Llorona) that support a cultural mythology of the mother as passive victim. Mother-daughter relations based on this mythology, Herrera cogently argues, are thematized as “a source of tension, frustration, and angst” (7) that have the potential to become a relationship of empowerment that nurtures agency when the life script of maternity is rewritten outside the polarities of good versus bad mothers and virgins versus whores

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Art · Ethnic group · Identity (music · Literature · Mythology · Social science · Sociocultural evolution · Sociology · Anthropology · Latin American and Latino Studies · Gender Studies

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