“With impressive rigor, erudition and sensitivity, Alfred Arteaga investigates the implication of… contemporary Chicano poets, allowing us to see how the sociopolitical underpinning and aesthetic complexity of their multilingual word play are linked. At the same time, his reading so key poetic texts of the New Spain from a Chicano perspective shed new light on these classics… well-argued and thought-provoking…. Chicano Poetics provides readers with the tools to appreciate the historical, literary and imagistic richness of a truly multicultural poesis.”
– Coco Fusco

“Arteaga’s book showed me a bold, new way of reading ‘difrasismo’ in colonial and post-colonial Mexican and Chicano/a literary texts. All of the chapters are poetically written and strikingly argued, but the masterful chapters on Alurista, Juan Felipe Herrerea, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and on Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá and Corky Gonzalez are absolutely brilliant.”
– José David Saldívar

Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities examines the crossing of literary and social forces–be they linguistic, political, poetic–that forms the context for being Chicano. Heterotextual poetics reveals how a poetry of the cross can influence identity, in reading ranging from the poetry of gender and race by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to that of the fragmentary , postmodern subject of Juan Felipe Herrera. How the text of Spanish and Indian miscegenation and the story of Aztlán propagate identity is demonstrated in texts from Bernal Díaz del Castillo to Gloria Anzaldúa. The international space and the interlingual language of the borderlands are read as factors of nationalism and postcoloniality in discussion ranging from cowboy lingo to the essential Mexicanism of Octavio Paz. Heterotextuality is the medium in which xicanismo is articulated and the xicano comes to be a hybrid subject of textual difference.