I have spent the past ten years as a private detective, investigating the stories, the authors, the journals and anthologies, scrutinizing notes on contributors, peering through dusty photographs of authors, jotting notes in my tattered little notebooks. Ashamed, yet excited, I waded knee-deep into stories, into drama.

One detective alone does not make a case. I encountered other detectives in those means streets, those university libraries, those women’s centers. Our eyes would meet over the stacks, and each would tip her hat, acknowledging the contribution of the other, but wary of letting slip any new clues.

I never meant to...

Chicana lesbians have been appearing in print for over thirty years. They have been created by heterosexual Chicanas and Chicanos, by lesbian Chicanas, and by other writers whose works fall both within and outside Chicano/a literature. Yet Chicana lesbian writing has yet to be studied as a distinct field—as a body of work with genealogies, with imagined communities of writers and readers, with definable characteristics, themes, paradigms, and contradictions.

In this study, I begin to map out the terrain of Chicana lesbian fictions. In defining Chicana lesbian fictions as drama, novels, and short stories by Chicana/o authors that depict...

The issue of visibility of Chicana (and in many of the cases below, Latina) lesbians is full of ambiguity. Lesbian writers have not always chosen to differentiate themselves from their heterosexual colleagues, either in their writings or in their public statements about their identities. Anthologies of Chicana writing of the past twenty-five years can be evaluated as falling into three categories: “nonlesbian,” “lesbian-friendly,” and “lesbian.” “Nonlesbian” refers to those collections in which the authors and the tone are predominantly heterosexual. While lesbian authors may appear, their work is unmarked as lesbian, compartmentalized, or tokenized. Examples areWoman of Her Word...

During my second year as a Ph.D. student, I was a teaching assistant in my first-ever Chicano/a studies class, and I was alternately dubious, furious, and inspired. One of the lectures by Shirley Flores-Muñoz, the instructor, was titled “Post-Colonial Myth, or, A Message from the Past: La Llorona, La Malinche, La Virgen de Guadalupe.” I remember the lecture clearly. Flores-Muñoz described hearing about La Llorona and the way the story stayed with her:

La Llorona was said to be a woman who neglected her children, partying and dancing into the night, a mother who either abandoned her children or killed...

Cherríe Moraga lays claim to an economy of desire shared, not along the lines of sexual orientation, but through a cultural imaginary that crosses the border between the United States and Mexico. Moraga’s provocation inspires me to explore Chicana lesbian representations, to articulate the connections between these representations and certain sexual spectacles that circulate through the Chicano/a and Mexican communities of “South Texas, L.A., or even Sonora, México.”

In this chapter I examine the genealogy of the Aztec Princess—“the” Indian woman¹—in Chicana and Chicano literature and visual culture. This mythic figure has taken on a specific sexual significance...

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, seventeenth-century poet, scholar, and dramatist of New Spain, has frequently been claimed as a literary foremother to contemporary Mexicana, Chicana, and Latina writers. The Puertorriqueña poet and historian Aurora Levins Morales posits a direct relationship between Sor Juana and contemporary Latinas. InRemedios, a prose poetry history of Puerto Rican women, Levins Morales writes that today’s Latina students partake of the same rituals as Sor Juana, “choosing among books, picking up a pen.” “We” invoke “her” as our ancestress, culturally and symbolically, even though, unlike her, we are “brown-skinned [and] poor” as well as...

In my research on Chicana literature, I found a series of stories in which girlhood provides a space, however restrictive, for lesbian desire. In the socially sanctioned system ofcomadrazgo, young Chicanas are encouraged to form lifelong female friendships, and it is the intimacy of these relationships that often provides the context for lesbian desire. Specifically, I consider the representation of girlhood friendships in four novel-length works: Sandra Cisneros’sThe House on Mango Street(1991), Denise Chávez’sThe Last of the Menu Girls(1987), Terri de la Peña’sMargins(1992), and Emma Pérez’sGulf Dreams(1996). Of these, only the...

Chicana lesbian fictions demonstrate a pressing concern with history.¹ Many of the stories I am discussing in this work create historical narratives that situate characters within a long line of women who were proud of their sexuality and their Mexican heritage.²

To understand this literary engagement with queer Chicana history, I have found it extremely valuable to examine the research of Chicana feminist historians. For example, Deena González, in her study of Spanish-Mexican women in Santa Fe, New Mexico, from 1848 to 1898, articulates how feminism informs her work:

Widows are frequently described as wives without husbands. I instead view...

This chapter focuses on the representation of Chicana/o politics in queer Chicana writings, specifically in two plays by Cherríe Moraga,Heroes and Saints(1991) andWatsonville: Some Place Not Here(1996). I am interested in the different ways these plays represent Chicana/o politics as well as their intervention in Chicana/o representation. I argue that they tie the figure of the Chicana lesbian to an activist politics; they draw from history, from legal cases, from oral history and ethnography; they render the political sphere so that it does not separate sexuality from “larger” political questions; and they draw connections between environmental...

Ramón Saldívar (1990) contends that to fully appreciate Chicano/a fiction, it is necessary to examine its genealogy, in particular, its relationship to the discursive erasure of Mexican Americans from the history of the American West. Saldívar observes that such texts “signify the imaginary ways in which historical men and women live out their lives.” In other words, Chicano/a narrative imagines histories of Mexican Americans, histories that have not made it into the official version of “how the West was won.” Saldívar takes as his originary model of Chicano/a narrative, Américo Paredes’s 1958 text, “With His Pistol in His Hand” a...