In Magical Habits Monica Huerta draws on her experiences growing up in her family's Mexican restaurants and her life as a scholar of literature and culture to meditate on how relationships among self, place, race, and storytelling contend with both the afterlives of history and racial capitalism. Whether dwelling on mundane aspects of everyday life, such as the smell of old kitchen grease, or grappling with the thorny, unsatisfying question of authenticity, Huerta stages a dynamic conversation among genres, voices, and archives: personal and critical essays exist alongside a fairy tale; photographs and restaurant menus complement fictional monologues based on her family's history. Developing a new mode of criticism through storytelling, Huerta takes readers through Cook County courtrooms, the Cristero Rebellion (in which her great-grandfather was martyred by the Mexican government), Japanese baths in San Francisco—and a little bit about Chaucer too. Ultimately, Huerta sketches out habits of living while thinking that allow us to consider what it means to live with and try to peer beyond history even as we are caught up in the middle of it.

Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

Monica Huerta is Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at Princeton University.

Author's Note  ix
Preface: A Patron Saint  xi
1. The Synthesis Problem  1
2. Fabulation  22
1988  31
3. Disciplines and Disciples  33
4. Aphorism as a Promise  42
2002  48
5. Heartbreak as Praxis  51
6. Whether Wisdom  68
2004  73
The Quene. A Mervilos and Magiquall Tale of epistemological Mischief, Wherein there are revealed no secretes  77
7. Before and After  85
2006  98
8. When Courts of Love Have Cash Registers  103
1976  107
9. Auctions  111
10. Uncertainty and Bathing  118
2010  124
2013  128
11. After Hypervigilance  132
2017  142
12. Choreography  143
Acknowledgments  153
Notes  157
Selected Bibliography  167