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Once relegated to the borders of literature—neither Mexican nor truly American—Chicana/o writers have always been in the vanguard of change, articulating the multicultural ethnicities, shifting identities, border realities, and even postmodern anxieties and hostilities that already characterize the twenty-first century. Indeed, it is Chicana/o writers' very in-between-ness that makes them authentic spokespersons for an America that is becoming increasingly Mexican/Latin American and for a Mexico that is ever more Americanized.

In this pioneering study, Héctor Calderón looks at seven Chicana and Chicano writers whose narratives constitute what he terms an American Mexican literature. Drawing on the concept of "Greater Mexican" culture first articulated by Américo Paredes, Calderón explores how the works of Paredes, Rudolfo Anaya, Tomás Rivera, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Cherríe Moraga, Rolando Hinojosa, and Sandra Cisneros derive from Mexican literary traditions and genres that reach all the way back to the colonial era. His readings cover a wide span of time (1892-2001), from the invention of the Spanish Southwest in the nineteenth century to the América Mexicana that is currently emerging on both sides of the border. In addition to his own readings of the works, Calderón also includes the writers' perspectives on their place in American/Mexican literature through excerpts from their personal papers and interviews, correspondence, and e-mail exchanges he conducted with most of them.

The first English-language translation of Rosabetty Muñoz’s vital and innovative poetry from across her extraordinary body of work

Rosabetty Muñoz is one of Chile’s most acclaimed and innovative contemporary poets. Her poems highlight the lives of girls and women on the islands of the Chilean archipelago, portraying the hardships they encounter in this often-overlooked region of the world. In this meticulous and compelling translation from Elena Barcia, Nothing Like Paradise offers a collection of selected works from across Muñoz’s oeuvre, offering a close look into the breadth and emotional intensity of her poetry.

These poems depict the wounds inflicted by the Pinochet dictatorship, foreign invasions, sexual exploitation, the incursions of global capitalism, and political exile. Renowned for her powerful use of multiple voices and striking images, Muñoz channels the thoughts and emotions of the islands’ female inhabitants, bringing immediacy and drama to their stories and transforming readers into their witnesses and confidants. Her poems invite us to confront pain and injustice with empathy and to turn understanding into a collective act of compassion and resistance.

2025 Foreword Indies Finalist, Nonfiction (Multicultural)

north by north/west is a hybrid work of creative nonfiction assembled as several iterative sequences—a discontinuous itinerary—of exile. Harnessing both montage and collage to represent the incohesive experience of being between cultures, categories, and language, this book is a personal, critical, and autoethnographic exploration of diasporic identity formation and creative expression amidst the cultural and political impacts of Cold War colonialism and fragmentation. As the narrator begins work on a rough translation of the 1959 film North by Northwest, focal points surface through textual correspondences with distant coordinates, shifting between close readings of Whitney Houston’s early music videos, current events reportage, illness journals, eighties spy movies, the most recent solar eclipse, Alfred Hitchcock’s unproduced films, Cold War “stay-behind operations,” an ill-fated party at the Festival de Cannes, and family accounts of migration. These meticulously arranged narrative threads—harnessing elements of a novel alongside poetry, photographs, and field notes—attempt to discompose the epistemology of the West/Global North in order to conceptualize a genre of work by the children of exiles who have been called “the post-dictatorship generation.”