In response to the banning of Mexican American Studies in Tucson, students in the newly formed Chican@ Literature, Art, and Social Studies program displayed their resiliency in the face of the oppressive actions of the Tucson Unified School District and the state of Arizona. This article serves as a platform for the voices of these dedicated youth…

The session that the AATSP organized at this year's MLA Convention in Boston (held on January 4, 2013) was dedicated to a topic that has been the object of constant debate in the past decades: the use of "Spanglish" as a marker of identity among US Latinos. The author states that she puts "Spanglish" into quotation marks…

This essay explores the relationship(s) between English and Spanish in the novel "Raining Backwards" (1988) by Cuban American Roberto G. Fernandez. While the many linked plots and characters suggest many protagonists, this study demonstrates how language itself takes on the role of protagonist. Through the author's use of calques…

This article discusses what is at stake in teaching works written in "Spanglish" in Spanish departments and what teaching such works might mean for students and the scholarly community at large. This article primarily comes out of the author's experiences teaching "Spanglish" works in Spanish courses at a major research…

"Code-switching," or the alternation of languages by bilinguals, has attracted an enormous amount of attention from researchers. However, most research has focused on spoken language, and the resultant theoretical frameworks have been based on spoken code-switching. This volume presents a collection of new work on the alternation of languages in…

Reading and reflecting upon ethnically unfamiliar literature can provide opportunities for teacher candidates to critically examine assumptions of self and other relative to racial, cultural, and linguistic identities. However, ethnically unfamiliar literatures can be difficult for readers to understand and appreciate due to the aesthetics they…

This essay looks at Ethnic Studies activism in Arizona through a rhetorical lens in order to highlight epistemological aspects of activities such as a high school Chicano Literature class, Roberto "Dr. Cintli" Rodriguez's journalism, and student activism to defend the Mexican-American Studies Department. Taking rhetoric's premise that language is…

The Hispanic literature of New York has often been classified as belonging to a handful of canonical authors or selected national groups. However, examples from the early years of the newspaper "La Prensa" and Felipe Alfau's novel "Chromos", as well as consideration for New York's cultural climate during the first decades of the twentieth century,…

Nobody likes the current system of peer review, and most everybody agrees it should move online. But from there, opinions diverge. As humanities editors continue to experiment with Web-based technology, two proposed online tools are highlighting disagreement over what needs fixing. Peter H. Sigal, a blue-haired associate professor of history at…

This article complements the existing body of Ruiz de Burton scholarship by providing the first sustained examination of her literary representations of American Indians in both "Who Would Have Thought It?" (1872) and "The Squatter and the Don" (1885), and by exploring how these representations serve her broader aims of social and political…

This interpretive study draws on data from a larger inquiry into teacher learning in a graduate-level course on Latino literature at a large southwestern university. The article focuses on a small diverse group of educators taking part in a literature discussion of the novel "Before We Were Free" by J. Alvarez (2002). Using a sociocultural…

Rene Saldana, Jr., an assistant professor at Texas Tech University, is a writer of short stories, poetry, and novels. In order to get his storytelling right, he has relied on his memory when writing memoirs and consulted popular culture and family when writing fiction. In order to get his university teaching right, he reads seminal texts on…

This paper examines dialogue in the higher education classroom. Instigated by my teaching experiences and the paucity of empirical studies examining dialogue in the higher education classroom, I present a re-examination of data I collected in 1996 for an ethnographic study focusing on the experiences of the participants in an ethnic literature…

By reading Helena Maria Viramontes's "Cariboo Cafe" and Daniel Chacon's "Godoy Lives," this essay argues that Chicana/o fiction articulates what I call a "borderlands ethics." Both Viramontes and Chacon give the undocumented migrant the power to merge the United States and Latin America, self and other, citizen and noncitizen. These mergers…

The term "Latino" in this paper adopts a U.S. definition to refer to those persons born/living in the United States who are of Latin American ancestry. U.S. Latino literature is defined as literature that is originally composed mostly in English, but not exclusively, by authors of U.S. Latino background. Selections of Latino literature in the U.S.…