Early literary works written in Spanish in what is today the American Southwest have been largely excluded from the corpus of American literature, yet these documents are the literary antecedents of contemporary Chicano and Chicana writing. This collection of essays establishes the importance of this literary heritage through a critical examination of key texts produced in the Southwest from 1542 to 1848. Drawing on research in the archives of southwestern libraries and applying contemporary literary theoretical constructs to these centuries-old manuscripts, the authors—all noted scholars in Chicano literature—demonstrate that these works should be recognized as an integral part of American literature.
 
Contributors:
Juan Bruce-Novoa
Ramón Gutiérrez
María Herrera-Sobek
Enrique Lamadrid
Luis Leal
Francisco A. Lomelí
Genaro Padilla
Tey Diana Rebolledo
Tino Villanueva

María Herrera-Sobek is a professor of Spanish at the University of California, Irvine. Her publications include The Bracero Experience: Elitelore Versus Folklore, The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis, and Northward Bound: The Mexican Immigrant Experience in Ballad and Song. She has edited four critical anthologies: Beyond Stereotypes: The Critical Analysis of Chicana Literature, Gender and Print Culture: New Perspectives on International Ballad Studies, Chicana Creativity and Criticism: Charting New Frontiers in American Literature (with Helena María Viramontes), and Chicana(W)Rites: On Word and Film (also with Viramontes); she has also edited one textbook, with Seymour Menton, Saga de México. She is one of three women featured in the poetry collection Three Times a Woman.

“Herrera-Sobek’s collection masterfully repositions Hispanic colonial texts both in the Chicano/a literary tradition as well as positing that these Hispanic colonial works produced the prototypes for many western American literary genres and archetypes. . . . Necessary reading for all those interested in the western colonial era and the development of western American literature and culture.”—Western American Literature
 
“An objective search for these roots [of modern Chicano literature] leads to the discovery of several outstanding contributions by Spanish writers of the colonial period.”—Choice
 
“[The essays] augment the ever-growing definitions of Chicano literature and their relations to the colonial period . . . [and] provide a variety of examples that illustrate the roots of Chicano works in the Hispanic colonial literature of the Southwest.”—Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies