| Traditional critical approaches to the canon of Chicana/o literature have offered those who identify themselves as Chicana/o citizens of the United States of America a limited sense of cultural identity. Considered a product of a piecemeal existence, that is, one part Mexican one part American, the Chicana/o literary subject has struggled to legitimize a cultural identity that contradicts the essentialism of U.S. culture.To date, the most profound and insightful Post-Colonial theories have allowed scholars to reexamine cultural identity from new-millenium perspectives. The most discerning of these theories, Cultural Hybridity, offers the field of Chicana/o Studies possibilities of self-identification that do not surrender to previously established identity limitations.In my study, I apply the foremost theories of Cultural Hybridity to seminal texts of Chicana/o literature in order to offer a new and optimistic possibility of identity construction. Inspired by Hybridity's insight, I have coined this process of identity articulation as Cultural Corridismo, borrowing from the term corrido in Spanish, which is a unique kind of storysong whose flexible nature permits the storyteller to articulate it in different ways according to his/her whim. I draw a correlation between this celebration of non-essentiality and the articulation of cultural identity in Chicana/o literature, as it also exhibits the same tendencies toward non-essentialism.After reexamining several foundational texts, this study concludes with an analysis of some of the most intellectually provoking Chicana/o literary works from the end of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st. As it stands in opposition to discursive limitations regarding cultural identity, I conclude cultural corridismo to be the most promising analytical vehicle by which to read works written from a Chicana/o cultural experience. |
