Repositioning Chicano Mexicanidad of the 1960s and 1970s in 'I am Joaquin', 'The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo', 'Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez' and 'The Crossing'

Moving away from the postcolonial discourse of some U. S. Southern Borderlands literature, my dissertation reevaluates Chicano/a Mexicanidad of the 1960s and 1970s and broadens the scope of the Chicano/a identitarian and cultural composition. I do so by exploring Mexican and American inter- and intracultural relationality in emblematic Chicano/a literary pieces like the poem I am Joaquin (1967) by Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972) by Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982) by Richard Rodriguez and The Crossing (1994) by Cormac McCarthy. The first three Chicano/a pieces integrate Mexican heritage with mainstream cultural Americana, particularly late-nineteenth-century Western Romanticism and post-World War II counterculture movements.;The concluding section of my study offers an analysis of the metaphorical function of the U.S.-Mexico Border in Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing (1994). In McCarthy's text, themes related to the Border and border crossing function to relay McCarthy's biocentric, post-humanist perspective on pre and postwar American disillusionment. Highlighting the connections and differences between McCarthy's border and the border of Chicano/a and Mexican texts points out both the intertextuality of American literatures and the interconnectivity amongst American cultures. Due to that interconnectivity, the inclusion of an American western novel in my dissertation facilitates my main goal of reassessing Chicano/a Mexicanidad.