Chicano Literary Theory

Dear Friends,

Please indulge me in a few academic posts here and there. Haven't spent a decade or more toiling in the fields of Chicana/o and Latina/o literary and cultural theory, I have to find an outlet for this work every now and then. I've very judiciously resisted the urge to comment on each and every book of theory I read, but I do have to single out Juan Bruce Novoa's Retrospace:Collected Essays on Chicano Literature, Theory, and History. First, Bruce Novoa's work was the first I found when I became interested in this subject as a KU undergrad. Novoa is one of the first theorists to devote a considerable amount of work to this field. Though he is an academic, his writing is also relatively free of the theoretical and critical jargon that others primarily used as Chicano theory and criticism became more institutionalized.
Finally, Bruce Novoa even during the heyday of Chicana/o literature and civil rights, is rightly critical of the emergence of a Chicana/o canon that tended to marginalize those works and writers who did not conform to what the critics felt Chicana/o identity was. As someone who identifies as a Chicano, but who has a Germanic surname, does not speak Spanish as a native, and who is not usually identified as a Chicano, this spoke to me.
Czar