Recovering the U. S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, Vol. 4 »

The Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage project, an ongoing and comprehensive program to locate, identify, preserve, and disseminate the literary contributions of U.S. Latinos, can now be considered a field in academia. The effort cuts across various disciplines, including literature and linguistics, history, ethnic studies, women's studies, library science and others. This historic fourth volume of articles celebrates the diversity of scholars contributing research to this fast advancing discipline. This corpus represents the finished, re-worked product of the biannual conferences of Recovery, providing theoretical and practical approaches, as well as critical studies on specific texts recovered from Hispanic expressive culture. Silvio Torres-Saillant's introduction, "Inscribing Latinos in the National Discourse," brilliantly conceptualizes and unifies a broad historical swath that encompasses the Spanish and English-language expression of Hispanic natives, immigrants and exiles from the colonial period to 1960.

Essays cover such broad topics as "Conquista o compra? Dos interpretaciones del Tratado de Guadalupe Hidalgo"; "Remapping the Archive: Recovered Literature and the Deterritorialization of the Canon"; "Anonimo No More: Toward a Transnational Theory of Nineteenth-Century Poetic Practice"; "Pastoras and Malinches: Women in a Traditional Folk Drama"; and "Fighting on Two Fronts: Jose de la Luz Saenz and the Language of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement." This is the fourth in a series of volumes collecting essays by leading scholars on the Hispanic literary history of the United States. The articles presented here will help to acquaint both experts and neophytes with important recent work accomplished in this field. This anthology illustrates the full scope of diverse Hispanic literary expression over some three hundred years; discusses canonization, class, gender, and ethnic identity; and addresses the reconstituting of an important segment of the cultural heritage (and overall identity) of the United States.