The Rise of Mexican and Chicano Literature in Chicago: Transplanting Early Roots to the Barrios and Beyond

Marc Zimmerman demonstrates his notable gifts as a writer keenly sensitive to the vital literary, socio-cultural and ethno-communal nuances his book explores and illuminates. Roberto Márquez, William Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Latin American & Caribbean Studies, Mount Holyoke College. Author of The Poet's Prose. ... The range of writers is impressive; Zimmerman's documenting this epoch in the Midwest is monumental. Armando Rendón, author of Chicano Manifesto and founder of the Somos en Escrito Literary Foundation.

This book is the first to trace the emergence of Chicago Mexican and Chicano literature from its clouded beginnings to and beyond Chicago's post-1968 Latino cultural and political explosion. The book explores how second-generation Mexican writers, many identifying as Chicanas or Chicanos, spread out from their initial points of entry to more diverse and cosmopolitan locales, forging an urban ethnic literature related to broader socio-historical trends. The rich story told here shows how these writers portrayed Mexican and Latino Chicago in ways which broadened and deepened the Chicano, Latino, minority, and overall U.S. literary field.

Part One applies theoretical and historical perspectives to early Chicago Mexican writing. Part Two studies stories portraying Mexican South Chicago's steel mill world. Part Three examines Mexican poets identifying as Chicana/o in the 1970s and 80s and the shift of many to the Chicago northside. Parts Four and Five center on Chicago's most famous Chicana writers, Ana Castillo and Sandra Cisneros, who join the northside shift and take off toward the wider world. An epilogue surveys many of the other writers emerging during and after the Latino explosion and the vital contribution of Chicago Mexicans to current Latinx and U.S. literature.

Marc Zimmerman has authored and edited over forty books on Latin and Central American, Caribbean and U.S. Latino cultures and literatures, transnational and urban processes, and Chicago Latino art; his developing autofiction Illusions of Memory series now centers on his Chicago Latino experience. Founder and director of LACASA Chicago, he is emeritus professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the U. of Illinois-Chicago, as well as Hispanic Studies and World Cultures and Literatures at the U. of Houston.