Shakin' Up Race and Gender: Intercultural Connections in Puerto Rican, African American, and Chicano Narratives and Culture (1965-1995) / Edition 1

by Marta E. Sánchez

Overview

The second phase of the civil rights movement (1965-1973) was a pivotal period in the development of ethnic groups in the United States. In the years since then, new generations have asked new questions to cast light on this watershed era. No longer is it productive to consider only the differences between ethnic groups; we must also study them in relation to one another and to U.S. mainstream society.

In "Shakin' Up" Race and Gender, Marta E. Sánchez creates an intercultural frame to study the historical and cultural connections among Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and Chicanos/as since the 1960s. Her frame opens up the black/white binary that dominated the 1960s and 1970s. It reveals the hidden yet real ties that connected ethnics of color and "white" ethnics in a shared intercultural history. By using key literary works published during this time, Sánchez reassesses and refutes the unflattering portrayals of ethnics by three leading intellectuals (Octavio Paz, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Oscar Lewis) who wrote about Chicanos, African Americans, and Puerto Ricans. She links their implicit misogyny to the trope of La Malinche from Chicano culture and shows how specific characteristics of this trope—enslavement, alleged betrayal, and cultural negotiation—are also present in African American and Puerto Rican cultures. Sánchez employs the trope to restore the agency denied to these groups. Intercultural contact—encounters between peoples of distinct ethnic groups—is the theme of this book.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780292709652
Publisher:	University of Texas Press
Publication date:	01/01/2006
Series:	Chicana Matters
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	220
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.51(d)

About the Author

MARTA E. SÁNCHEZ is Professor of Literature at Arizona State University and Professor Emerita at the University of California, San Diego, where she taught from 1977 to 2004.

Table of Contents

• Agradecimientos
• Prelude
• Introduction: Intercultural Connections
• Chapter 1. "In Bed" with La Malinche: Stories of "Family" à la Octavio Paz, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Oscar Lewis
• Chapter 2. La Malinche at the Intersection of Puerto Rican and African American Cultures: Piri Thomas and Down These Mean Streets
• Interlude 2. La Malinche: Shuffling the Puerto Rican Border in Spanish and Black Harlem
• Chapter 3. Of Nutshells, Frogs, and Men in Manchild in the Promised Land
• Interlude 3. Grandma Knows Best: The Women in Manchild in the Promised Land
• Chapter 4. Overcoming Self-Loathing, Learning to Love Brownness: Oscar Zeta Acosta and The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo
• Interlude 4. The Brown Buffalo Puts On Blackface
• Epilogue: La Malinche Comes Home
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Copyright Acknowledgments
• Index