Mestizos Come Home!: Making and Claiming Mexican American Identity (Volume 19)

Chicana & Chicano Visions of the Américas

by Robert Con Davis-Undiano

Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano has described U.S. and Latin American culture as continually hobbled by amnesia—unable, or unwilling, to remember the influence of mestizos and indigenous populations. In Mestizos Come Home! author Robert Con Davis-Undiano documents the great awakening of Mexican American and Latino culture since the 1960s that has challenged this omission in collective memory. He maps a new awareness of the United States as intrinsically connected to the broader context of the Americas. At once native and new to the American Southwest, Mexican Americans have “come home” in a profound they have reasserted their right to claim that land and U.S. culture as their own.

Mestizos Come Home! explores key areas of change that Mexican Americans have brought to the United States. These areas include the recognition of mestizo identity, especially its historical development across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the re-emergence of indigenous relationships to land; and the promotion of Mesoamerican conceptions of the human body. Clarifying and bridging critical gaps in cultural history, Davis-Undiano considers important artifacts from the past and present, connecting the casta (caste) paintings of eighteenth-century Mexico to modern-day artists including John Valadez, Alma López, and Luis A. Jiménez Jr. He also examines such community celebrations as Day of the Dead, Cinco de Mayo, and lowrider car culture as examples of mestizo influence on mainstream American culture. Woven throughout is the search for meaning and understanding of mestizo identity.

A large-scale landmark account of Mexican American culture, Mestizos Come Home! shows that mestizos are essential to U.S. national culture. As an argument for social justice and a renewal of America’s democratic ideals, this book marks a historic cultural homecoming.

Genres: Politics, Sociology

336 pages, Hardcover

Published March 30, 2017

About the author

Professor Davis-Undiano teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in the areas of American literature, American studies, Chicano studies, cultural studies, and literary and cultural theory. At the undergraduate level, he focuses on American identity, community problems in America, gender relations in America, and Chicano studies. At the graduate level, he focuses on problems of criticism and theory as they relate to the practice of American studies, cultural studies, and Chicano studies. His books and articles are concerned with the history of criticism and cultural theory in America but also with problems in the history of literary criticism more broadly.

Reviews

[Michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was initially excited to read this book, I heard about it from an article and requested my local library get a copy. However, I could not finish it.

While there is no doubt a great deal of effort and research that went into the writing of this book, it felt a little too academic for my current taste. At first I thought it would be like a Chicano studies refresher course, and it was, but it wasn't enough to hold my attention beyond page 181.

That said, I would still recommend it to others and there was definitely useful information gained from reading. Perhaps this was just the wrong book for now and one that I will pick up again later at the right time.

[World Literature Today]

"The book’s sweeping view is interdisciplinary and critically attentive to the work of Mexican American writers, historians, and artists who have redefined the meaning of “homeland” as a place and history that must be reinvented, thus a “lost home” re-created with a full awareness of its ancient ties to the southwest region and, as of the nineteenth century, to the United States." - Roberto Cantú

This book was reviewed in the May 2017 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website: https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/...