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Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicano Culture and Legal Discourse Carl Gutiérrez-Jones. Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicano Culture and Legal Discourse. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. 219 pp.
In this book, Gutiérrez-Jones addresses a significant and puzzling absence in American studies as a whole, and specifically in the study of Chicano/a literature. He argues forcefully that Chicano cultural critiques are derived from and based on entirely different premises, as well as entirely different selections and readings of crucial historical moments from those chosen by dominant Anglo representations, such that "even 'sympathetic' treatments of Latino criminality have generally avoided larger historical factors, a fact which may well reveal a constitutive denial of racial mechanics built into law." He proposes that a careful analysis of such moments-both those chosen by Anglos as well as the alternative and revisionist readings of Chicanos and Chicanas-will require of all of us a serious rethinking of the basic premises structuring much of U.S. literary (as well as legal and historical) studies today.
In this book, while Gutiérrez-Jones explores the mechanisms by which Latinos have come to be institutionally encoded as criminals by the dominant class, he also asks us...