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Chicano Poetics: Heterorexts and Hybridities. By Alfred Artega. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press. 1997. ix, 185 pp. $49.95; paper, $16.95.
In Chicano Poetics Alfred Arteaga combines his poetic and scholarly talents to understand better the personal and social aspects of Chicana/o identity formation. He initiates his inquiry with a poetic device drawn from preconquest Mexican Indian poets called difrasismo. This device couples two distinct elements to represent a third. For example, Arteaga uses water and metal to stand for the U.S.-Mexico border in the opening poem of his study. Difrasismo, then, clearly lends itself to Arteaga's interest in the hybrid Chicana/o subject, a hybridity or mestizaje dating back to the Spanish colonization of Mexico. Further, he maintains that this hybridity manifests itself...