Barrio Logics: The Role of East Los Angeles in Contemporary Chicano fiction

Cristina M. Rodriguez
English
UC Irvine

The grantee’s work focused on the intersections between the transnational and the local in contemporary ethnic fiction, and the first chapter was devoted to novels that take place in East Los Angeles. This emphasis on the local requires archival research, and the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA) of the University of California at Santa Barbara had several collections that allowed the grantee to complete her project. CEMA is home to an extensive Chicano and Latino collection, including Helena Maria Viramontes’s papers, a Chicano and Tattoo Body Art Collection, and the Chicano Art Movement Collection. The novels under research, including Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came With Them, depict aspects of gang culture and the use of tattoos and graffiti tags in expressing identity. Archives of both the earlier Chicano art movement and more contemporary body art provided the grantee with the evidence needed for the localized approach adopted for the dissertation.