The term “Chicano” often refers to Mexican-Americans born and raised in the Southwest– which is not the case for Jeraldine Diyarza Flores. A first-generation student studying Spanish and gender studies, she has been living in New York City for nearly 4 years.
This summer, as a Mellon Mays Scholar, she’s fusing her fields of interest to research an overlooked subject in Latinx literature– urban migrants and women.
“My goal is to understand how their voices challenge the dominant framework in the U.S. Latinx literature, especially the Chicano-centered canon from the Southwest, in hopes the authors are creating new ways to express the migrant and female experiences in urban contexts like New York,” Diyarza Flores said.
The Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 70s emerged out of a need for civil equality among the Mexican-American population, mainly concentrated in California and Texas. This political movement, characterized by strikes, walkouts, and occasional civil unrest, inspired a literary movement. While the works and accomplishments of Southwestern Mexican-Americans remain well documented, there isn’t much spotlight on writers from the Northeast.
Photo: Courtesy of Jeraldine Diyarza Flores
This gap in representation led to Diyarza Flores work on developing a canon of theoretical foundations, finding niche sources, and connecting the dots on how it ties into her thesis– a grand challenge for someone conducting formal academic research for the first time. Her primary resources are CUNY databases and JSTOR.
“My topic is underrepresented, so I’m not entering a field with a well-mapped conversation, and there is no established framework existing for the voices that I want to study,” she said. “I’m doing a lot of grunt work, finding the authors, building the archive and trying to see how they fit or don’t fit [into the canon].”
For this project, Diyarza Flores examined critiques of Chicano and Latinidad theory, in addition to key novels and newer literary works. She notes the field is predominantly male and offers contradicting ideas of Latinidad (Latin identity) and resistance.
However, there are exceptions, such as feminist Gloria Anzaldúa’s anti-colonialist “Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza” and Sandra Cisneros’s “The House on Mango Street,” a modern classic which chronicles a Mexican-American girl’s urban upbringing in Chicago. While one is more politically vocal than the other, they both shed light on identity and patriarchy.
Although she is in the early stages of research, Diyarza Flores already noticed some of the varied perspectives and writing styles within fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. One standout source is “Los niños perdidos: Un ensayo en cuarenta preguntas” by Valeria Luiselli, a first-generation author who has lived in Wisconsin and New York. Diyarza Flores was moved by Luiselli’s chronicles as a translator for undocumented children in immigration court.
“What struck me is not only the content, but the way she writes. She’s writing in fragmented chapters. She’s using ironic [language], and is deeply conscious of her privilege and responsibility, and… turns literature into a political and ethical act. Her work reflects many of the things I’m interested in– the contradictions of the city, the cultural layers of migration, the power of language.”
Before transferring to City College, Diryarza Flores attended Borough of Manhattan Community College, where she received an award for her academic excellence in the Spanish department and was among 459 semifinalists for the prestigious Jack Kent Cooke Foundation’s Transformative Undergraduate Scholarship.
The Mellon Mays Fellowship provides eligible students with $17,000 to support a path to post-secondary education. As she continues to research and analyze, Diryarza Flores hopes to widen the field of focus within the literary genre.
“My project pushes for a more inclusive definition of Latinx literature, one that not only includes the canon of Chicano studies or literature, but also all Mexican-American experiences.”
Mia Euceda is an alumna of Baruch College, where they studied journalism and served as an editor for The Ticker newspaper and Refract Magazine. Their work has been published in The New York Review of Books and Treble Zine.