Race Class: Reading Mexican American Literature in the Era of Neoliberalism, 1981-1984

Race Class identifies two competing aesthetics, the ’recognitional’ and the ’redistributive, ’ that developed in Mexican American literature during the 1980s. Recognitional literature seeks to express an ethnic identity via a circular narratological discourse of self-creation. This expressive view of literature fosters readerly sympathy via testimony and textual personification, the author argues, but ultimately forecloses interpretive judgement. Redistributive literature instead averts the readers’ sympathy to produce the evaluative distance through which interpretative judgement and structural critique are enabled. By tracking these competing aesthetics, Race Class shows why the Chicano Movement should not be understood as a working-class enterprise, why higher education cannot be a mechanism of social justice, and why the left continues to misunderstand the nature of economic inequality today.