Synopses & Reviews
A woman living and communicating in multiple lands, Susana Chávez-Silverman conveys her cultural and linguistic displacement in humorous, bittersweet, and even tangible ways in this truly bilingual literary work. These meditative and lyrical pieces combine poignant personal confession, detailed daily observation, and a memorializing drive that shifts across time and among geocultural spaces. The author’s inventive and flamboyant use of Spanglish, a hybrid English-Spanish idiom, and her adaptation of the confessional "crónica" make this memoir compelling and powerful.
Killer Crónicas confirms that there is no Latina voice quite like that of Susana Chávez-Silverman.
Includes a chapter that was awarded first prize in El Andar magazine’s Chicano Literary Excellence Contest in the category of personal memoir.
Review
"These chronicles are truly hemispheric, postmodern memories written in a ludic, singular Spanglish that encapsulates the transnational, nomad vivencias of a Jewish Chicana from Califas, a citizen of the Hispanic world. Original, powerful and profound."—Frances Aparicio, University of Illinois at Chicago
Review
“This is not a memoir written outside the box; it is a memoir written to obliterate it.”—Publishers Weekly
Review
“A stirring memoir . . . practically a performance. Killer Crónicas is a testament to the maturing sense of global and pan-Latin citizenship being claimed by Chicanos and U.S.-born Latinos in the American West. Combine this with such innovation in language, and her book may one day be regarded as a refreshing turning point in Latino literature, maybe even the truly bilingual literary voice that the pioneering Chicana critic Gloria Anzaldúa called for.”—Daniel Hernandez, Los Angeles Times
Review
"Susana Chávez-Silverman isn't a code-switcher but a switch-burner. Her Killer Crónicas is an astonishing example of linguistic mestizaje. It's also a prophetic statement: north and south are no longer applicable coordinates to understand the Americas. They have merged into a single gravitational order where languages are in constant mutation."—Ilan Stavans, author of Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language
Review
"North American and European queers have assigned themselves the roles of 'universal' queer subjects. Reading and Writing the Ambiente insightfully challenges that bias. This volume joins and significantly contributes to an emergent wave of queer critique that is calibrated to look beyond the borders that queer theory has set up for itself."—José Esteban Muñoz, author of Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics
Review
"Reading and Writing the Ambiente will be of interest to scholars of Spanish, Latin American, and Latino literatures and cultural studies, as well as to scholars in queer studies beyond the geographical and linguistic boundaries of Hispanism."—Amy Kaminsky, University of Minnesota
Review
"Susana Chávez-Silverman's Killer Crónicas: Bilingual Memories is a masterfully written memoir in the form of 'chronicles' exploring issues of memory, family relationships, and language. Her philosophical excursions on writing, intertextuality, and life in general are brilliantly and humorously rendered in a bilingual format of code-switching that evidences a superb knowledge of English and Spanish. This linguistic dexterity enables the crónicas to flow effortlessly from one language to another and easily captivates the reader as he/she travels with the author in a most enjoyable and fascinating journey from California to South Africa, Argentina, Spain, and Chile."— María Herrera-Sobek, associate vice chancellor and Luis Leal Endowed Chair, University of California, Santa Barbara
Synopsis
In this dynamic collection of essays, many leading literary scholars trace gay and lesbian themes in Latin American, Hispanic, and U.S. Latino literary and cultural texts. Reading and Writing the Ambiente is consciously ambitious and far-ranging, historically as well as geographically. It includes discussions of texts from as early as the seventeenth century to writings of the late twentieth century.
Reading and Writing the Ambiente also underscores the ways in which lesbian and gay self-representation in Hispanic texts differs from representations in Anglo-American texts. The contributors demonstrate that—unlike the emphasis on the individual in Anglo- American sexual identity—Latino, Spanish, and Latin American sexual identity is produced in the surrounding culture and community, in the ambiente. As one of the first collections of its kind, Reading and Writing the Ambiente is expressive of the next wave of gay Hispanic and Latin scholarship.
About the Author
Susana Chávez-Silverman is professor of romance languages and literatures at Pomona College in California. She is coeditor of Tropicalizations: Trans-cultural Representations of Latinidad and author of Scenes from la Cuenca de Los Angeles y otros Natural Disasters and Killer Crónicas. Librada Hernández is assistant professor of Spanish at Los Angeles Valley College in California.
Table of Contents
FOREWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
GLOSSARY CRÓNICA
I. MINI PLAYERA RE-ENTRY CRÓNICA
II. FLORA Y FAUNA CRÓNICA
III. "EL CHINO" CRÓNICA
IV. BLOOD/RELATIONS CRÓNICA
V. CELOS PASIONAL CRÓNICA
VI. MEMORY/LAME CRÓNICA
VII. TECOLOTE CRÓNICA
VIII. ROUTE 66 CRÓNICA
IX. ESTRAGOS ACUÁTICOS CRÓNICA
X. LOS ANGELES CUENCA CRÓNICA
XI. ANTI-SUICIDIO CRÓNICA
XII. ON THE ROAD CRÓNICA
XIII. OTRA VEZ EN HURLINGHAM CRÓNICA
XlV. LOST AND FOUND CRÓNICA
XV. TURKISH DELIGHT CRÓNICA
XVI. AXOLOTL CRÓNICA
XVII. CONO SUR MITZVAH CRÓNICA
XVIII. ANNIVERSARYCRÓNICA
XIX. LITTLE WHITE CAR STOLEN CRÓNICA
XX. RE-DESIGN CRÓNICA
XXI. MINI BARRIO NORTE CRÓNICA
XXII. IGUAZÚ CRÓNICA
XXIII. TINY LOVE-RIFF A CABALLITO CRÓNICA
XXIV. KILLER CRÓNICA