New Mexican Narratives and the Politics of Home

The Chicano critic Genaro Padilla states that within the tradition of writing from New Mexico the experiential and discursive network of the Spanish colonial imaginary continues to effect the orientation of conceptions of self and home towards time past (Padilla 31-32). Certainly New Mexico was one of the primary arenas in which the Hispanos first achieved an authoritative sense of self and home in America. Yet the argument that texts dating from Spanish colonisation function as genealogically re-empowering narrative[s] is problematic in the light of recent trends within New Mexico's literary practice (29). Rather than seeking to recover a legitimating relation between themselves and a discourse of possession and domination from the past, it is my contention that contemporary Chicana writing in fact runs counter to this tradition.