SOURCE: “Ana Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters: The Novelist as Ethnographer,” in Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology, Duke University Press, 1991, pp. 73–83.

In the following essay, Quintana finds The Mixquiahuala Letters to be a study of the cultural liberation of Chicanas.

Personal narrative mediates this contradiction between the engagement called for in fieldwork and the self-effacement called for in formal ethnographic description, or at least mediates some of its anguish, by inserting into the ethnographic text the authority of the personal experience out of which the ethnography is made.

—Mary Louise Pratt (1986)

In recent years the academy has been shaken by a significant shift in scholarly concerns which raises provocative questions regarding the politics of representation. By addressing problems in the Western intellectual tradition, cultural critics have uncovered what has come to be thought of as a crisis in representation. Giving rise to such...