SOURCE: Rodriguez, Ralph E. “Cultural Memory and Chicanidad: Detecting History, Past and Present, in Lucha Corpi's Gloria Damasco Series.” Contemporary Literature 43, no. 1 (spring 2002): 138-69.

In the following essay, Rodriguez analyzes Lucha Corpi's three Gloria Damasco detective novels, focusing on what they reveal about the formation of Chicano/a identity and the transmission of Chicano/a history.

Prior to the 1990s, the detective novel had been a little-explored literary form among Chicana/o writers. Over the last decade, however, they have taken to the genre with great energy, and a long tradition of American detective novels now counts some twenty-odd Chicana/o volumes as part of its corpus. Chicana/o writers have tapped into the genre's capacity for investigating history and identity to better understand the shifting Chicana/o subject of the late twentieth century.¹ Grasping the variety of ways in which this Chicana/o subject finds itself as...