SOURCE: “Emplumada: Chicana Rites-of-Passage,” in MELUS, Vol. 11, No. 2, Summer, 1984, pp. 23-38.

In the following essay, Seator examines Emplumada as a work that emphasizes the nature of Chicana womanhood through showing the turbulent rites of passage involved in the process.

Emplumada, the first published collection by Lorna Dee Cervantes, is poetry that defines a Mexican-American identity and so carries an “ethnic” denomination. As ethnic poetry it is art that does not dwell in the region of purely detached art, “art for art's sake,” but that necessarily attempts to establish its integrity in a particular territory and time. However, for Cervantes, the role of the ethnic writer intent on affirming a personal and group identity within a clearly defined temporal and spatial context is complicated by the fact that her sense of self as a woman does not conform to the traditions of her ethnic heritage. Together, the poems of...