SOURCE: “Notes toward a New Multicultural Criticism:Three Works by Women of Color,” in A Gift of Tongues: Critical Challenges in Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Marie Harris and Kathleen Aguero, University of Georgia Press, 1987, pp. 168-95.

In the following excerpt, Crawford analyses specific poems from Emplumada, demonstrating the strength of Cervantes's themes of resisting adversity, facing helplessness in the face of tragedy, and recapturing confidence through communication.

Although Chicano literature has emerged only since the 1960s, it has a remarkable consciousness of its own origins. An early textbook, Literatura chicana: Texto y contexto (1972), could already state that it was “composed with the Chicano reader in mind” and trace a cultural heritage including “antecedent Mexican texts [and] pre-Hispanic selections.”¹ By 1980, the critic Bruce-Novoa had proposed a paradigm of Chicano poetry as a response to the overall problematic of Chicano history. Such a poetry contained

a nostalgia for a...