SOURCE: "Towards a Chicano Poetics: The Making of the Chicano Subject, 1969–1982," in Confluencia, Vol. 1, Spring, 1986, pp. 10-17.

In the following excerpt, Saldívar offers a thematic and stylistic analysis of "So Not to Be Mottled."

While a Chicano poetics must be holistic, must include the constitutive material nature of the culture relative to the individual, it must be distinguished from orthodox social theory. I begin [then] … with the self-evident claim that conventional social theory is not often concerned with the ethnopoetic or feminist consciousness of the historically situated author and/or reader of a text. This failure of social theory to deal with individuals, groups, and texts "on the margins," to use Jacques Derrida's suggestive metaphor, can be corrected by accommodating ethno-feminist poetic theory in its concept of a private and collective subject. The Chicana ethno-feminist project has received attention by, among others, Marta E. Sánchez, Evangelina...