The Californios were the original Spanish-speaking settlers of Alta California. By the 1870s they had become a conquered and dominated population as a result of the westward expansion of the United States. In that same decade the Californios were approached by agents of Hubert Howe Bancroft, a wealthy San Francisco book dealer and publisher, asking them to narrate recollections of their past in Alta California as part of a research project seeking to assemble all available information and documentation on California history. These dictated recollections are known today as testimonios.

SÁnchez offers the first pointed historical and literary analysis of thirty of these testimonios from the 1870s along with additional narratives, diaries, and documents from the nineteenth century. Most of the materials she examines have never before been published and are accessible only in their original handwritten form at the Bancroft Library housed at the University of California at Berkeley. Telling Identities scrutinizes the role of gender, class, race, language, and ethnicity in group identity formation as it looks into history to help articulate the cultural politics of contemporary Chicano and Latino culture in the United States.

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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780816625598
Publisert
1995-05-17
Utgiver
University of Minnesota Press
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
149 mm
Dybde
20 mm
Aldersnivå
UP, G, UU, 05, 01
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
352

Forfatter

Biografisk notat

Rosaura SÁnchez is professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Chicano Discourse and recently coedited the republication of The Squatter and the Don, a novel written in 1885 by Californio author MarÍa Amparo Ruiz de Burton. SÁnchez is known for both her critical work and her fiction.