Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities examines the crossing of literary and social forces - be they linguistic, political, poetic - that forms the context for being Chicano. Heterotextual poetics reveals how a poetry of the cross can influence identity, in readings ranging from the poetry of gender and race by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz to that of the fragmentary, postmodern subject of Juan Felipe Herrera.

How the text of Spanish and Indian miscegenation and the story of Aztlan propagate identity is demonstrated in texts from Bernal Diaz del Castillo to Gloria Anzaldua. The international space and the interlingual language of the borderlands are read as factors of nationalism and postcoloniality in discussion ranging from cowboy lingo to the essential Mexicanism of Octavio Paz.

Heterotextuality is the medium in which xicanismo is articulated and the xicano comes to be a hybrid subject of textual difference.