Canonical Jovenes: Adolescence and the Chicano Bildungsroman

Noel Zavala’s paper, "Canonical jovenes: Adolescence and the Chicano Bildungsroman," focuses on the centrality of adolescence in Chicano literature, specifically the bildungsroman, to explore its representations of... [ view full abstract ]

Noel Zavala’s paper, "Canonical jovenes: Adolescence and the Chicano Bildungsroman," focuses on the centrality of adolescence in Chicano literature, specifically the bildungsroman, to explore its representations of Mexican-American masculinity. Concerns over identity and assimilation have proven to be a central trope in Chicano literature, even more so in the discipline’s infancy as exemplified by Americo Paredes’s George Washington Gomez (1930s). Calling attention to the emergence of “adolescence” following the US industrial revolution, he identifies it as a form of chronobiopolitics. His argument is that when considered through the lens of adolescence and masculinity studies the linear development ascribed to protagonists in the Chicano bildungsroman reifies legible representations of masculinity and forecloses any “sideways growth,” resulting in queer identities and practices being viewed as examples of arrested development.