ABSTRACT

This chapter examines how one might teach a United States Latino/Chicana cultural studies course through an intersectional framework of socioeconomic class. The very marketability of chica lit itself its own publishing success is bound up with its heroines ability to learn how to enact a properly modern and 'American' style. The Pachuco Style was an act in Life precursor of revolution Or a piteous, hideous heroic jokedeserving of absolution. The Pachuco was existentialfor he was an Actor in the streetsboth profane and reverential. The middle-class, neoliberal Latino/a text such as chica lit must be, taught with the same kinds of attention to fine-grained differences, locales, and histories as people use to read and teach working-class, immigrant, or exile Latina/Chicano texts. In reading, through disparate works, the function of style through the framework of socioeconomic class, critical and theoretical work is necessary for students to have at least a basic grasp of terminology and ideas.