ABSTRACT
This chapter aims at presenting a survey of the circulation and critical reception of Chicana/o culture in Italy. It addresses the various literary forms and genres practiced by Chicana/o authors – poetry, theatre and prose fiction – as well as the wide-ranging field of Chicana/o Studies, which encompasses literary and cultural criticism, sociology, politics, music and linguistics. Theatre, a medium that relates to its audience in a live performance within a definite frame of space and time, is a form of art that lends itself reluctantly to appreciation or study merely through its scripts or outside its original context of production. That is especially true of contemporary Chicana/o theatre, rooted in the farmworkers' struggle for civil rights and social justice in the mid-Sixties. Along with theatre, poetry was the most popular literary form practiced during the early phase of the Renacimiento Chicano.
