ABSTRACT
The first goal of the exercise is to bring students closer to realizing that they have such a thing, since many of them usually white students, but not always, wrongly think otherwise. The second goal is to persuade them that while 'Chicano' and 'Chicana' are rooted in the particularities of America's entanglement with Mexico, the experiences these words signify have resonance across the globe. Many movies and books about the suburbs are entirely cynical toward the mythologies of American exceptionalism, but El Norte is not one of them. When Rosa finds housekeeping work in a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles, she appreciates the neighborhood's natural beauty. Raymond Williams's The Country and the City explains how landscape poets and painters of the eighteenth century aided the transition from an exploitative feudal system to a more rationalized system of exploitative agrarian capitalism.
