Latin American Literary Review Goldwin Smith Hall, Cornell University • Ithaca, NY 14853 • 607-255-4155 Volume 44 / Number 88 2017 E-mail:
[email protected] • Website: www.lalrp.net Are Pachucos Subalterns?: Crime, Liminality, and the Uncanny in Early Chicano Literature Paco Martín del Campo ABSTRACT: This article studies the novels of Daniel Venegas, Jovita González, and Américo Paredes that they wrote between 1928- 1938. Indigeneity, marriage, liminality, and volition are major themes in the works of each author, all of which analyze the state of Chicanos in the Southwest during the first decades after the Mexican Revolution. While their plots and characters differ, they are all rooted in the conflict between First Nations and colonial settlers and had to grapple with the existence of pachucos. Because it was necessary for pachucos and pachucas to mediate between their Mexican-born relatives and Euro-Americans, they best represented the state of Mexican America during that era. KEYWORDS: Indigeneity, la chicanada, crime and punishment, liminality, settler-colonialism From 1925 until 1938, three writers named Daniel Venegas, Jovita it is now much easier to access both of González’s works, which González, and Américo Paredes wrote novels that analyze the state she titled Caballero and The Dew on the Thorn, and Paredes’ George of Mexican emigrants and their children living in the U.S. Southwest Washington Gómez. The recovery project allowed Latina and Latino in the decades after the revolution. The characters of their novels intellectuals to analyze these novels in relation to those of contem- exhibited lingering effects from the U.S.-Mexico War, discrimination poraneous authors such as Venegas’ Las Aventuras de Don Chipote.