A primary characteristic of Chicano culture remains its ability to move across numerous textual terrains: the ritual, the mythic, the mass cultural, the popular, the folkloric, the hyperreal, the Mexican, the American. A strategy of pastiche and appropriation enables this movement, a strategy that manifests a cross between postmodern and postcolonial concerns and discursive formations. The articulation of Chicano cultural identity conveys an outrage and sadness, a humor and wryness that weave themselves out of the multiplicitous discursive practices surrounding and traversing the borderlands of Chicano experience. Some of the topics: the concern with reconstructing history, the desire to reconnect with an original moment, the construction of expressions that establish historical connections and simultaneously enable a sense of agency for movement forward, a piecing together of resistant and acquiescent social practices. All these constitute some of the features that mark the articulation of contemporary Chicano culture.

Chicano poetic expression interwoven – as both its metacommentary and meta-articulation – with and out of this experience manifests the highly textured character of the cultural landscape. We have already seen some of the poetic and critical configurations possible. Several poets evoke pre-Cortesian cultural remnants in order to proffer a singular and empowering contemporary identity.