We have seen the multiple worlds of the Chicana/o, the rocky terrain of Aztlán cum borderlands, construed in a number of different ways. In Chapter 2 those worlds, considered from a critical perspective, break down roughly into the Anglo-American, the Spanish, the pre-Cortesian indigenous, the Mexican-American, and extant North American indigenous cultures. In Chapter 3, that terrain is viewed from a postnationalist perspective, shifting from a search for homeland to a migration across borderlands. The landscape here is mapped along the lines of separatism, foundationalism, essentialism, resistance, and migration. Chapter 4 configures those worlds in terms of the regions in which Chicana cultural figures engage and resist antagonistic sociopolitical systems. These worlds break down into micropolitical realms where particular figures – the migrant, the pinto, the pachuco – search for justice and empowerment. The politics of locality evoked by poetic texts do not abjure a vision of global change; they do focus on the immediacy of political configurations.

From a discursively theoretical perspective, the worlds explored in the previous chapters of this book can be viewed as three distinct but interrelated realms: the postcolonial, the postnational, the postrevolutionary. I would like to offer a couple more terms – the postmodern and the multicultural – as signs for two of the critical landscapes across which Chicano poetry moves.