Welcome to Oxnard - (Latinx and Latin American Profiles) by Cristina Herrera (Hardcover)

About the Book

A Literary Exploration of Chicana Coming of Age, Identity, and Belonging

Book Synopsis

Michele Serros (1966-2015) is widely known for her groundbreaking book Chicana Falsa and Other Stories of Death, Identity, and Oxnard. Despite her status as a major figure in Chicanx literature, no scholar has written a book-length examination of her body of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction--until now. Cristina Herrera, also from Oxnard, weaves in history, autoethnography, and literary analysis to explore Chicana adolescence and young womanhood with a focus on place-making. Factoring in location, region, and landscape, Herrera asks what it means to grow up Chicana in settings that carry centuries of colonial violence, segregation, and everyday racism against Mexican American communities. She contends that Serros used her hometown to broaden understandings of who and what constitutes Chicanx communities and identities. By reading Serros's work in tandem with her lived experience in the same setting, Herrera uncovers moments of adolescent subjectivity that could only be vocalized and constructed within this particular locale. Herrera pushes against the tendency to separate the author from the text and argues for a spatial understanding of Chicana adolescence, race, class, and young womanhood.

Review Quotes

brilliant...a genius level of literary analysis-- "Children's Literature"

[Herrera] effectively argues for Serros' significance as a Latina intellectual but also as a Southern California chronicler.-- "The Los Angeles Times"

Herrera critically and creatively produces a work of scholarship that is part literary analysis-memoir-travelogue while being an honest and major contribution to the field.-- "MELUS"

Welcome to Oxnard is nothing short of brilliant. Well written and well argued, Herrera's scholarship adds humor, heart, and style that only mirror and highlight the Chicana author it explores. Redressing the absence of scholarship on Michele Serros, this book sets the tone and raises the bar for Chicanx and US Latinx literary analyses.--Ella Maria Diaz, San José State University

Herrera's tour de force book takes us on a riveting scholarly journey through the trailblazing work of the late, great Latina maverick Michele Serros. This is more than biographical ode or YA lit crit. Herrera beautifully weaves in her own coming-of-age struggles in the shared 'no-love' hometown of Oxnard, along with insights from 'rurban' ethnography, sociocultural geography, borderland and Latinx cultural studies, and feminist theory, breaking wide open the mold for all future scholarship. Heartfelt. Astute. Brilliant!--Frederick Luis Aldama, University of Texas at Austin

About the Author

Cristina Herrera was born and raised in Oxnard, California, and is now professor and director of Chicanx/Latinx studies at Portland State University. She is the author of ChicaNerds in Chicana Young Adult Literature: Brown and Nerdy and editor of Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature, which won the 2022 Children's Literature Association Edited Book Award.