This chapter explains why the topic of Mexican American culture became especially urgent during the 1960s and 1970s, and shows why this emphasis on culture came under question during the 1980s. Arellano describes how the Chicano literary intervention was crucial for exposing reductive caricatures by providing more nuanced characterizations of Mexican Americans. This focus on nuanced characterization, however, ultimately risked obfuscating the damaging effects of class struggle. Referencing the competing visions of Tomás Rivera and Richard Rodriguez, concerning the value of culture, Arellano analyzes literary case studies by José Antonio Villarreal and Arturo Islas, showing how their emphasis on a shared ethnic identity occluded class inequality. Arellano concludes by analyzing Rolando Hinojosa’s novel We Happy Few, which reconsiders the legacy of Chicano activism, demonstrating how Hinojosa disarticulates the novel’s meaning from cultural unity and reconnects it to the needs of workers. The novel thus highlights a view of literature that takes Mexican American humanity as a given and directs readers’ critical attention toward the problems that arise from a society organized by class

This chapter examines the relationship between Mexican American literature and the strand of Chicano activism focused on the needs of the working class. By offering literary case studies, including Rudolfo A. Anaya’s novel Heart of Aztlan (1976), Arellano identifies how literary activism has diverged from these needs. Although literature could aid the plight of workers by enabling a group to recognize its solidarity, Arellano argues, the identity that Chicano literature consolidates is ultimately distinct from the working class as such. So even as Chicano literary activism tends to be presented as the cultural arm of a labor movement, such activism has instead operated as the psychic support for a growing Mexican American middle class. While it may seem as if the interests of this growing class are unified with the needs of Mexican American workers, a shared Chicano culture has not been able to address the economic problems that each class faces. It remains necessary to identify continually the difference between literary activism benefiting the middle class and a labor movement benefiting workers.