Reflection on Teaching Practice: A Pillar of Continuous Improvement in the New Mexican School
Keywords:
Chicana literature, precarious archive, orality, digital archive, borderAbstract
This article proposes a rereading of Tomás Rivera’s …y no se lo tragó la tierra and Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street through the lens of the precarious archive. In contrast to critical approaches centered primarily on identity, cultural hybridity, or subject formation, this study shifts attention to the narrative forms through which Chicana/o experience is recorded, organized, and transmitted. Drawing on Derrida, Anzaldúa, and contemporary debates on archive, memory, and digital culture, the precarious archive is understood as a mode of inscription marked by incompleteness, formal heterogeneity, non-institutional transmission, and material vulnerability. The analysis shows that in Rivera’s work, orality, collective memory, and the dispersion of voices configure a form of communal preservation; in Cisneros’s, the fragmentation of vignettes, linguistic instability, and the articulation of gender, space, and subjectivity produce a discontinuous archive of everyday Chicana/o life. Finally, the article places both texts in dialogue with debates on datafication and the digital archive, arguing that they not only represent historically marginalized experiences but also elaborate alternative ways of archiving them and rendering them legible.
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References
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Copyright (c) 2026 David Alonso Cruz-Jiménez
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