Condemnation of assimilation in the Chicano/a identity discourse

The aim of this review is to familiarise a potential reader with a particularly interesting monograph written in English that has been available on the reading market since 2015 – Ends of Assimilation: The Formation of Chicano Literature autho- red by John Alba Cutler. The presented study is devoted to the literature produced by the representatives of the Mexican ethnic group in the United States – litera- ture that owes its prime to the civil rights movement launched in the latter half of the twentieth century. As the author has noted, activism accompanying the participants and observers of this social impulse translated itself into the political orientation of literary works. What, however, distinguishes Cutler’s study, when compared to similar monographs published continuously since the 1980s, is the interdisciplinary approach of the conducted research. The author not only con- centrates on a typical analysis of selected works (preserving simultaneously their chronological order), but juxtaposes their subject matter and specificity with the assumptions of the theory of assimilation developed within the discipline of socio- logy in the 1920s. Based on this perspective, Cutler indicates the way in which the literature produced by Mexican-origin prose writers and poets was shaped. More- over, he proves that it does not manifest any antiassimilationist attitude, as it was commonly considered so far, but rather shows the group’s aspiration to function together within one society – not beyond it.