Latino comics: Javier Hernandez’s El Muerto as an allegory of chicano identity

If identity is one of the recurring themes in the cultural production of virtually all societies, those societies that have been historically marginalized and persecuted see their cultural work as a reflex of larger social concerns, particularly permeated by issues of identity. Certainly, it is a matter of historical identities, and issues of language, religion, sexuality, race-ethnicity in all sorts of combinations may be involved. While movement politics may seek to establish and congeal certain structures of identity, the flux of lived historical experience is likely to present more nuanced and contradictory patterns of identity, whereby a particular individual may move in and out of certain identity formations, may experience them in contradictory fashion, or may strategically (for pragmatic or other reasons) adopt a contestational stance toward them. The semantics of the possessive syntagm "I am," as in Rodolfo Corky Gonzáles’s Yo soy Joaquín (1967), is crucial to identity politics and, as such, is fraught, with unresolved positions vis-á-vis sociohistorical reality.².