Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities examines the crossing of literary and social forces that forms the context for being Chicano. Heterotextual poetics reveals how a poetry of the cross can influence identity, in readings ranging from the poetry of gender and race by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to that of the fragmentary, postmodern subject of Juan Felipe Herrara. Heterotextuality is the medium in which xicanismo is articulated and comes to be a hybrid subject of textual difference.