World-renowned scholar, writer, and American intellectual Norma Elia Cantu’s autobiographical book Canicula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera has achieved tremendous success. Winner of the Premio Aztlan Literary Prize, it is used in high school and college classrooms across the nation, thanks to its depictions of immigration and growing up along the Texas-Mexico border. Cantu reconstructs for her readers an intimate portrait of a young girl’s experience via family photographs and strong narrative writing.Word Images: New Perspectives on Canicula and Other Works by Norma Elia Cantu is a collection of critical essays that for the first time unveil Cantu’s contribution as a folklorist, writer, scholar, and teacher. Word Images unites two valuable ways to view and use Cantu’s work: Part I comprises essays that individually examine Cantu’s oeuvre through critical analysis. Part II is dedicated to ideas and techniques to improve the use of this literature by teachers and professors, with a particular focus on tools for using Canicula.
Cantu herself has prepared the terrain for this collection, thanks to the hundreds of readings she has delivered at universities, community centers, libraries, and schools. The contributors to this collection seek to enable students and instructors alike to embark on life-changing world-vision paradigms that embrace Cantu’s technique of intellectually challenging her audiences while introducing the dissonance that exists between memory, photography, and storytelling.
Contributors: Steven W. Bender, Aurora Chang, Michael Cucher, Vanessa Fonseca, Maria Herrera Sobek, Gabriella Gutierrez y Muhs, Ellen McCracken, Maria Esther Quintana Millamoto, Aldo Ulisses Resendiz Ramirez, Rose Rodriguez-Rabin, Jesus Rosales, Carlos Sibaja-Garcia, Maria Socorro Tabuenca, Juan Velasco.
