The former discussed his 1963 novel City of Night as an example of Chicano literary and artistic space, a necessary response to the chaos of cultural negation and exclusion. In that book, I discovered his essays “The Space of Chicano Literature” and “Canonical and Non-Canonical Literature.” Both of them mentioned John Rechy.

I recall that one of the main texts in Bruce-Novoa’s class was his own RetroSpace: Collected Essays in Chicano Literature, Theory, and History published by Arte Public Press in 1990, the same year that he came to Harvard. I first encountered their books in New Words, a groundbreaking feminist bookstore that opened Apin Somerville, Massachusetts. At the same time, beyond the context of any university course, I began to read the works of queer Chicana feminists such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga. So, I decided to audit Bruce-Novoa’s course. in “English and American Literature.” But, I had never had the chance to formally study the literary production of Latina/o/x writers engaged with U.S. At Harvard, I had completed courses in Anglo-Saxon poetry to postmodern U.S. Up to that point, I had taken courses in Latin American literature, Peninsular Spanish literature, and “American” Literature as an undergraduate at Brown University in the mid 1980s. Bercovitch was a specialist in Puritan literature and author of many books including his 1975 The Puritan Origins of the American Self, a study that focuses its argument about the invention of this “American Self” on Cotton Mather’s biography of John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony. My dissertation advisor, the Jewish Canadian scholar Sacvan Bercovitch (1933–2014), encouraged me to audit Bruce-Novoa’s course (I had already completed my official coursework). in Harvard’s English Department while also serving as a teaching assistant and experimenting with conceptual photography. and was researching and writing my way toward a Ph.D. I first learned of John Rechy’s work in 1990 while auditing a graduate course taught by Costa Rican-born, US-raised literary critic Juan Bruce-Novoa (1944–2010), Professor of Latin American and “Chicano/Latino” literatures and cultures, film studies, and critical theory at the University of California, Irvine when Bruce-Novoa was a Visiting Professor at Harvard University. Please tell us about yourself and what prepared you for the work you accomplish in Understanding John Rechy?

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