Word Images

World-renowned scholar, writer, and American intellectual Norma Elia Cantú’s autobiographical book Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera has achieved tremendous success. Winner of the Premio Aztlán 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. Cantú 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 Canícula and Other Works by Norma Elia Cantú is a collection of critical essays that for the first time unveil Cantú’s contribution as a folklorist, writer, scholar, and teacher. Word Images unites two valuable ways to view and use Cantú’s work: Part I comprises essays that individually examine Cantú’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 Canícula.

Cantú 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 Cantú’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 Gutiérrez y Muhs, Ellen McCracken, María Esther Quintana Millamoto, Aldo Ulisses Reséndiz Ramírez, Rose Rodríguez-Rabin, Jesús Rosales, Carlos Sibaja-García, María Socorro Tabuenca, Juan Velasco.