Mexican American Literature

Mexican American literature is more generally known as Chicano Literature. 

Chicano literature describes the writing of Mexican Americans from the 20th century to the present. People often use the word Chicano and Mexican American interchangeably, but the term Chicano generally refers to the ethnic pride and unique identity emerging from the civil rights movement among Mexican Americans (roughly from the 1940s to the present).

The origins of Chicano literature date back to the 16th-century Spanish Conquest of Mexico and continue through the colonization of Mexico from the 16th to 19th centuries, including Mexico's independence and the later U.S. annexation of Mexican territory in 1848 under the TREATY OF GUADALUPEHIDALGO. 

The word Chicano comes from mexicano and was first used in literature by Mario Suárez in his 1947 collection of short stories, El hoyo (The hole). Initially Chicano was meant as a pejorative word; however, Mexican Americans reclaimed the name as an assertive sign of their identity. Mexican Americans, particularly those who came of age during the civil rights movement, still use the word to signal their involvement in cultural and political activism. Because nouns agree in Spanish in gender (ending either in o or a), Chicano typically describes male writers or the corpus of Mexican-American literature since the 1940s, while Chicana refers to women writers and their writing.