"Home Girls makes an original, bold, and significant contribution to feminist studies, Chicana/o studies, and literature. Quintana accomplishes what few critics in Chicana/o studies have done: she applies different interpretive paradigms to her reading of Chicana texts, blending ethnography with literary criticism, ideological analysis with semiotics. Her reading of literary texts is rich in texture and detail." --Rosa Linda Fregoso, author of Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture

• Acknowledgments Introduction: Testimonio as Biotheory 1. Politics, Representation, and Emergence of Chicana Aesthetics 2. Classical Rifts: The Fugue and Chicana Poetics 3. The House on Mango Street: An Appropriation of Word, Space, and Sign 4. Shades of the Indigenous Ethnographer: Ana Castillo's Mixquiahuala Letters 5. Orality, Tradition, and Culture: Denise Chavez's Novena Narrativas and The Last of the Menu Girls 6. New Visions: Culture, Sexuality, and Autobiography Notes Index