Romance Notes

Abstract:

Las aventuras de Don Chipote (1928), an immigration novel written by Mexican author Daniel Venegas and inspired by his own life experience as a manual laborer in southern California, has been called the first Chicano novel. Its most obvious intertext is Cervantes's Don Quijote. However, until recently Cervantists have shown little interest in this book, which has been analyzed almost exclusively by Chicano literature specialists. Given the rise of theories such as transnationalism within the field of Cervantine studies—and the growing recognition of the fact that the Quijote itself arose, in its original moment, within a transnational context—it is now appropriate to analyze more carefully this transnational text in juxtaposition to its Cervantine model. The results of this comparative study will be relevant for both fields, as well as for the history of Cervantine reception in other countries in earlier centuries.