First Place Winner of the 2015 International Latino Book Award for Best Latino Focused Nonfiction Book Literary history is a history of reading. What happens during the act of reading is the subject of the branch of literary scholarship known as reader-response theory. Does the text guide the reader? Does the reader operate independently of the text? Questions like these shape the approach of the essays in this book, edited by a scholar known for his groundbreaking work in using reader-response theory as a window into Chicana and Chicano literature. Manuel M. Martin-Rodriguez has overseen several research projects aimed at documenting Chicana and Chicano reading practices and experiences. Here he gathers diverse and passionate accounts of reading drawn from that research. For many, books served as refuges from the sorrows of a childhood marked by violence or parental abandonment. Several of the contributors here salute the roles of teachers in introducing poetry and stories into their lives.

Since colonial times, Chicano/a literature has varied with the authors' assumptions about the class and gender of their audiences, the linguistic choices available for literary communication, the geographic mobility of writers and readers, and the tastes they may have acquired in Mexico or other countries. In this examination of Chicano/a literature, Manuel M. Martin-Rodriguez analyzes the ways it connects with and is shaped by the interaction with its audiences. Martin-Rodriguez begins this writing with an examination of the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when the creation of Chicano-owned or controlled publishing enterprises made possible a surge of Chicano/a literature at the national level. He then concentrates on Chicana literature and "engendering" the reader and on linguistic and marketing strategies for a multicultural readership. Finally, Martin-Rodriguez provides a very thorough list of Chicano/a literature that he studied and recommends for the reader to consider.