Threshold Time provides an introductory survey of the cultural, social and political history of Mexican American and Chicano literature, as well as new in-depth analyses of a selection of works that between them span a hundred years of this particular branch of American literature. The book begins its explorations of the “passage of crisis” with Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don , continues with Americo Paredes’ George Washington Gómez , Tomás Rivera’s … And the Earth Did Not Devour Him , Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory , and ends with Helena María Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus and Benjamin Alire Sáenz’ Carry Me Like Water . In order to do justice to the idiosyncrasies of the individual texts and the complexities they embrace, the analyses refer to a number of other texts belonging to the tradition, and draw on a wide range of theoretical approaches. The final chapter of Threshold Time brings the various readings together in a discussion circumscribed by the negotiations of a temporality that is strongly aligned with a sense of memory peculiar to the history of the Chicano presence in the United States of America.