Issues that inspired the publication of are to be found in the backgrounds and lives of the work's contributors themselves. These scholars all are part of a new generation of Chicana/o historians, a generation that is in the midst of framing a debate over the future of the Chicana/o past. Because most were born after 1960, these men and women also are living the history of an intellectual movement they seek to describe and explain. In aggregate, this selection of fourteen important new pieces of in-depth research forms a kind of paradigm for expanding the boundaries of Chicana/o cultural studies. presents a construct by which the Chicana/o shared experience is helping to redefine many academic disciplines with a stimulating, multi-layered questioning of inherited scholarly assumptions.