SCHOLARS@TAMU

Dr. Juan Alonzo's areas of concentration include 20th- and 21st-century American literature and culture, with specializations in Chicanx literature and film studies. Dr. Alonzo is interested in exploring literature's and popular culture's engagements with modernity. His research examines literary and cinematic representation of ethnic identities, from the turn-of-the-century to the present. In his monograph, Badmen, Bandits and Folk Heroes: The Ambivalence of Mexican American Identity in Literature and Film (Arizona, 2009), Alonzo argued that the representation of Mexican American male identity in U.S. literature is characterized simultaneously by avowal and disavowal. In late 20th- and early 21st-century works by Mexican American writers and filmmakers, Alonzo identified contingency and hybridity as the dominant expressions of identity.



Alonzo's recent work includes an essay on Machete, Robert Rodriguez's film franchise, titled "Ethnic Avengers: Machete, Django and the Uncertain Futures of Race and Immigration in the

U.S" (2019), in wich he reads the film through the lenses of immigration and issues of free speech.



Dr. Alonzo is currently at work on essays on the novels of Rolando Hinojosa-Smith and the short stories of Oscar C?sares, in whose fictions he sees defining instances of the Chicanx claiming of belonging in the discourses of American citizenship.