On the ethnicity issue, Sanchez’s Marxist reference to how the Californios identified themselves in relation to others at different periods (right through the
1870s) makes clear that people identity themselves in different ways and at different times depending on what the current issue are. In other languages, the words are used in identity subjective and relative. Her reference to this history as being as source of understanding to Chicanos for the apparent racism of today is weak and stretch in mind.
Rosaura Sanchez is a professor in the University of California, San Diego. Sanchez’s work in critical theory, literary analysis, and sociolinguistics has been in many literary journals. She is the author of Chicano Discourse an recently coedited the republication of The Squatter and the Don, a novel written by M.A. Ruiz de burton in 1855