ABSTRACT
US Latino/a literature has a complicated relationship with canon formation. Through anthologies, university courses, and the institutions of literary publication and criticism, canons draw borders, determining who is allowed in and who will be excluded. Yet canons also stake out territory and help imagine communities. Latino/a studies, born as an intervention into an exclusionary American canon, is coming to terms with its own institutionalization and the kinds of selections and hierarchies that process entails. This push and pull, between challenge and consolidation, taking an anti-canon position or creating a counter-canon, marks the ambivalent relationship between Latino/a literary studies and canon formation.
