“Detecting” the Specters of Chicano/a Past in Lucha Corpi’s “Eulogy for a Brown Angel”

Abstract

Since its first affirmation at the end of the nineteenth century, the detective genre has been highly debated: on the one hand it represented a very popular genre, but on the other hand it has always been considered “inferior,” receiving scant academic attention. Nevertheless, during the 1960s and 1970s, hard-boiled fiction got a new boost due to the increasing recognition from both a wider audience and critics. It also became one of the means through which multicultural writers could explore society and deal with issues such as gender and ethnicity. The aim of the present article is to show how detective fiction has been rethought from both a multicultural and a postfeminist perspective, to give voice to those deprived of it, through an analysis of Lucha Corpi’s first detective novel, Eulogy for a Brown Angel (1992), and of her heroine, detective Gloria Damasco. In the novel the past and the history of the Chicano/a Movement overwhelmingly re-emerges, in Derrida’s words, as a specter to resume its fights after an unforgettable disillusion.