In this essay collection Pérez-Torres engages and succeeds in the always risky task of reconciling the oppositions at work in the conformation of a mestizo identity through the analysis of the critical, literary, musical and other artistic productions, such as poster drawing, created by the communities who identify themselves as Chicanos. With the assumption that the Chicano persona results from the negotiation of multiple identities, Pérez-Torres provides an exhaustive description of different variables that combine in the enactment of the final product: mestizaje, the racial and culturally transculturated subject.

Anzaldúa's Bordelands, César Chavez, Luis Valdez and many other iconic figures that contributed to the creation of a distinctive and respected Chicano culture in the second half of the twentieth century find a place of praise in Mestizaje. Although the native–hybrid duality haunts the pages, the historic–legendary figures of La Malinche, La Llorona and the Virgin of Guadalupe impose their mestizo heritage on the generations of Chicanos who struggle to find a place in the contemporary landscape of the US.

Language is contemplated as a unifying element, especially in terms of code-switching and the way it woks with music bands to convey a message that only “La Raza” can decipher. The explicit lyrics about the superiority of the mestizo race and the comradeship among its members make hip-hop bands the heirs of a struggle against the erasure of a distinctive Chicano racial type embodied in the past by the Pachuco, the Chicano dandy, made visible by his zoot suit.

“The Transgressive Body and Sexual Mestizaje,” Chapter 5, develops powerfully as it describes the body as a site on which multiple meanings get imposed, a space that, at first glance, suggests the impossibility of conciliating the parameters of queerness and Chicanidad (in terms of race). Through the stories of Emma Pérez's Gulf Dreams and Gil Cuadros' City of God, Pérez-Torres verifies the ironic rejection of queerness by traditional Mexican American families whose values, in Perez's narrative, turn out surprisingly to be based on hidden depraved stories of rapes between relatives. Cuadros's narrative contemplates the same hypocritical defence of values that culminates in continuous frustrations for the characters, this time grounded on the repression of a homosexual desire generation after generation.

The history of pain and suffering inscribed on the Chicano/a gay body, retold through generations and passed along the collective memory, has contributed to the creation of new human cartographies, to the articulation of the formerly silent voices of those who inhabit the margins, the borderlands where Anzaldúa's “atravesados” live.

Pérez-Torres's bright analysis finds, in the midst of the turmoil of oppositional forces advocating for difference, the unifying element that holds the Chicanos together: the mestizo race, whether it stands for pride or for rejection.