Description
In Magical Habits Monica Huerta draws on her experiences growing up in her family's Mexican restaurants and her life as a scholar of literature and culture to meditate on how relationships among self, place, race, and storytelling contend with both the afterlives of history and racial capitalism. Whether dwelling on mundane aspects of everyday life, such as the smell of old kitchen grease, or grappling with the thorny, unsatisfying question of authenticity, Huerta stages a dynamic conversation among genres, voices, and archives: personal and critical essays exist alongside a fairy tale; photographs and restaurant menus complement fictional monologues based on her family's history. Developing a new mode of criticism through storytelling, Huerta takes readers through Cook County courtrooms, the Cristero Rebellion (in which her great-grandfather was martyred by the Mexican government), Japanese baths in San Francisco—and a little bit about Chaucer too. Ultimately, Huerta sketches out habits of living while thinking that allow us to consider what it means to live with and try to peer beyond history even as we are caught up in the middle of it.
Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient Monica Huerta draws on her experiences growing up in her family's Mexican restaurants and her life as an academic to sketch out habits of living that allow us to consider what it means to live with history as we are caught up in it and how those histories bear on our capacities to make sense of our lives. Monica Huerta is Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at Princeton University. Author's Note ix
Preface: A Patron Saint xi
1. The Synthesis Problem 1
2. Fabulation 22
1988 31
3. Disciplines and Disciples 33
4. Aphorism as a Promise 42
2002 48
5. Heartbreak as Praxis 51
6. Whether Wisdom 68
2004 73
The Quene. A Mervilos and Magiquall Tale of epistemological Mischief, Wherein there are revealed no secretes 77
7. Before and After 85
2006 98
8. When Courts of Love Have Cash Registers 103
1976 107
9. Auctions 111
10. Uncertainty and Bathing 118
2010 124
2013 128
11. After Hypervigilance 132
2017 142
12. Choreography 143
Acknowledgments 153
Notes 157
Selected Bibliography 167
“Monica Huerta moves readers toward a habit of being captured by objects that mesh one's own singular and collective histories. We learn to breathe with them and to be dispossessed by them. This fantastic book enchanted me and taught me so much.”
“Magical Habits is as much a treasure trove as it is a book—full of surprises, glittering insights, lyrical vignettes, personal archives, political history, family lore, and brilliant literary critique. The writing is exquisite, for the book is both polyphonic and constantly—effortlessly—changing tack. I would turn the page without any sense of where Monica Huerta might take me next, only knowing that I wanted to follow, that I did not want to come out from under this spell.”
"Thoughtful, wry, and intimate, Magical Habits is a memoir that’s rich with questions about identity, heritage, authenticity, and the true American dream."
"This striking debut blends personal and political essays with U.S. and Mexican histories, photos, menus and a fable to indulge 'multiple habits of thought rather than proposing there is one way of knowing.'"
"Huerta weaves into each chapter powerful stories of her upbringing and family and the narrative of her own winding path in academia. She cleverly uses a variety of documents and historical archival material, sourced from her family and their businesses in Chicago and Mexico, to explore wide-ranging themes of migration and displacement and the results of what she calls racial capitalism. . . . It is a fascinating read. . . ."
"Magical Habits’s blend of personal archive and theory prompts the reader to question their assumptions around what constitutes accepted archives and heralded academic discourse. . . . Within a relatively slim text, Huerta performs a rich kind of self-ekphrasis, looking at material from her own life and family for clues about how to live alongside scholarship: television, family lore, tales from her love life that read like movie reels."
"When I tweeted a joke ('joke') about timing my book proposal to a certain full moon, someone recommended I read Monica Huerta’s Magical Habits, an intimate, academic, genre-bending study of race, history, and heritage grounded in Huerta’s experience growing up in her family’s Mexican restaurants. I’m glad I listened, and not only because Huerta validates moon-based writing timelines—it was a much-needed reminder that there are countless ways to tell a story, and that a book can be whatever you want it to be."
"Delightfully heterogenous and perfectly unblended, Huerta’s mixture of creative and critical writing spans from history to monologues, to tales and family documents, including a variety of media—photographs, restaurant menus, advertisements—which comprise her personal ‘archive’ (xix). . . . As a book which ‘seeks to enact as much as describe,’ Magical Habits is a love story between the reader and the writing, one to be read with generosity and eagerness (ix)."
“Monica Huerta’s first book, Magical Habits, is unlike many other contemporary Latinx studies monographs. It breaks with generic conventions of literary criticism and stuns with Huerta’s reflections on everyday encounters with history and capitalism via family, place, race, self, and the stories they intertwine.”
