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Sánchez, Ricardo. Canto y Grito Mi Liberación (y lloro mis desmadrazgos.) established its author as a major voice in Chicano poetry and stands as an early and forceful statement of carceral experience, political self-fashioning, and cultural insurgency within the Chicano Movement. Published in 1971, shortly after Sánchez's years of incarceration and release from Soledad Prison, the volume belongs to the period in which Chicano writers used poetry as a language of anti-colonial critique, barrio memory, prison testimony, and self-determination. Sánchez, born in El Paso in 1941, earned national attention for this first solo collection, and his trajectory from prison education to a PhD and later university teaching gave the book unusual documentary force within the literary and political history of the movement. Contemporary scholarship and reference sources continue to identify Canto y Grito Mi Liberación as the work that brought him major recognition, while later criticism described it as "an excellent poetic manifesto." Sánchez, Ricardo. Canto y Grito Mi Liberación (y lloro mis desmadrazgos.) El Paso, Texas: Míctla Publications, 1971. Signed and inscribed by the author on the front endpaper, "12 Jan/84 San Auto Para Arthur Muñoz con en fuente saluda and a joyous song of self realization Ricardo S Ph.D." First edition. Illustrated by Manuel Acosta. Folio. 159 pp. Hardcover in publisher's dust jacket. Brown cloth, gilt lettered. Title page with a taped newspaper clipping relating to Sánchez's obituary. Sánchez's first book, issued by the important Chicano press Míctla Publications in El Paso, joins poetry and visual art in a format scaled beyond the usual paperback economy of movement literature. The association inscription adds a later layer from Sánchez's postdoctoral period, after he had completed graduate study and taught at Washington State University, linking the copy to the mature phase of his literary career. The obituary clipping, while later and copy specific, underscores the retrospective canonization of Sánchez as a foundational Chicano poet. The timing of this book matters. In the early 1970s, Chicano writing was consolidating its own presses, readerships, and aesthetic vocabularies outside Anglo literary institutions, and Sánchez's poetry brought prison, street life, and cultural affirmation into that emergent canon with unusual directness. His life history made the volume legible not simply as literary production but as evidence of the overlap between incarceration, educational struggle, and radical ethnic self-definition in the period after the high point of 1960s movement organizing. Minor edge wear to dust jacket; taped clipping on title page; otherwise very good. A strong signed copy of Sánchez's breakthrough volume, central to any serious holding in Chicano poetry, prison writing, and movement print culture.
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