Bless Me Ultima is fantastic. Also, check out The Magic Journey and The Milagro Beanfield War.

I second Myrna's Steinbeck suggestion, and would recommend you branch out a bit from "Cannery Row," although that's a great place to start. "Tortilla Flat" would be a more obvious choice, I think.

Graham Greene's "The Power and the Glory" is probably outside your purview - written by a Brit and takes place in Mexico - but I'll throw it out there anyway.

You must be taking "Chicano lit" up at SCCC with Quintana, eh? :) I took that class a decade ago and did my project on how Chicanos were portrayed in film during the fifties. It was fun, and I discovered a great film - "One Eyed Jacks" - staring Marlon Brando that I never would have seen otherwise.

Have fun!

I think the most popular book on the topic is probably T.C. Boyle's The Tortilla Curtain, which is about immigration and Los Angeles. This is a huge one with book clubs, and a number of libraries have led city-wide reading programs centering around this book.

A more recent one would be Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna, which is a novel that starts in Mexico City and touches on a ton of famous Latino figures, as well as Aztec history. This would be a good one for two reasons: Kingsolver, being an Oprah-approved author, is a tremendously popular American writer, and it's also so new that there probably hasn't been much academic work written about it.

Mexico by Michener, as Mahtli69 suggests, would be a good one just because it was incredibly popular. But you should be warned: though Michener always does a ton of research, it's usually hilarious how much he misses the real spirit of the place he's writing about.

Whiskeydick's suggestion of McCarthy's Borderland trilogy is excellent, too.

Let me know if you need any more or if you need anything more specific, and I'll do some digging. Good luck!

I can't remember clearly, but you might want to look at Cannery Row by Steinbeck. I *know* that there's heavy portrayal of Asians (and their stereotypes), but there may also be some Hispanic portrayals, too. It's been a looooong time since I've ready it, though, so I could be wrong.

I was thinking of "J is for Judgement" by Sue Grafton.

You might check out "Mexico" by James Michener. I say "might", because I started reading it, thought it was a piece of crap, and never got through it.

Part of what I didn't like is that the main character is an American journalist visiting Mexico, as opposed to a sweeping saga about, say, a Mexican family. But, that might be exactly what you're looking for.