As a writer born in San Antonio, I have always felt myself anointed, or perhaps branded, by the conflicted literary legacies of the Lone Star State. I was never sure whether my origins—as a descendant of eighteenth-century Spanish expeditionary settlers and Revolución-era norteño immigrants and a mestizo heir of storytellers as diverse as Américo Paredes, Katherine Anne Porter, and Hondo Crouch—were truly a blessing of birthplace, a karmic serendipity of sorts, or, given Texas’s fraught history of ethnic and racial discord, exclusion, and violence, a Tejano version of the mark of Cain. It’s this uncertainty that has compelled much of my work, and it’s this same uncertainty that informs my thoughts whenever I consider the Texas literary canon. That a canon of Texas literature notionally exists…The post Against the Canon appeared first on Texas Monthly.