"When We Arrive integrates Early American Studies and Chicano/a Studies into a comparative cultural framework by using the Puritan connection to shed new light on dominant images of Chicano/a narrative, such as Aztlan and the borderlands. Aranda explores the influence of a nationalized Puritan ethos on nineteenth and twentieth-century writers of Mexican descent, particularly upon constructions of ethnic identity and aesthetic values.

He then frames the rise of contemporary Chicano/a literature within a critical body of work produced from the 1930s through the 1950s, one that combines a Puritan myth of origins with a literary history in which American literature is heralded as the product and producer of social and political dissent."--BOOK JACKET.