This dissertation examines the folkloric underpinnings of the Mexican American literary archive by reading Mexican American literature and cultural expression through the analytic I call the folkloric difference. Through folkloric difference, this project theorizes how to interpret Mexican American engagement with folklore. This study contends that the folkloric difference allows scholars to chart a Mexican American literary history that is attentive to the ways Mexican Americans have fashioned regional identities in response to coloniality. My study treats Mexican Americans’ communal identity formation as a dynamic process that is influenced by their relationships to particular regions in the US Southwest and West. The folkloric difference, I argue, acts as a framework that intervenes in the fields of American literary studies, folklore studies, and Chicana/o studies, highlighting how settler colonialism and processes of migration and exchange unfold in regional contexts to shape local forms of meaning-making and unofficial archives. The goal of this study is to acknowledge the capacity of folklore to act as a decolonial method.

This study traces folkloric difference since the early twentieth century. Chapter one examines discourses of folklore and the formation of alternate “folk” community in Cleofas Jaramillo’s Romance of a Little Village Girl (1955). Jaramillo’s politics demonstrate how folklore became a means dealing with the consequences of Manifest Destiny. In its reading of Jorge Ainslie's serialized novel Los Pochos (1934), chapter two revisits the US Spanish-language press to examine how folklore becomes a source through which immigrant communities negotiate their identities outside of Mexico and in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. Chapter three explores how borderlore, a type of folklore tied to the US-Mexico border, disrupts two dominant literary genres—magical realism and the gothic—in Luis Alberto Urrea’s novel The Hummingbird’s Daughter (2005). Chapter four analyzes ire’ne lara silva’s application of borderlore in her short story collection flesh to bone (2013). Here borderlore is deployed as a feminist spiritual response to border violence. Chapter five contemplates the limits of the folkloric difference by considering how the contemporary celebration of the Spanish reconquest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, plays out in the public schools.