In The Poetics of Fire, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and Chicano author Victor M. Valle posits the chile as a metaphor for understanding the shared cultural histories of ChicanX and LatinX peoples from preconquest Mesoamerica to twentieth-century New Mexico. Valle uses the chile as a decolonizing lens through which to analyze preconquest Mesoamerican cosmology, early European exploration, and the forced conversion of Native peoples to Catholicism...