Marta Caminero‐Santangelo
Latina/o literature began with the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s in the Southwest and with the Nuyorican Movement (New York Puerto Rican) and the Nuyorican Poets’ Café, founded in 1973. Prior literary production by people of Latin American origin in the United States existed, of course – including Mexican American María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s historical novels in the late nineteenth century, María Cristina Mena’s short stories published in Century Magazine in the early twentieth century, and even much of Cuban poet and essayist José Martí’s writing when he lived in exile, primarily in New York, from 1881 to 1895. Further, corridos – or ballads – immortalizing folk heroes such as Gregorio Cortez and Joaquín Murrieta proliferated along the border; one of these, “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez,” is the subject of Américo Paredes’s landmark work, With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1958), which, as Ralph E. Rodriguez noted, “[set] the tone and intellectual trajectory for the next half‐century of Mexican American studies [and] […] established a pattern for celebrating figures of resistance in Mexican American cultural production” (Rodriguez 2010: 180). Nonetheless, prior to the literature that was produced from the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, there was no recognizable body of Latina/o literature; our sense of a Latina/o literary tradition has its origin in the movements that foregrounded a self‐consciously Chicana/o or Nuyorican sense of identity. A strong, pan‐ethnic Latina/o literary sensibility did not manifest itself until later, emerging in part out of the creation of “latinidad” as a marketing category (Dávila 2001) and through the anthologizing of the literary work of different Latina/o groups together in anthologies such as Currents from the Dancing River (Gonzalez 1994) and The Latino Reader (Augenbraum and Olmos 1997). Both the Chicana/o and Nuyorican movements emblematized a resistant, anti‐establishment ethos, and the art that emerged was often polemical, representing issues of oppression, marginalization, exploitation, and poverty.
The Chicano farmworkers’ strike in Delano, California (1965–1970), which demanded fair pay and recognition for a farmworker’s union, is often hailed as signaling the beginnings of the Chicano Movement; correspondingly, the conditions of Mexican American migrant farmworkers were the focus of what could be called some of the founding texts of Latina/o literature. Tomás Rivera’s classic novel Y no se lo tragó la tierra / And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (1971) depicted, in a series of interrelated vignettes, the lives of migrant farmworkers; many follow the point of view of a young male protagonist. The title story suggests the oppressive conditions of these workers, who repeatedly fall prey to heatstroke in the fields. The protagonist learns to resist his conditions by denying God, who represents the passive indoctrination of religious institutions. (The boy’s mother, for instance, suggests that tragedies befalling family members because of unsafe working conditions are part of “God’s will.”) Remarkably, the boy’s denial results not in damnation or punishment (the earth does not open up and swallow him) but rather signals the beginnings of recovery for the boy’s younger brother, who has fallen ill – suggesting that resistance to ideology creates an opening for improved conditions. In Raymond Barrio’s novel of social protest, The Plum Plum Pickers (1969), the repeating cycle of oppression endured by exploited farmworkers (conjured by the repetition in the title) can be countered by small acts of collective resistance to the economic forces controlling their lives; but such resistance is strongly gendered masculine. Though The Plum Plum Pickers has been considered a classic of Chicano Movement literature, Barrio himself was not Mexican American but rather the child of parents who had immigrated to the United States from Spain.
Over two decades later, Chicana writer Helena María Viramontes represented migrant farmworkers in her first novel, Under the Feet of Jesus (1995), which recounts migrant life from the perspective of a young female protagonist – thus significantly revising the male‐centric perspective of Rivera’s collection and, in general, of the Chicano Movement. Viramontes’s novel depicts in lyrical language how migrants are, paradoxically, “stuck” precisely because they are always moving and cannot put down roots, and how migrant work is the invisible labor upon which a middle‐class lifestyle for most in the United States depends. But women in Under the Feet of Jesus are more stuck than men; the responsibility of caring for children, along with harvesting crops, falls on the women in Viramontes’s female bildungsroman, so men see escape from domestic responsibility as a possibility for them, while Petra, the mother figure in the novel, is left behind with the children. Thus the “coming of age” for Estrella, the young female protagonist, means not only reaching physical maturity and adulthood but also the possibility of unwanted pregnancy. As seen through her mother’s eyes, the development of Estrella’s body and her budding young romance with Alejo, another farmworker, signals her risk of being trapped in a cycle of poverty and caretaking. Viramontes’s novel revises the classical Rivera text by depicting farmworker life through the lens of gender difference.
While the texts produced immediately out of the Chicano and Nuyorican Movements were “home grown,” other forms of subsequent Latina/o literary production were influenced by corresponding forms emerging out of Latin America. The most notable of these influences is magical realism, heavily influenced by Latin American letters of the “boom” and beyond, including Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits (1982). Magical realism in US Latina/o texts tends to be more subdued than its Latin American counterparts, however, leaning more toward the “realism” of magical realism. According to Wendy Faris’s explanation, magical realism is characterized by events that defy the laws of physics and scientific explanation, but that exist side by side with the recognizably “real” – the quotidian lives of regular people (Faris 1995). The magic in magical realism as such is not regarded as “magic” by the characters but as a “normal” part of their everyday lives, relatively unremarked on. Prominent Latina/o novels that have been associated with magical realism include Rudolfo Anaya’s classic Chicano text Bless Me, Ultima (1972), about a spiritual healer and the young boy who learns to love her in post‐World War II New Mexico; Ana Castillo’s So Far From God (1993), a romping novel about four sisters, each of whom exhibits magical qualities at some point, and their mother Sofi (wisdom), who decides to empower herself and her community in very unmagical ways by becoming “mayor” of their small town, Tome (again in New Mexico); and Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992), which – although not imbued throughout with magical elements – does contain some paranormal manifestations, including one patriarch’s post‐death appearances and audible haunting of his daughter as well as a santera’s bodily dissolution. None of these novels fits squarely with Faris’s definition of the genre, since the “magic” of both Anaya’s and Castillo’s novels is certainly regarded as astonishing and amazing – not as ordinary – by its characters, and can be read as a manifestation and literalization of spiritual beliefs. (When traditional Christian beliefs are represented literally in literature, by contrast, they are almost never labeled “magical realism.”) In all three cases, however, the influence of the Latin American strain is evident. Latina/o writers have often been labeled in ways that imply magical realism precisely because of a stereotyped, assumed connection to Latin America (and an essentializing association of Latin American literature with magical realism), regardless of whether “magic” actually appears in their texts.
Particularly since the 1990s, narratives representing immigration to the United States and the processes of assimilation have constituted a significant share of Latina/o cultural production. Pocho (1959) by José Antonio Villarreal was an early novel that focuses on these themes, as the novel’s title (a slang term suggesting an anglicized Mexican) suggests. The novel opens with the family patriarch’s immigration to the United States in the wake of the Mexican Revolution; the subsequent narrative deals with the tension between cultural preservation and assimilation to US culture, which tears the family apart. The 1990s witnessed a burgeoning of immigrant Latina/o fiction about the experiences of newer arrivals and their adjustment to the United States, including the novels How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) by Julia Alvarez and Dreaming in Cuban (1992) by Cristina García as well as the memoir When I Was Puerto Rican (1993) by Esmeralda Santiago. The novels by García and Alvarez, which established them as major Latina figures, are told from multiple perspectives suggesting the fragmentary and incomplete nature of memory and the composite and contested nature of truth and history. Both were credited with being loosely autobiographical in their representation of the experiences of Alvarez and García themselves, who came to live in the United States as children when their families fled the Dominican Republic and Cuba, respectively. Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros’s novel Caramelo (2002) has been viewed as semi‐autobiographical as well and, while not a narrative of immigration to the United States, details a story of circular travel that is a by‐product of migration: the young protagonist’s Mexican American, Chicago‐based family returns to visit extended family in Mexico every summer.
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989) by Cuban American Oscar Hijuelos, about the immigration of Cuban musicians to the United States during the 1950s, is one of two Pulitzer Prize‐winning novels by Latino immigrants. Imbued with nostalgia for the lost homeland, the novel’s plot predates the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and thus skirts the sharply divided politics that mark many representations of Fidel Castro’s revolution. More recently, Dominican American Junot Díaz’s first novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) traces Dominican migration to the United States in the wake of the repressive and bloody dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, cutting back and forth in time between the present day and the history of the titular character’s family under Trujillo, accompanied by the author’s own explanatory footnotes, in a metafictional move that splices literature with literary scholarship. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008.
Latina/o letters have also seen excellent collections of short fiction. Indeed, several major Latina/o novels, beginning with Rivera’s And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, and including Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1984), which tells the story of a Chicago neighborhood in a series of loosely related vignettes told through the eyes of its young protagonist Esperanza, actually lie somewhere between a short story cycle and a novel; works such as Julia Alvarez’s debut novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, her later novels In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) and ¡Yo! (1997), and Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban are told through short story‐like chapters from varying characters’ perspectives. Helena María Viramontes, one of the most prominent Chicana writers, debuted with a collection of short fiction entitled The Moths and Other Stories (1985). In the title story, a young girl tends her grandmother’s body immediately after her death; in another story, “The Cariboo Café,” the lives of a Central American woman who has lost her young son to government forces, two undocumented children, and the titular café’s cook/owner, cross paths in tragic ways. Sandra Cisneros published Woman Hollering Creek in 1991. Included in this collection are several stories that revisit prominent figures of femininity in Mexican culture: the Virgin of Guadalupe, la Llorona, and la Malinche. La Virgen de Guadalupe, who appeared to the Indigenous Juan Diego decked, so the story goes, in Indigenous clothes and with dark skin, represents for Mexican culture a powerful hybridity between Spanish Catholic and Indigenous belief systems. Cisneros revisits the virgin in her story “Little Miracles, Kept Promises,” which is in the epistolary form of requests left at the shrines of various saints and folk saints.
La Llorona in Mexican culture is a boogie‐woman who in the recounted tales drowned her children and now cries through the night, often near bodies of water, looking for other children to replace her own. As Gloria Anzaldúa has written in Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), la Llorona (and her counterpart la Malinche) are stories with a gendered ideological function: they reinforce a virgin–whore dichotomy in which women are punished for being sexual beyond the bounds of marriage or for being bad mothers. La Llorona is gestured toward in Cisneros’s short story “Woman Hollering Creek,” in which “la Gritona” (the creek, which “hollers”) reimagines la Llorona by yelling not in pain or rage over a man but in joy and empowerment. La Malinche appears in a third story, “Never Marry a Mexican,” in which the narrator is a “Malinche” figure – a Chicana mestiza – who has an ill‐fated affair with a man who resembles Cortés, the colonizer of Mexico. The narrator has internalized ethno‐racial self‐hatred and believes she should “never marry a Mexican” (meaning, in her case, a man from Mexico rather than a Mexican American) but is then confronted with the obvious prejudice of her lover, who reflects the same sentiment to her.
Other short fiction also revisits and rewrites major figures of Chicana/o folklore such as la Malinche and la Llorona. Monica Palacios, for instance, pokes fun at heteronormativity even in lesbian relationships through her story “La Llorona Loca: The Other Side” (1991), in which a character kills her female lover, who patterns herself on male clichés of independence and unfaithfulness. The murdering woman then becomes the “Llorona” mourning her lost love. Rodolfo Anaya, forefather of the Chicano novel, wrote a novella called The Legend of La Llorona: A Short Novel (1984) in which the Malinche figure is transformed into la Llorona after she murders her children to save them from being removed to Spain by their father, Cortés. All of these revisionary tales, alternative narratives of women’s victimization within patriarchal circumstances or of women’s agency, bear the marks of the influence of second‐ and third‐wave feminisms and of revisionist mythmaking as influenced by feminist literary scholar‐critics such as Alicia Ostriker (1987).
Several contemporary Chicana/o and Caribbean Latina/o writers rose to critical prominence via strong debut collections of short fiction. In the case of immigrant writers, these collections often examined the dynamics of migration, exile, and loss. Acclaimed Cuban American writer Achy Obejas’s debut collection, We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? (1994) reflects generational and political divisions among immigrants of the Cuban American diaspora resulting from Castro’s revolution, as well as the additional layers of marginalization faced by its gay and lesbian Latina/o characters. The title story’s narrator is a lesbian who contemplates – despite her nostalgia – whether her sexual identity would have been forced to express itself differently in Cuba, under the repressive policies toward gays and lesbians of Castro’s regime. Ana Menéndez’s debut collection In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd (2001) includes the beautiful and nostalgic title piece depicting the lives of lonely Cuban and Dominican men in Miami and the painful juxtaposition of past belonging with present loss of status. Junot Díaz’s debut collection Drown was a much‐hailed work that depicted – in a style that bears some resemblance to Piri Thomas’s memoir – the lives of young male Dominican immigrants both in the Dominican Republic and in the barrios and neighborhoods of New York and New Jersey; several of the stories center around the sometimes‐narrator “Yunior,” whose family is left behind – and for a time abandoned – when the father migrates illegally to the United States. Gay Chicano writer Manuel Muñoz debuted with Zigzagger (2003), which he followed with a second collection, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue (2007). In the latter, characters must deal with sickness, death, and loss as well as (in some stories) their status as unauthorized immigrants, which positions them on the margins of society.
Latina/o memoir has always been a marked genre within Latina/o letters. Puerto Rican author Piri Thomas’s memoir Down These Mean Streets (1967) recounts his racial anxiety as a youth in Spanish Harlem and Long Island; Piri finds that he can at times escape the worst forms of prejudice and discrimination by asserting his Puerto Ricanness as an identity that somehow counters his blackness, although the trajectory of the memoir is that he must accept both the racial and the ethnic identities to recover from self‐hatred. Thomas’s memoir follows his developing sense of identity as he becomes involved in drugs, is imprisoned for shooting a police officer, and – when released – learns to distance himself from this past. Mexican American Luis P. Rodríguez’s Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. (1993) has a similar theme, as Rodríguez documents his youthful involvement in gang life on the opposite coast as a cautionary tale.
Puerto Rican Esmeralda Santiago’s first memoir, When I Was Puerto Rican, differs in tone and theme from the gritty Mean Streets, which takes the “barrio” as its point of focus; When I Was Puerto Rican, by contrast, is set predominantly in Puerto Rico. In its story of “arrival” and difficult adaptation to the United States, it shares more with fictional texts like How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and Dreaming in Cuban than it does with its Puerto Rican counterpart Mean Streets. The prologue describes a highly metaphorical scene in which the narrator, shopping in a (mainland) grocery story, rejects the “exotic” guavas of her youth for the more domestic apples and pears; early scenes set in Puerto Rico detail the narrator’s childhood rejection of “American” food as a form of resistance against US cultural imperialism. Life in Puerto Rico is marked by the hardships of a poor, rural jíbaro existence and its squalid urban counterpart, with the narrator teased for being from the country when she goes to school in the city; in the epilogue, she looks back on her success as a graduate of the High School of the Performing Arts in New York City and of Harvard.
In Oscar “Zeta” Acosta’s fictionalized Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), the narrator depicts a journey of self‐discovery that begins with leaving his job as a Bay Area legal‐aid attorney to travel through much of the Southwest as well as to his birthplace along the Mexican border, finally arriving in Los Angeles to become an activist. It is in part a journey about the reconstruction of ethnic identity: “What is clear to me after this sojourn is that I am neither a Mexican nor an American. […] I am a Chicano by ancestry and a Brown Buffalo by choice.” Thus the narrator eats “tortillas” and “refried beans” and contemplates “revolution,” linking his insistence on his passionate, overindulgent love for the spicy Mexican foods of his culture to the Chicano Movement’s spirit of resistance to Anglo‐American assimilation (Acosta 1989: 199). The narrator adds “Zeta” to his name as a gesture to his Chicano/Mexican roots, and also likens himself to a “buffalo” to signal his identification with a threatened (and physically large) “brown” population. Brown Buffalo shares an affinity with earlier Beat Generation writing such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) for its raw portrayals of a road trip infused with drugs and sex, as well as with Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971). (Acosta is the model for Thompson’s character Dr. Gonzo.) According to Marcia Chamberlain (2001), Brown Buffalo is critically overlooked because of its irreverent and at times offensive representations of other marginalized groups. Acosta’s sequel The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973) continues the story of the lawyer’s activism with the Chicano Movement during the 1970 Chicano Moratorium in protest against the Vietnam War.
Several Latina/o authors have written memoir‐like texts that take the form of a series of personal essays or mixed‐genre collages consisting of essays, poetry, short fiction, and more. The collection of personal essays Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982) by Mexican American writer Richard Rodriguez contains perhaps one of the most frequently taught works by a Latina/o in the mainstream classroom. Rodriguez’s memories of learning English constitute a nostalgic look backwards at what was lost but also an endorsement of English‐only education and of the necessity of relinquishing the “home” culture to become a “public” individual. As a Latina/o spokesperson against bilingual education, Rodriguez appealed to a more assimilationist point of view than most other Chicana/o writing. In contrast, Gloria Anzaldúa’s landmark Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), a hybrid text combining personal essay, critical essay, theory, history, and poetry, and written in an equally complex hybrid language, insists on her right to speak the language most reflective of her identity and asserts that “I am my language. […] Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself. […] Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, […] my tongue will be illegitimate” (Anzaldúa 1987: 81). Similarly, Chicana lesbian feminist writer Cherríe Moraga describes in her essay “La Güerra” (1983) how for many years she felt silenced by believing she needed to speak in a “white language” that was not reflective of “the voice of my own brown mother – the brown in me”; Moraga recounts having to learn to combat this “internalized” oppression through the adoption of a voice more expressive of her own Chicana experience (Moraga 1983: 54–55).
Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood (1990), weaving fragments of personal memories with poetry, alternates between Puerto Rico and New Jersey, the two homes of Cofer’s childhood. Silent Dancing won the PEN/Martha Albrand Special Citation for Nonfiction in 1991 and was included in New York Public Library’s list of Best Books for Teens. Her later collection The Latin Deli (1993) combines essays, short fiction, and poetry to convey the intersecting lives of Puerto Rican migrants to New Jersey, which converge in a high‐rise apartment – El Building – and the surrounding barrio. Julia Alvarez’s most explicitly autobiographical impulse is given voice in her collection of essays Something to Declare (1998), which takes up the intertwined themes of exile and writing, themes woven into her first novel. The Distance Between Us (2012), a memoir by Reyna Grande, details her experience of being left behind in Mexico by her parents, who went to the United States seeking better economic opportunity – thus giving voice to the experience of abandonment articulated by many children of migration and diaspora. Eventually, Grande is brought to the United States by her father, though as with Díaz’s Drown, this is hardly a happy ending for the parent–child relationship.
María Amparo Ruiz de Burton is the first known Mexican American to have published historical fiction in English; her two novels, The Squatter and the Don (1885) and Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) examined the appropriation and loss of Mexican lands following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 as well as the tense and ambiguous positioning of Mexicans within US culture during the Civil War period. More recently, historical novels have gained traction in Latina/o literary production, in large part as a result of a transnational sensibility in which authors maintain emotional, economic, or political ties with their countries of origin. The reconstruction of historical narrative in fictional form is a way of imagining a significant, collective national past in which even current immigrants are included. Julia Alvarez’s second novel, In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), imagines the lives of four historical women, the Mirabal sisters, three of whom were involved in the resistance against Dominican dictator Trujillo and who were killed because of it. Her novel In the Name of Salomé (2000) investigates Dominican nineteenth‐century poet Salomé Ureña, some of whose verse was strongly patriotic in theme; it intersperses Salomé’s forward‐moving storyline with the backward‐moving line of Salomé’s daughter Camila, a professor at Vassar. And Alvarez’s novel Saving the World (2006) juxtaposes a contemporary timeline involving a Dominican American writer, with some resemblance to Alvarez herself, with a nineteenth‐century expedition from Spain to the New World to spread a smallpox vaccine via orphaned boys.
Cristina García’s first novel, Dreaming in Cuban, takes the familial and generational divisions in the aftermath of Castro’s revolution as its subject matter, but García’s subsequent novels looked further back in history. Monkey Hunting (2003), for instance, investigates the different roots of Cuban society in its imported Chinese “coolies” or African slaves. Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Hummingbird’s Daughter (2005) tells the story of Urrea’s great‐aunt Teresita in nineteenth‐century Mexico, who became revered as a folk saint.
Like Dreaming in Cuban, several novels by Latina/os that could be termed “historical” in a looser sense have taken Latin American political upheavals as their subject matter. Viramontes’s short story “The Cariboo Café” (1985) shared this theme and was one of the earliest works of fiction by a Chicana/o to examine the repercussions of political repression in a country of origin that is not the author’s own. Demetria Martinez’s novel Mother Tongue (1994) represents in highly romantic terms the relationship between a young Chicana in New Mexico and the Salvadoran refugee she aids via a fictionalized version of the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s. Sandra Benítez’s The Weight of All Things (2001) depicts a boy caught between Salvadoran military and guerrilla forces after witnessing the eruption of violence and his mother’s death by gunfire at the public burial of assassinated Archbishop Óscar Romero. Guatemalan American author Héctor Tobar’s novel The Tattooed Soldier (1998) tells the intertwined stories of a young man fleeing the murder of his wife and infant son in Guatemala by death squads and of the soldier who killed them – both of whom have migrated to Los Angeles, where they must bear witness to the 1992 LA riots. These novels drew readers’ attention to the disappearances, tortures, and genocide in Central America – conditions aided by US military support for the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala.
The beginnings of Chicana/o poetry have their roots in the spirit of political and cultural resistance that characterized the Chicano Movement. The poem “I Am Joaquín” (1967) by Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, cited by Gloria Anzaldúa as one of the elements that gave birth to a self‐conscious Chicana/o identity, constructs and solidifies a sense of group identity among all Mexican Americans in the context of the solidarity needed for an effective Chicano Movement. The poem, with a Whitmanesque “I” persona who embodies a collective history, recounts a catalogue of key moments and figures of Mexican and Mexican American history that include both Spanish colonizers and the indigenous peoples they colonized, both Mexican revolutionaries and the tyrants they opposed. Anglo‐Americans are notably left out of this narratively constructed mestizaje.
Happening concurrently to the Chicano Movement, the Nuyorican Movement originated as a cultural phenomenon in New York and gave voice to issues of complex hybrid identities and to racism, poverty, and cultural marginalization in Spanish Harlem/the Lower East Side. As Urayoán Noel reports, “Puerto Rican poets were at the forefront of the countercultural ferment of 1960s New York City and […] were also involved in a variety of artistic and activist initiatives – from poetic and musical performances and community theater to collaborations with nationalist, antiwar, community, and student organizations,” including the radical nationalist Young Lords Party. The Nuyorican Movement of the mid‐1960s through 1970s “insist[ed] on poetry in its various forms as a means of institutional critique and communal engagement,” and was associated with a sort of “barrio realism” (Noel 2014: 1, 2, 9). The Nuyorican Poets Café, founded in 1973 in the East Village home of Miguel Algarín, hosted poetry readings and performances by major writers (as well as musicians and artists) including Algarín, Tato Laviera, Pedro Pietri, and Miguel Piñero. In Nuyorican aesthetics, “diaspora itself [was] performance, as an alternative practice that questions the primacy of geographic and juridical conceptions of identity” (Noel 2014: 8).
Victor Hernández Cruz, in his collection Snaps (1968), frequently identified as the first volume of Nuyorican poetry, drew on Afro‐Caribbean rhythms to represent the urban scene of New York. In a much‐noted poem of this era, “Puerto Rican Obituary” (1971), Pedro Pietri indicted the deceiving lure of capitalism and the American Dream for Puerto Ricans; through the incantatory repetition of short lines, Pietri suggests the futility of subscribing to a myth of meritocracy in a system based on exploitation: “They worked / They were always on time / They were never late / […] They worked / ten days a week / and were only paid for five / They worked / They worked / They worked / and they died.” In “A Lower East Side Poem” (1980), Miguel Piñero’s poetic persona stakes his claim to the Lower East Side rather than the island of Puerto Rico: “I don’t wanna be buried in Puerto Rico / I don’t wanna rest in Long Island Cemetery / I wanna be near the stabbing shooting / gambling fighting & unnatural dying / & new birth crying.” Despite the grimness of the barrio environment, with its crime and drugs, Piñero’s persona asks an unspecified addressee to “scatter my ashes thru the Lower East Side,” which, for better or for worse, is home; its mood, while recognizing the grimmer aspects of barrio life, is less bleak and more celebratory than “Puerto Rican Obituary.” Like the latter, however, “A Lower East Side Poem” is crafted in short lines with repeated end‐line rhymes to “Lower East Side,” suggestive of oral performance.
In “AmeRican” (1985), Tato Laviera constructs his own version of a celebratory hybrid identity that merges “American” with “Puerto Rican” in a potentially hopeful and celebratory manner that “dream[s] to take the accent / from the altercation.” All three of these poems have similar forms, consisting of short lines of free verse and a sometimes incantatory repetition of particular words or phrases, although later poems like “AmeRican” and “A Lower East Side Poem” suggest an aesthetics more rooted in continental US soil and more embracing of an American identity, despite its shortcomings. In 1975, Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero published the volume Nuyorican Poetry, which arguably gave institutional visibility to the Movement. The Nuyorican Café moved out of Algarin’s living room to East 6th Street, and then eventually to 236 East 3rd Street, where it has served for many years as a forum for innovative and performance poetry, spoken word, hip‐hop, and more. In 1994, the volume Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, co‐edited by Miguel Algarín and Bob Holman, featured a new and more multicultural generation of poets. Contemporary Nuyorican poets include well‐known figures such as Gloria Vando and Martín Espada. In “Nuyorican Lament” (1993), which deliberately invokes the movement label and conjures a collective Nuyorican sensibility, Vando begins by noting, “San Juan you’re not for me / My cadence quails and stumbles / on your ancient stones” – but then goes on to reproduce a dramatic “cadence” clearly molded by her Puerto Rican background (“¡Vaya! How can I deal with that?”) and to invoke an entire collective history, “I Am Joaquin” style, for Nuyoricans and Puerto Ricans alike. In poems such as “Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands” (about the 1937 Ponce Massacre) and “Two Mexicanos Lynched in Santa Cruz, California, May 3, 1877,” Espada lyrically documents the bloody and violent history of Anglo‐America’s oppression of Latinos and extends this collective history beyond Puerto Ricans to include Mexicans as well, in a manifestation of a pan‐ethnic sensibility. Espada’s collection The Republic of Poetry (2006) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; he is also the recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.
A wave of Chicana and Latina writers in the 1980s and 1990s also published volumes of poetry bearing witness to experiences of hybridity, hyphenation, cultural uprootedness, and dislocation. Anzaldúa’s poem, which opens her classic text Borderlands/La Frontera, overlays the US–Mexico border onto the poetic persona’s physical body, likening it to a “1,950 mile‐long open wound / dividing a pueblo, a culture, / running down the length of my body” – suggestive of the ways in which a borderlands identity is both material (its effects felt on the body) and metaphorical, positioning the border subject between cultures and belonging (Anzaldúa 1987: 24). Pat Mora writes powerfully of being hybrid, hyphenated: in “Legal Alien” (1985), the poetic persona, like Anzaldúa’s, describes being an identity on the border, or in Mora’s words, “Bi‐lingual, Bi‐cultural / […] a handy token / sliding back and forth / between the fringes of both worlds.” Another Mora poem, “Immigrants,” attests to a first generation’s need to seek assimilation for their children as a means of securing them a better life; they “wrap their babies in the American flag, / feed them mashed hot dogs and apple pie,” and whisper “Will they like / our boy, our girl, our fine American / boy, our fine American girl?” Assimilation, in this rendering, is equated with acceptance, inclusion, and the achievement of the American Dream – although the poem hints at the cultural losses that it entails.
Lorna Dee Cervantes, another Chicana poet, writes of feeling disconnected from her culture of origin by the very process of assimilation in poems such as “Refugee Ship” (1974, 1981), in which the poetic persona laments that “mama raised me with no language / I am an orphan to my Spanish name,” and “Heritage” (1981), a brief snapshot of a narrator returning to Mexico for a visit only to feel utterly detached from her environment: “Heritage / I look for you all day in the streets of Oaxaca.”
The beginnings of Chicana/o (and more broadly, Latina/o) drama can be located in the Teatro Campesino, or “Farmworkers’ Theater,” founded by Luis Valdez in 1965 to perform conflicts faced by the farmworkers, to spread the word about their cause, and to train the striking farmworkers to become better organizers (Chicano! 1996). The Teatro Campesino intentionally departed from the conventions of “white western European […] proscenium theatre” (Valdez 1990: 11) and sought new forms more connected to the material realities of the Chicana/o experience. It began by improvising “actos,” or skits, which aimed to make salient social points regarding the experiences of farmworkers. In Valdez’s definition, the acto “evolved into a short dramatic form” with the following goals: “Inspire the audience to social action. Illuminate specific points about social problems. Satirize the opposition. Show or hint at a solution. Express what people are feeling” (1990: 12). Characters represented archetypes, not individuals. Some years after the end of the farmworkers’ movement, Valdez’s play Zoot Suit (1978) was first performed to sold‐out houses in Los Angeles before going on to Broadway. Zoot Suit is, arguably, the best‐known play to date by a Latino; and though it was performed after the events that marked the Chicano Movement, it is set before the movement, during World War II, depicting the unjust arrest and trial of several Los Angeles “pachucos” for a murder, as well as the “zoot suit riots” that followed. The play’s theme is Chicana/o exclusion from the national imaginary. An early exploration of the theme of racial profiling, Zoot Suit calls attention to how the pachucos’ appearance marks them as already guilty in the eyes of the law. Written in an experimental style clearly influenced by Bertolt Brecht’s concept of estrangement, the play repeatedly breaks the fourth wall to address audiences; uses newspapers as props in the setting in place of furniture, jail cell bars, a court bench; and plays with time – even, at one point, “rewinding” the scene and replaying it. Several of the characters in the play, as in the earlier actos, represent archetypes: “Press,” “Newsboy,” and Pachuco himself.
Heroes and Saints (1992), a play by Cherríe Moraga, takes up the legacy of the teatro campesino and the farmworkers’ movement by dramatizing the results of poisonings of farm laborers by crop pesticides. Between 1978 and 1988, many children in McFarland, California in the San Joaquin Valley were diagnosed with cancer or born with birth defects as a result of pesticides contaminating farmworkers’ bodies and their drinking water; United Farm Workers called for a grape boycott to bring attention to this crisis in 1988. In Heroes and Saints, the character Cerezita, a bodiless head inspired, according to Moraga, by Valdez’s play The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa (1963), symbolizes the long‐term results of the harmful pesticides.
Josefina López’s play Detained in the Desert (2011) is a contemporary take on the issue of racial profiling, examining the anti‐immigrant legislation passed in Arizona in the early 2000s; one central character, a Chicana, is wrongly deported, while her boyfriend, who is undocumented but is white and Canadian, never comes under scrutiny. A conservative talk show personality, meanwhile, also finds himself lost in the desert; his experience constitutes a conversion since, in the aftermath of his experience, he modifies his hard line on undocumented immigrants.
While the Chicano Movement boasted the Teatro Campesino, the Nuyorican Café served as the home for emerging Puerto Rican playwrights. Miguel Piñero’s play Short Eyes (1974), written while he was in prison, was first performed off‐Broadway before moving to the Vivian Beaumont Theater on Broadway. Depicting details of prison life for Hispanic and African American men, the play was nominated for six Tony Awards and won a New York Critics Circle Award and an Obie Award for best American play of the year.
Latina playwrights including Cuban Americans María Irene Fornes and Carmelita Tropicana and Chicana Cherríe Moraga frequently take gender, sexuality, and performativity as subject matters. Fornes’s critically acclaimed Fefu and Her Friends (1977), which explores gender roles and power dynamics among the all‐female cast, disrupts conventional staging, with action at once occurring in different parts of the theater while audience members rotate until they view each scene. Moraga’s play Giving Up the Ghost (1989) eschews verisimilitude for a surrealist style, in which three women characters (two of whom represent the same character at different ages) share dialogues on stage, although frequently directing their remarks to the audience rather than to each other. The titular “ghost” that the characters struggle to “give up” is, arguably, heteronormativity enforced by traditional Mexican culture which otherwise provides an imaginary “home” for the play’s characters. Cuban American performance artist Carmelita Tropicana (Alicia Troyano) features the performance of gender/sexual identities as well as of ethnic identities in her plays and performances. As José Esteban Muñoz (1999) has noted, Tropicana’s work combines gay camp with Cuban “choteo”; lesbian sexuality is on display along with parodied “Latinidad.”
Some recent works of fiction and non‐fiction by US Latina/os call attention to a new situation of political urgency and crisis – the conditions of undocumented immigrants, both as they risk their lives by crossing the border and as they live in the shadows within their new home country. Ana Castillo’s The Guardians (2007) represents a family in Texas that is left devastated and adrift in the wake of the father/brother’s disappearance while crossing the border. Reyna Grande’s Across a Hundred Mountains (2006) depicts the devastation wreaked on a family in Mexico when the father migrates north to the United States but then is not heard from again. Cristina García’s novel A Handbook to Luck (2007) depicts a Salvadoran woman who flees the repression and violence in her own country and then secures US citizenship – both for herself and eventually for her adopted son. Non‐fictional narrative journalism by Latina/os on the topic of undocumented immigration has also drawn considerable attention to human rights issues involved in the militarization of the border; the most notable of these is Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway (2004), which details the hazardous 2001 journey across the US–Mexico border and through the Arizona desert of 26 men, 14 of whom died.
Testimonio, the Latin American genre of first‐person narrative of the 1970s–1990s that bore witness to conditions of large‐scale repression, torture, disappearance, and genocide, particularly in Central America, has influenced a brand of home‐grown testimonio, as well as novels with what Linda J. Craft (1997) would call a “testimonial function” that represented the Central American situations of crisis. John Beverley defines testimonio as a genre that “involve[s] an urgency to communicate” a situation of crisis in order to actually alter the course of events (Beverley 2004: 32). While memoirs depicting inner city or gang life bear some affinity to testimonio in the sense that they are first‐person accounts of life in crisis due to larger social situations and structures, they are not calling for immediate intervention in the sense of Latin American testimonio. Likewise, the memoirs Diary of an Undocumented Immigrant (1991) and Diary of a Guerilla (1999), by Ramón “Tianguis” Pérez, while both detailing from a first‐person participant perspective the challenges of life under a particular set of legal and historical conditions (unauthorized immigration and revolutionary activity, respectively), do not particularly place ethical demands of a pressing nature upon imagined readers.
Arguably closer to the spirit of its Latin American cousin is the anthology Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios, published by the Latina Feminist Group (2001), a group of writers and scholars founded in 1993. The group’s sharing of life stories builds solidarity and cohesion across lines of class, sexuality, race, religion, and other forms of difference, and it is also a tool by which the group members “came to theorize feminist latinidades.” As the authors acknowledge, while testimonio is commonly understood to constitute “disclosures not of personal lives but rather of the political violence inflicted on whole communities,” their own testimonios were, first and foremost, “personal and private,” although through their sharing the stories became “profoundly political,” bearing witness to “an emerging pattern of systemic violence and cultural ideologies that continually repositioned us at the margins, despite relative privilege” (2001: 12–13). Also deliberately positioning itself as within the tradition of Latin American testimonio is Arnaldo Cruz‐Malavé’s Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza (2007), a text which is in part the story of Juan Rivera, a Puerto Rican youth who became a runaway in New York and, eventually, the lover of pop artist Keith Haring. Rivera told his story to Cruz‐Malavé, who transcribed and creatively edited it as a series of interviews that bear witness to the experience of queer urban Latino existence in the 1970s and 1980s; at the same time, Cruz‐Malavé also deliberates critically on the project of potentially “feeding a prurient interest […] for Latino lives under duress” and “aestheticizing – and thereby neutralizing – sheer wretchedness” (Cruz‐Malavé 2007: 95–96).
As William Westerman (1998) has documented, the more immediate heirs of the testimonio in the United States were arguably the oral narratives produced by the Sanctuary Movement, in which US citizens provided aid, accompaniment, and shelter for refugees from violent Central American regimes and offered a forum for the telling of first‐person stories to raise awareness of the human rights violations committed in El Salvador and Guatemala. More recently, narratives by undocumented immigrants have served as a new manifestation of testimonio demanding a response to the crisis of invisibility and lack of status in the United States. Peter Orner’s Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives (2008) and Alicia Alarcón’s The Border Patrol Ate My Dust (2004) gather first‐person narratives of undocumented immigrants bearing witness to the false hope of the American Dream and to the exploitation, vulnerability, and lack of rights of unauthorized immigrants and workers. Testimonios by undocumented youth have also been notable for their contribution to a larger political effort to pass some version of the DREAM Act, a piece of legislation proposed for the first time in 2001 that would allow those who arrived in the United States as children a path to legalization. DREAM Activists have put the testimonio form to good use in collections such as Underground Undergrads (Madera et al. 2008) and Papers: Stories by Undocumented Youth (Manuel et al. 2012) as well as in social media (YouTube, websites, blogs); they tell the collective story of what it is like to be an undocumented teenager coming of age in the United States. The “crisis” situation in such testimonios is a lack of routes to legalization for young people who, in many cases, do not remember any other country; the first‐person narratives are meant to raise awareness of this situation as a preliminary step to generating political change.
Scholarship on Latina/o literature has moved beyond an early emphasis on themes of marginality, oppression, and resistance to Anglo‐American hegemony and assimilation – as well as a focus on specific national origin groups – to theorize its representations of constructions of nation, collective trauma, and testimony, in a variety of narrative modes (see Halperin, Intersections of Harm [2015]; Caminero‐Santangelo, Documenting the Undocumented [2016]; Socolovsky, Troubling Nationhood [2013]). Research on Latina/o literary and cultural production is beginning to account for the diversity of Latina/o forms – including popular “genre” fiction such as the detective novel (Rodriguez, Brown Gumshoes [2005]), chick lit (Hedrick, Chica Lit [2015]), speculative fiction (Merla‐Watson and Olguín, Altermundos:Latin@ Speculative Literature, Film, and Popular Culture [2017]), and graphic narratives (Aldama and González, Graphic Borders [2016]). Indeed, recent scholarship critically challenges readerly expectations that have historically constrained Latina/o/x literary production and examines anew the expansive possibilities of Latinx narrative forms (Rodriguez, Latinx Literature Unbound [2018]; González, Permissible Narratives [2017]). These various approaches place Latina/o cultural production at the cutting edge of work that conceptualizes contemporary “American” identities and that considers how literary forms, in particular, impact that conceptualization.
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 11 (PROLETARIAN LITERATURE); CHAPTER 28 (CREATIVE NONFICTIONS).