Novel

Central to Latino/a studies scholarship is the idea that there is no singular Latino/a experience. In fact, Chicanos/as, Cuban-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Central Americans, and others with roots in Latin America often share more in common with Anglos than with other Latino/a groups. These complicated aspects of panethnic identity are compounded when we consider literary history and traditions. Because Latino/a novels do not encompass a single literary trajectory, a comparative perspective offers a more productive approach. A comparative approach reveals how many Latino/a novels evidence resistant relationships with mainstream US culture. In what follows, I outline basic definitions of the novel genre and consider how Latinos/as employ the form to articulate oppositional politics. I then analyze a series of Latino/a novels according to three rough periods to provide a literary history of Latino/a novelistic production since the late 1950s and early 1960s. While each group’s historical relationship with the US nation-state is distinct,

Latinos/as are often impacted by racism, economic disempowerment, and reduced life chances. This is not, however, to say that all Latino/a groups experience disempowerment equally. Indeed, there is a growing Latino/a middle-class in the US. Moreover some groups, such as Cuban-Americans, constitute a relatively privileged class of Latinos/as, occupying powerful political positions in places like Dade County, Florida. Yet given the socioeconomic realities of many Latinos/as and the persistence of racialization, it is no surprise that many Latino/a authors represent oppositional politics in their literary texts. As Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (1993: 211) observes, Latino/a novels “share a focus on … political activities and on the implications of their varied political ideologies in determining their sense of personal and social identity.” Latino/a novels are thus linked by thematic and narrative concerns with social and political justice. So what is a novel? The scholarly consensus holds that the novel is primarily a

prose narrative form. To distinguish it from other prose forms – such as short stories, novellas, and essays – scholars point to the novel’s fictive orientation and length. Novels are thus book-length, fictive narratives. Although novels have circulated for more than 300 years, scholars such as Benedict Anderson (1983) and Franco Moretti (2008) tie the increasing importance of the novel to the development of mass literacy and consumer culture that accompanied the formation of middle classes. Moreover, the rise of the novel coincides with the development of the

nation-state as a primary mode of political organization (as opposed to older political modes such as feudalism) from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Of key importance to my analysis of contemporary Latino/a novels is that literary scholars have tied the rise of the novel to the development of particular class and political formations. One important idea is that the novel often functions as a space to imagine alternative political and social realities. Much Latino/a literary criticism is dedicated to understanding how oppositional

representations are deployed in Latino/a novels. For example, Lisa Sánchez González (2001a: 102) argues that Boricua (a popular term for Puerto Ricans derived from the Taíno name for the island, Borinquen) texts “are characterized by progressive and even radical social, historical, and philosophical critique.” Similarly, Ramón Saldívar (1990: 10) asserts that Chicano/a narratives constitute “a corpus of texts” that foreground “political, economic, and racial oppression.” While Sánchez González and Saldívar write about different populations, they emphasize how Latino/a novels offer correctives to mainstream historical and literary accounts. A distinguishing feature of the novels I consider is thus an oppositional relationship with the US nation-state and an elaboration of individual and social political identities. What, then, is a Latino/a novel? Latino/a novels are sustained, fictive prose texts

written by US Chicanos/as, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Cubans, Central or South Americans, or others with roots in Latin America. While many important Latino/a novels are brief, they offer book-length narrative engagements with their subjects. The novels I consider are written in English, but there are important Spanish-language Latino/a novels by authors such as Rolando Hinojosa and Tomás Rivera. There are also novels by authors such as Junot Díaz and Ana Castillo who use Spanish and English interchangeably, as well as figures such as Julia Alvarez and Sandra Cisneros who make use of bilingual “code-switching” (the practice of alternating between Spanish and English inter-or intrasententially). While many Latino/a texts are stylistically influenced by Latin American narrative traditions – especially magical realism (the blending of magical or fantastical elements within a realistic setting) and the “Boom” novels of the 1960s and 1970s – Latino/a novels are distinct in their focus on Latino/a history and culture in the US. Consequently, while Latino/a novels may document settings, historical situations, characters, or events in Latin America, these aspects are frequently tied to Latino/a history and culture in the US. Although the roots of Latino/a literature date to the colonial period in the

Americas (Acosta-Belén 2005), it is not until the last third of the twentieth century that a sustained novel tradition emerges in the United States. Novels such as María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (originally published in 1885), Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gómez: A Mexicotexan Novel (published in 1990, but written during the 1930s), and Josefina Niggli’s Mexican Village (1994; originally published in 1945) anticipate the concerns of contemporary Latino/a texts. Yet I focus on novels written in English after 1960 for two reasons. First, due in part to demographic changes in Latino/a populations like increasing waves of immigration from Latin America, the rise of Latino/a middle classes, and the increase in Englishdominant and bilingual Latinos/as, there has been a substantial increase in Latino/a novelistic production since the 1960s. Second, a significant majority of these novels are written in English, suggesting an engagement with a larger US literary tradition.