South American Latino/a Writers in the United States

doi:10.4324/9780203097199-52

ABSTRACT

As Latino/a literature in the United States continues to receive wide critical attention in the second decade of the twenty-ﬁrst century, it is appropriate to recognize the literary contributions of a wide spectrum of cultural groups south of the US border. Since pioneer Latino/a groups such as Chicanos and Puerto Ricans have struggled to make inroads in highly regarded publishing houses in the United States, it is also important to pay attention to the least-known group of Latino/a authors, South Americans in the United States, for they form a heterogeneous collective whose contribution to American, Latin American and world literary traditions in the twenty-ﬁrst century can no longer be overlooked. This literary group refers to people of national heritages/origins in a Spanish-or Portuguese-speaking republic south of Central America. By diﬀerentiating these authors from Chicano/a, Puerto Rican and Cuban-American ones in terms of immigration patterns, socioeconomic status, and geographic settlements, South American Latino/a literature reveals a different understanding of the hybrid Latino/a identity in the twenty-ﬁrst century because many authors in this chapter represent transnational migratory experiences between the US and the South American homeland. According to Oboler, in “South Americans” (2005), the relationship between each

nation in this region and the United States has played a signiﬁcant role in shaping the mobility, residence, and community formation of South Americans in the United States. For example, Chilean and Peruvian workers whose immigration to ﬁnd employment in northern California during the Gold Rush of 1849 coincided with the United States’ annexation of one third of Mexico, the present Southwest. Although they may appear like “new” Latinos in the United States, Oboler demonstrates that South Americans have a long history of immigration that is barely known to the public eye. US foreign policy has further helped push various South Americans to consider leaving their homelands to the United States for economic, social, and political reasons throughout the twentieth century. The Good Neighbor Policy during Roosevelt’s presidency in the 1930s and 1940s allowed privileged Latin Americans to immigrate to the United States. In another example, the involvement

of the US to overthrow Salvador Allende in 1973 displaced thousands of Chileans and their families as political exiles to the US and other parts of the world. Likewise, dictatorships and violence in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru from the 1970s to the 1990s forced thousands to ﬂee their homelands and settle with their families in the US. Political intervention from north to south has resulted in enclaves and archipelagos of South American individuals and communities throughout the United States, principally in metropolitan centers, which has aﬀected the constantly changing demographics of Latinos in the United States. These Latinos may immigrate as a result of US intervention or for prosperity. As globalization has increased in the twenty-ﬁrst century, many South Americans have maintained more consistent contact with their national heritages/homeland through frequent travels. Some authors I discuss in this essay have been able to proceed with transnational migrations due to their class privileges, which is not the case for authors of a working-class background in the United States. The ability to travel consistently between the United States and a South American nation deﬁnitely informs the narratives, be they novels or memoirs, in this study. This chapter will provide an overview of key South American authors in the

United States beginning with the decade of the 1990s. The United States witnessed the largest inﬂux of immigrants from all of Latin America, but particularly from South American nations, after 1980 (Espitia 2004: 275). While the aim of this chapter is to cover a diverse array of narratives by South American authors in the United States, it is by no means exhaustive but rather comprehensive. That said, it would be impossible to ﬁnd a representative author of the diaspora for each of the ten countries – Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela – in this South American region. At times, within a single nation such as Colombia or Peru, the authors contrast with one another according to generation, gender, race, and social class factors, which makes for a broader portrait of the “South American” diaspora in the United States. For the sake of consistency, the authors discussed will be those who primarily publish in English because part of their formation and formal education took place in the United States, giving them a dual sense of identity. Because this literary group is beginning recently to be recognized as a collective, they will be presented according to generation within their respective historical and social contexts. In this way, one can appreciate the diversity within each group. Since the majority of the authors in this chapter write in the genre of the narrative, which permits a dialogue with the past through memory, I will focus on this form to ﬁnd an appropriate balance among a variety of authors who emerge in the 1990s. While South American Latino literature may begin in the twentieth century, it is in the post-2000 period that more authors come into prominence with wider critical acclaim. The scholarship on South American writers in the United States does not really

exist with such an appellation in a given collection, but rather as case studies, general essays, or chapters in other topical academic works. In “South Americans,” Oboler (2005) presents many authors discussed in this chapter, such as Ariel Dorfman, Marjorie Agosín, Jaime Manrique, and Marie Arana, all of whom may be considered part of a South American diaspora. In A Companion to US Latino Literature (2007), Caulﬁeld and Davis include two chapters dedicated to the works of Argentine

and Brazilian writers in the United States who represent experiences in both their respective homelands in South America and the United States, but none write originally in English or are from a dual bicultural perspective. Kathleen de Azevedo’s novel Samba Dreamers (2006) is only mentioned in a note at the end of the Brazilian chapter as the ﬁrst Brazilian-American novel published in English. However, another chapter in the same collection, “Toward a Jewish Latino Literature,” exempliﬁes a good overview that includes memoirs by Ariel Dorfman and Marjorie Agosín regarding their multiple identities as a consequence of various genealogical migrations. In the collection The Other Latinos (2008), Falconi and Mazzotti provide case studies such as the chapter, “The Andean Archipelago,” where authors of the Andean diaspora such as Marie Arana and Leo Spitzer are mentioned in passing, but their works are not fully analyzed. Further studies in this collection are dedicated to Brazilian-American literature and cinema, including a brief mention of de Azevedo’s novel. In Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-First Century (2009), Heredia examines Marie Arana’s memoir American Chica (2001) in the transnational context of gender, race, and migration issues. In The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (2010), the editors under the direction of Ilan Stavans include a wider array of Latino/a authors publishing in the United States, such as Jaime Manrique, Ariel Dorfman, and Daniel Alarcón; yet, important women authors of the South American diaspora who published since 2001 are omitted. Evidently, more critical work needs to be addressed in the analysis of literary works by SouthAmerican Latino/a writers in the United States. In the decade of the 1990s, one notices a generation of South American Latino/a

authors such as Marjorie Agosín, Ariel Dorfman, Jaime Manrique, and Leo Spitzer emerge in the literary spotlight. Through the social and historical context of their narratives one can better understand how each author develops a bicultural identity between their respective country of origin/heritage in South America and the United States. These writers have been raised and educated in part in their respective South American nations and, then continued to develop intellectually and socially as adolescents or adults in the United States. Furthermore, these particular authors raise race and religion concerns related to Afro-Latino and Jewish Latino identity in their narratives to highlight the representation of several levels of diasporas through transnational migrations. Although Ariel Dorfman is best known for his proliﬁc academic criticism and

ﬁction, his memoir Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey (1998) best exempliﬁes his internal struggles in coming to terms with his multifaceted identity across nations, cultures, and languages in a US (north)/South America (south) dialogue. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1942, Dorfman lived there until the age of ﬁve, when he and his family had to migrate to New York City to live for ten years, then relocated to Chile until adulthood, and eventually, exiled himself to the United States after the fall of socialist president Salvador Allende in 1973. From an early age, Dorfman experiences a dual sense of identity between English and Spanish, the US and Chile, one that enables him to live biculturally. Because of his privileged social status, Dorfman is able to beneﬁt from his experiences in Chile and in the United States by receiving a formal education. It is not until he develops his political views on socialism during the time of Salvador Allende that he ﬁnds his life at risk and, thus, must exile himself from his homeland in Chile to seek security in the

United States. By chronicling Dorfman’s genealogy from Eastern Europe to South America and the United States, Heading South is as much about global immigration as the formation of an intellectual of the South American diaspora. Although Dorfman decides to make his home in the United States as an adult, he reﬂects on his past in Chile with a strong sense of nostalgia recognizing that he is a hybrid product of south and north, not quite fully part of each. Similar to other US Latino authors, Dorfman’s memoir demonstrates the cultural politics of speaking English and Spanish, an alienating experience as a bilingual speaker in the US. Born in Bethesda, Maryland, the academic, critic, and writer, Marjorie Agosín, is

another author who negotiates experiences in being accepted culturally in the United States as well as in Chile, where she spent her formative years. In the trilogy of her memoirs, A Cross and a Star (1995), Always from Somewhere Else (1998), and The Alphabet in My Hands (2000), Agosín chronicles her genealogy from her ancestral homeland in Eastern Europe to Chile and then to the US as her grandparents were the ﬁrst generation of immigrants in her family to arrive in Chile in the 1920s and 1930s. Agosín further captures the discrimination her parents felt as people of the Jewish diaspora in a predominantly Catholic Chile. When she was ostracized and mistreated at a young age among her peers at school due to her cultural and religious practices, Agosín’s parents decided to educate their daughter at the Hebrew Institute in Santiago, Chile, to acknowledge and remember her Jewish heritage. Through photographs in the narratives, Agosín reﬂects on what it means to be a Chilean Jewish woman when few Jewish people lived in the Catholic-dominated country. As she recovers her genealogy, Agosín also draws attention to the migratory trajectory of her Jewish identity. She not only represents the pogrom taking place in Eastern Europe in the twentieth century, but she also critiques the Holocaust where she lost family members in Europe during World War II. Because of the family’s ideologies in support of Salvador Allende, Agosín and her family are exiled from Chile and must move to settle in Georgia in the United States in the 1970s. At the age of 17, Agosín learns to reconcile cultural and linguistic diﬀerences where her peers this time mock her Spanish accent and Jewish Americans exoticize her as a “Latina” Jewish woman. Thus, Agosín discovers from a young age the internal conﬂicts of being bicultural and in-between nations, cultures, and languages, making her narratives a signiﬁcant contribution of the Chilean diaspora in the United States. Jaime Manrique was born in Barranquilla, Colombia, in 1949 and migrated with

his family as an adolescent to Florida in the 1970s and then eventually to New York City. His Spanish, indigenous, and African mixed heritage have informed his works to complicate the portrait of the Colombia diaspora in the United States. Known as a critic, novelist, poet, and professor, Manrique is a pioneer author of ColombianAmerican literature, especially in his novels Latin Moon in Manhattan (1992) and Twilight at the Equator (1997). In both works, he represents the formation of a Colombian community in the neighborhood of Jackson Heights, Queens, which holds its largest population in the United States since the 1960s. In Latin Moon in Manhattan, Manrique explores the politics of gender with respect to masculinity and sexual orientation. The protagonist is a gay Latino who is open about his sexual identity despite the traditional values he must confront from Colombians at home and abroad. In Twilight at the Equator, he further raises important issues with respect

to class and race relations that can be traced back to Colombia, where the African heritage plays a role in social acceptance and discrimination. In these works, Manrique reﬂects on the pressures of being an exemplary Colombian man within a homophobic patriarchal society and the acceptance for gay Latinos in the United States. As a gay Colombian of mixed descent, Manrique stands as a signiﬁcant literary voice for South American Latino/a authors in the United States. Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge of Nazism (1998), by academic and

historian Leo Spitzer, is another ﬁne example of a narrative of migration that transcends national boundaries, cultures, and languages. Similar to Dorfman and Agosín, Spitzer not only recovers genealogical immigration from Europe to Latin America to escape the Holocaust, but also the family’s settlement in the United States. During World War II, Bolivia was one of the few countries in the world that received Jewish refugees such as members from his family who would have otherwise died in the Holocaust. The displacement of his family from Austria to Bolivia, where Spitzer was born in La Paz in 1940, forms the basis for this narrative of memory and growing up trilingually with German, English, and Spanish. Even though Hotel Bolivia is an academic work documenting archival and ﬁeld research about Jewish refugees settling in Bolivia in the 1930s and the 1940s, Spitzer also recuperates his childhood in Bolivia until the age of ten when he and his family migrated to the United States. He explains that many Austrians viewed their settlement in Bolivia as a temporary sojourn as if they were staying in a hotel for a brief visit and would later move to countries like the United States where they would be able to feel more at home as if they were in Austria. The United States as a destination provides a diﬀerent kind of haven for Spitzer’s family because they can ﬁnd commonalities with other hybrid communities similar to themselves. At the same time, when Spitzer returns to Bolivia as an older adult with his grown sons and wife to conduct interviews with the elderly of his parents’ generation, he notices that some did settle in La Paz and would never imagine returning to Europe. In other words, Bolivia provided them with a sense of home away from the atrocities in Europe for which they will always by grateful, like Spitzer himself. In the post-2000 period, a ﬂourishing of narratives by South American origin

writers in the United States began to cement this tradition in multifaceted ways. While multiethnic Latino authors such as Ernesto Quiñonez focus on the transformation of a predominantly Puerto Rican/Nuyorican neighborhood in New York City in his novels, Peruvian born Daniel Alarcón recuperates the diasporic experiences of Peruvians in New York City as well as in Lima, Peru, in his ﬁction. Born in Ecuador in 1966, Ernesto Quiñonez was raised by an Ecuadorian father

and Puerto Rican mother in Spanish Harlem. In 2000, he made a splashing debut with his critically acclaimed ﬁrst novel Bodega Dreams, which represents the changing cultural context of El Barrio (Spanish Harlem) in New York City as diﬀerent generations of Latinos, including an Ecuadorian one, must ﬁnd ways to take control of their community by creating opportunities that are not given to them. While he pays homage to all the great Nuyorican/Puerto Rican legends in politics and the arts during and after the Great Migration of the 1950s, Quiñonez realizes that education and other institutions must be transformed to incorporate the present and future generations of Latinos/Puerto Ricans in their achievements and struggles. At the

same time, Quiñonez demystiﬁes the notion of the American Dream as he displays the contradictions of success and modernity that have aﬀected every ethnic group in New York City that has transformed its circumstances from poverty to social mobility. In his second novel, Chango’s Fire (2004), Quiñonez critiques the abuses of gentriﬁcation and Latino displacement within an urban context. He portrays the challenges of working-class Latino neighborhoods such as “SpaHa” (Spanish Harlem) that are undergoing economic and social transformations beginning in the 1990s as a result of the “invasion” of Anglo-American yuppies and other professionals from corporate America and of globalization. Undoubtedly, Quiñonez stands as one of the great authors of the urban South American diaspora who is preoccupied as much with the local as the national. Born in Lima, Peru, in 1977, Daniel Alarcón relocated with his parents and two

siblings to Birmingham, Alabama, at the age of three. Although he was formally educated in English in the United States (receiving an MFA in creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop), this bicultural and bilingual author maintains close ties to Peru, which were cemented when he returned to teach and research in Lima under a Fulbright scholarship in 2001. His experiences during this time form the basis and inspiration for developing many characters in his ﬁrst short ﬁction collection War by Candlelight (2005), which received wide critical acclaim. Even though most of the stories take place in Lima, Alarcón also represents Peruvian immigrants and US Latinos struggling to survive in a city such as New York in the post-2000 period. In his ﬁrst novel Lost City Radio (2007), he is preoccupied with migration in the context of civil war and political violence, but this time within an anonymous South American nation as the protagonist migrates from a province to the city. Alarcón’s ﬁction has been well received in both the United States and in Spanish translation in Peru, which is a signiﬁcant endeavor for a US Latino who writes originally in English and was criticized for doing so by his Latin American peers. In this respect, Alarcón’s work is important for breaking these national and linguistic boundaries. The memoirs and novels by women writers of South American descent in this

decade dialogue as much with other US Latina authors as with contemporary Latin American women writers. The narratives by Marie Arana, Kathleen de Azevedo, Leila Cobo, and Patricia Engel in particular show a new direction in which Latina literary discourse can no longer exist within the conﬁnes of a single nation, but rather expand with a transnational perspective between South America and the United States that Heredia explored critically in Transnational Latina Narratives (2009). In fact, this South American-US transnationalism has broadened the critical discourse dominated by Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Dominican diasporic scholarship. Marie Arana, also the ﬁrst Latina book editor of The Washington Post, represents

her bicultural genealogy originating in Peru, and then migrating with her family to the United States, in her memoir American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood (2001). As the daughter of a Peruvian father and an American mother, she illustrates the complexity of Peruvian society in terms of culture, gender, history, and racial politics in comparison to the United States in the 1950s and early 1960s, when Arana settled permanently with her family in New Jersey to become an “American chica.”

During the era of the Good Neighbor Policy in the 1940s, her Peruvian father from a middle-class background was able to study engineering at a university in the United States where he met her mother, whom he took back with him to Lima. Arana provides a vivid portrait of the cultural conﬂicts her parents endured during their years in Lima, where they began to form a family. While Arana may have been the privileged daughter of an engineer in Peru, she becomes a “Latina” in the United States, a diﬀerence characterized by her accent and foreignness in mainstream circles, where she must learn how to fend for herself. Interestingly, Arana’s family was the only Latino one in her Summit, New Jersey, neighborhood in the early 1960s. As an adult, Arana returns to her ﬁrst home and witnesses more Spanish-surnamed students in the school system, thereby noting the demographic changes. Presently, Paterson, New Jersey, holds the largest concentration of Peruvians in the United States. In American Chica, Arana demonstrates a profound understanding of living between two cultures and two languages by coming of age in Peru and in the United States, a literary landmark in US Peruvian letters. In her ﬁrst novel, Samba Dreamers (2006), Kathleen de Azevedo explores the cul-

tural conﬂicts, struggles, and dreams of Brazilian immigrants and Brazilian-Americans in the transnational migration between the Amazon, Río de Janeiro and metropolitan Los Angeles in temporal shifts between the 1940s, the 1970s, and the present. Born in Río de Janeiro, de Azevedo lived most of her life in the United States, where she learned to negotiate her dual Brazilian-American identity. By constructing Latino/a public ﬁgures – a Brazilian starlet reminiscent of the “tropical” Brazilian Carmen Miranda of the 1940s, and a Brazilian immigrant who embodies the Cuban Ricky Ricardo of the 1950s – in Samba Dreamers, Azevedo critiques the reception and perception of Latino/a stereotypes that Hollywood has appropriated and exploited in the American media. As the protagonists come to terms with their identities in the United States as ﬁrst and second generation Brazilian-Americans, she shows the diﬃculty of adaptation for Brazilian immigrants and their descendants in the saudade (nostalgia) that they feel for the homeland despite the economic or political factors that forced them to leave in search of better opportunities and personal safety. Having received high critical praise, Samba Dreamers is the ﬁrst Brazilian-American novel published in English. Best known for her journalistic coverage of the Latino/a music scene in the United

States, Leila Cobo is also a television show host, a novelist and a professional pianist. Born in Cali, Colombia, Cobo received her formal education in Bogotá, Colombia, as well as universities in the United States. In her transnational novel, Tell Me Something True (2009), she portrays a mother-daughter relationship within the context of Colombia-United States global relations. Similar to the dual heritage protagonist of Arana’s memoir, the Colombian-American protagonist in Cobo’s novel is of bicultural heritage as the daughter of a Colombian mother who was a successful photographer and an American father who is a ﬁlm producer. While the mother comes from a privileged family in Cali, the father works in the environs of Beverly Hills, California. Although the mother dies in a tragic accident, the protagonist daughter at the age of four maintains close ties to her heritage by returning to her mother’s homeland during the summers to be raised by her maternal grandmother. Cobo further engages critically in the representation of Colombia as a

country perceived with violence and drug cartels. Rather than replicate this image in stereotypical fashion, she delves into the complexity of these issues by presenting the globalized context of the situation. In this spellbinding novel, Cobo provides a critical lens into the transnational travels between two distinctive worlds in the United States and Colombia. Of the younger generation of writers of Colombian-American literature, Patricia

Engel constitutes part of the Colombian literary diaspora who has received critical laurels for her ﬁrst major literary work Vida (2010). This collection of short ﬁction was highly praised by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. For example, Kakutani ﬁnds most memorable “a voice that is immediate, unsentimental and disarmingly direct” (2010). More importantly, Engel provides a transnational perspective in this collection as the protagonists represent both Colombians and Colombian-Americans who migrate between Bogota, Miami, and New Jersey, in search of community, freedom, and respect. She navigates questions of gender, genealogy, immigration, human traﬃcking, and bicultural identity as the characters seek the American Dream, romance, and contact with cultural roots across national boundaries. In these stories, Engel has constructed a female protagonist of Colombian parentage who does not apologize for her actions nor for the wrong choices she may make. In this striking literary debut, Vida contributes a refreshing perspective on Colombian/US relations on a local as well as global scale into the twenty-ﬁrst century. In all, the South American Latino/a writers in this chapter present another

dimension of heterogeneity in Latino/a literary discourse. Many examine the past to learn about the challenges and obstacles in the present to be able to confront the future, be it in South America or in the United States. At the same time, they diﬀer from Chicano/a, Puerto Rican, Cuban-American and Dominican-American authors because they have experienced various levels of transnational migrations that have resulted in diasporas, especially that of Jewish Latino/a authors. Others have been highly inﬂuenced by the national literary discourse of their country of origin such as Alarcón. Since South American Latino/a literature is increasingly hemispheric, the canon of US Latino/a literature must also be understood transnationally.