Introduction

This Companion provides a critical overview of US Latino/a literature – key ideas, figures, terms, and debates – as well as engaging new topics for consideration and drawing attention to new directions in which the study of Latino/a literature might expand. The collection of entries, like Latinos/as themselves, strains against any bounded conceptions of the nation and any singular definitions of identity. Although US Latino/a literature is, for the most part, produced and published in the United States, it is the product of multiple border crossings. This Companion traces the circulation and intermixture of cultures, identities, texts, and aesthetic forms across borders within and beyond the Americas. Not only is the literature under consideration here transnational; the contributors to this project come from multiple different nations in the Americas as well as Western Europe, Russia, North Africa, and Australia, addressing the increasingly global circulation of Latino/a literary texts. Identity terminology is particularly tricky in Latino/a studies. The terms “Hispanic”

and “Latino” are US inventions designed to describe Latin American descent peoples in the United States. Both are misnomers to the extent that they imply a transplanted European heritage and elide the mixture with indigenous and African peoples that characterized the formation of mestizaje [racial and cultural mixture] throughout “Latin” America. The term “Hispanic,” adopted by the US government for census purposes in the 1970s, is seen by many US community organizations as an attempt to neutralize resistant cultural nationalism. (In the census, Hispanics have been considered racially white, and the term itself seems to equate to “Spanish.”) In contrast, “Latino” is recognized as a more progressive term and as a way to account for the mixtures that differentiate American Latinos from Europeans. In terms of nation, Latinos are “US Americans,” a word that does not exist in

English, which myopically equates the hemispheric term “American” with the United States, but does exist in Spanish: estadounidenses. “US citizen” is also not the preferred term given the large number of undocumented Latinos/as in the United States. Nor are all Latinos/as immigrants to the United States, since many Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, for instance, became “US Americans” as a result of land annexation and colonialism. One might be tempted to use “American” in the hemispheric sense, but it is also important to foreground the US origins of the term “Latino” and the US locations of most “Latinos.” (We are, however, including

Latinos/as who move back and forth between the United States and another homeland, as well as those who have left the United States but are still shaped by its influence, within our definition.) The central lesson to draw from this terminological friction is that all of these identity terms are contested, sometimes fluid, and always relational. How one identifies oneself is, of course, highly subjective. Indeed, most US Latinos/as define themselves first as belonging to a particular national, subnational, or binational group, like Boricua or Cuban-American, and only to a larger latinidad for the purposes of pan-ethnic solidarity or inclusion. Latino/a literature might be said to require a “companion” to aid analysis because

of the variety of identities, locations, historical perspectives, worldviews, traditions, and cultural forms that it incorporates. We approach the field in the broadest sense here, using the term “Latino/a” throughout because it is inclusive in terms of gender (with the dual engendering of the adjectival form) and inclusive in terms of nation of origin, encompassing Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban-Americans, and Dominican-Americans, as well as US Latinos/as from Central America and South America. Like all literary fields defined by an identity, Latino/a literature is a field characterized by political and intellectual friction. It is one of the fastest growing fields in the discipline of literary studies, one of the most heterogeneous, and one of the most fluid – changing as fast as the demographics of US Latino/a population growth and immigration. The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature aims to replicate this friction while contextualizing, historicizing, and defining it. The idea of creating a single guide to Latino/a literature, however, implies (or at

least creates the illusion of) some coherence. We thus follow a dual impulse towards particularization and generalization. The entries in this collection focus on the different locations, homelands, migrations, languages, cultures, races, sexualities, embodiments, aesthetics, and politics that form divergent Latino/a experiences as well as shared Latino/a histories and worldviews, hemispheric connections, and unifying identities. Following these simultaneous particularizing and generalizing impulses, we include entries that highlight inter-Latino/a differences – such as Afro-Latino identity and the different canons of Chicana lesbians, Dominican-Americans, and South Americans in the United States – as well as entries that build trans-Latino/a realities – such as “latinidad” and “Latino/a literary canon.” Our entries cross beyond the boundaries of what is conventionally considered “Latino/a,” including the interface between Latino/a literature and Arab cultures, Siberian borderlands, and emergent genres such as chick lit or science fiction. We also cross beyond the boundaries of what is conventionally considered literature to reveal more of the cultural, political, and aesthetic contexts in which the literature is embedded. The history and politics of US Latino/a literature are distinct. “Latino/a” identity

is a product of layers of conquest, colonialism, and cultural mixture – beginning with Western European territorial battles upon the indigenous lands of the “New World,” from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, and, after most Latin American nations achieved independence, continuing through the US imperialist expansions of the nineteenth century to the present. As such, it is an inevitably politicized term. The nature and timing of these conquests differ across the Americas, producing (post)colonial realities as diverse as the Puerto Rican Commonwealth (which is still technically a US colony), the politically isolated socialist republic of

Cuba, the dually conquered territories of what is now the US Southwest, and those Latin American nations subject to US cultural imperialism despite their own healthy and independent economies. The emergence of Latino/a identities, as a united transnational force or in particular nationalist traditions (like the Chicano/a consciousness that developed among Mexican-Americans or the Boricua consciousness that developed among Puerto Ricans in the mainland United States), constitutes a high degree of resistance to imperialism and assertion of selfhood apart from the (former or current) colonizer. Such acts of resistance have emerged at different historical moments for different groups. For some Mexican-Americans, for instance, the urge to assert independence from the United States began in the middle of the nineteenth century, after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded half of Mexico to the United States, and for others it began with the Chicano/a Movement of the 1960s. Similarly, for some Puerto Ricans the impulse to resist US imperialism followed the 1900 Foraker Act, and for others it began with the emergence of Nuyorican identity and nationalist groups like the Young Lords’ Party on the US mainland in the 1960s. The entries on nationalism and on the development of literary canons for particular Latino/a groups revolve to some extent around these histories and their distinct (cultural and geographic) locations. Central American and South American writers are adding their own narratives to the larger history of the long-term impact that US imperial ideologies and interventions have had in Latin America, particularly as seen in the histories of US-supported dictatorships and authoritarian regimes that have led to genocides, civil wars, and the egregious economic marginalization of the indigenous populations as well as to ensuing large-scale emigration to the United States and other countries. Latino/a literature, as a field of study, is often considered to be a product of the

US identity movements of the 1960s and later, and the field saw a surge in publications (literary and scholarly) beginning in the 1980s, with the rise of ethnic studies and multiculturalism. In the contemporary period, Latino/a literature has become a desirable commodity, often marketed for its exotic forms and subjects. Within this literary “boom,” a few writers (such as Sandra Cisneros or Esmeralda Santiago) have been fetishized, which often leads to the marginalization of writers whose works don’t engage with the fetishized traits (like vibrant-colored book covers, recipes for spicy food, or traditional spiritual practices). Moreover, this celebration of contemporary texts obscures the history and the politics that underlie the “boom.” Literary critics have been working to trace a Latino/a literary tradition that reaches back into the nineteenth century, when Spain lost control over its American colonies and when the United States began to exert its control over these lands, incorporating large numbers of former Spanish colonials into its own borders. Recovery projects make available texts that were “lost” due to lack of readership (or sometimes outright censorship) but have been “found” and republished as Latino/a literature became increasingly popular in and after the 1980s. José Aranda’s entry highlights the politics of recovery projects, which inevitably recreate the texts they recover to reflect the critical trends and political interests of their own moment rather than accurately “recovering” the past. Yet most of the texts written prior to the 1960s ultimately fail to live up to the political desires of contemporary literary critics as well as the aesthetic desires of publishers seeking to capitalize on the

Latino/a literature “boom.” Beyond this barrier posed by presentism, the recovery of earlier texts also involves issues of translation, as many nineteenth-century Latino/a writers (and their readers) were not assimilated into the US mainstream and preferred to publish in Spanish. Language presents particular problems for Latino/a literary production and ana-

lysis. Allison Fagan’s and Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s entries, in particular, draw attention to the decisions authors and editors must make when publishing bilingual or Spanishlanguage texts for US readers. Most critics in the field would agree that knowledge of Spanish is necessary to understand the subtleties of Latino/a language usage, but most contemporary Latino/a texts are published for English-speaking/reading audiences. Many authors incorporate untranslated Spanish into their texts with the assumption that some readers will either not “get” certain allusions or that they will have to work to do so and confront their own linguistic ignorance in the process; this strategy produces different reading audiences, insiders or outsiders, defined by their language usage. There are definite benefits to using Spanish as a tool of cultural affirmation (in terms of creating political community or social identity). Yet the tendency to regard Spanish as the “authentic” Latino/a language ignores the important shaping force of English as well as of different indigenous languages, African languages, and Portuguese. Since the Chicano/a movement saw itself as a reclamation of the indigenous land and culture of Aztlán [the mythic Aztec homeland located in what is now the US Southwest], many Chicano/a writers since that time have wrought terms from the Aztec language Nahuatl, as well as other indigenous languages, into their writing. Moreover, the Spanish language itself incorporated many indigenous words, like aguacate or chocolate, in its American history. If we don’t wish to exclude the writings of Brazilian immigrants to the United States from our definition of Latino/a literature, a working knowledge of Portuguese would also be important. Finally, many Latino/a writers grew up speaking English and are not comfortable writing in any other language, for English was the language of their intellectual formation within the colonial educational system of the United States. Much funding for printing books made it a condition that they would be in English only, even for publications coming out of Arte Público Press and The Bilingual Press. After mainstream presses “discovered” a Spanish-speaking readership, both within the United States and more globally, they funded the Spanish translation of many writers. As a result of these multiple histories and political developments, Latino/a literature is a multilingual field. We have divided this Companion into five sections, starting with “Identities” in

order to clarify our subject and to foreground its heterogeneity. The first section will address the different conceptions of “Latino/a” underlying this identity-based literary field. Rather than describing a natural collectivity of peoples, “Latino/a” is a sociopolitical label applied to US residents based on divergent traits: national origins (including, variously, Mexico, the Hispanic Caribbean, Central America, or South America); ethnicity (which, since Latinos/as are mestizos/as, includes European, indigenous, and African descent); or language (which may be Spanish, English, Portuguese, or an indigenous tongue). This divergence and fluidity complicate the coherence of Latino/a identity politics and create many sites for friction, dialogue, and alliance. Entries in this section consider how nation, region, culture, race, and gender shape

the production, circulation, and consumption of Latino/a literature. We begin with Marta Caminero-Santangelo’s entry on the significance of thinking hemispherically about “latinidad” in an encompassing sense. Rafael Pérez-Torres and William Luis, in their entries “Mestizaje” and “Afro-Latino/a Literature and Identity,” consider the ways in which racial mixture enriches and complicates Latino/a identity. Raúl Homero Villa turns our attention to how space shapes identity, focusing on the particular case of “Urban Spaces.” While Patricia Marina Trujillo, Jennifer Domino Rudolph, and Sandra K. Soto consider how feminism, masculinity, and queerness inflect Latino/a identity, Suzanne Bost’s entry examines how illness and disability draw alternate boundaries around Latino/a bodies. The final entries in the section address the status of Latino/a studies outside its American home and intersections between Latino/a studies and other identity-based fields. Marisa Belausteguigoitia Rius and María del Socorro Gutiérrez Magallanes, Frauke Gewecke, and Elena Nakaznaya discuss the development and significance of Latino/a literary studies in Mexico, Western Europe, and Siberia, and Dalia Gomaa considers affinities between Latino/a literature and the Arab world. These entries document and exemplify the global circulation of Latino/a literary texts, while also highlighting the specific ways in which these regions abroad have given meaning to and made relevant US Latino/a literary texts. There are clear distinctions between the ways in which Chicano/a literature is read in Mexico by Mexicans (those who did not leave the home country) and how it has been integrated into European university classes and scholarship. In Siberia it becomes a channel for further understanding the experience of their own borderlands with China and diverse ethnicities in the region, and in the Arab world the central role that Latina feminist writings have had in the conceptualization of Third World women is clearly revealed. The entries in the “Worldviews” section explore the culturally particular ways

that Latino/a literature engages with broader intellectual movements and theoretical subjects vital to literary studies today. Latinos/as have a long history of civil disobedience and a distinctive relationship to questions of citizenship (given the longterm debates about noncitizen workers dividing US Americans), nationalism (since so many Latinos/as come from deterritorialized or colonized nations), and transnationalism (given the histories of migration and immigration behind the formation of this identity). Indeed, pairing any “-ism” with “Latino/a” as a modifier challenges conventional understandings of both terms. Belinda Linn Rincón and Suzanne Oboler’s entry on citizenship examines how national belonging shapes and is reconceived by Latino/a literary works. Mathias Nilges examines what a Marxist critical approach looks like when applied to Latino/a literature, and Kristi L. Ulibarri looks at how neoliberalism affects the production and consumption of Latino/a literature. John Alba Cutler and Elizabeth Russ theorize Latino/a nationalism and transnationalism, respectively, and George Hartley and Grisel Y. Acosta trace the politics of Latino/a investment in indigenous worldviews and environmentalism as these politicized perspectives emerge in the literature. These entries situate Latino/a literature relative to transcultural concerns and other traditions at the same time as they highlight Latino/a particularities; they also engage the ways in which Latino/a literary texts transform and transculturate these worldviews and ideologies.