Latinidad

The meaning of “latinidad,” ostensibly a fairly straightforward term that translates to “Latinoness,” is actually quite fraught. Like many labels referring to questions of identity, “latinidad” implies questions of authenticity (“Is that really Latino?”), of degree (“How Latino is that?”), and, perhaps most of all, of difference and opposition. As various theorists of ethnicity have pointed out, ethnic group identities are generally based on contrast (Sollors 1995; Cornell and Hartmann 1998). When we classify writers and their literature by ethnicity, we put them in one group as opposed to another: “the writer is an X, meaning not a Y” (Sollors 1995: 290). Anthropologist Fredrik Barth introduced the notion that it is “the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses” (1969: 15) – suggesting that, more than cultural commonalities within a group, what makes groupness is the ways one group understands itself as opposed to or different from others. Werner Sollors argues that literature itself helps to “construct” such ethnic group identities, through narratives that invoke a common history and culture and that suggest that there are differences that matter between ethnic groups; thus literature “may help to create the illusion of a group’s ‘natural’ existence from ‘time immemorial’” (1995: 290). “Latino” as an ethnic label thus suggests a contrast with some “other” people understood to be “non-Latino.” According to this logic, “latinidad,” at least in the United States, is assumed to be

in contrast with “dominant” or “mainstream” Anglo-American culture; literature that is “about” latinidad would therefore be largely about the ways in which one’s culture and identity of heritage are maintained despite pressures to assimilate – or, conversely, about the ways in which they are lost in the pressures toward assimilation. Representative literature in which latinidad, in this sense, is a central theme, might include Chicano/a novels such as Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972), José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho (1959), and Ana Castillo’s So Far From God (1994c); Dominican-American Julia Alvarez’s first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991); and Puerto Rican Esmeralda Santiago’s first memoir, When I Was Puerto Rican (1993). It is this understanding of “latinidad” that Karen Christian refers to when she

suggests that Latino identity is in fact a performance, made up by the many everyday acts and behaviors Latinos engage in that, cumulatively, “reinforce the notion that a definable Latina/o cultural essence exists” (1997: 15); literary performances, Christian

argues, can also reinforce this notion. In Paul Allatson’s discussion of literature by Chicano/a, Puerto Rican, and Cuban-American writers, he also uses the term “Latino” to imply contrast with the mainstream; for him, the term allows an investigation of Latino/a writers’ modes of engagement, from positions of marginality, with prevailing stories and myths about what it means to be “American” (2002: 12-13). In their exploration of the Latino/a literary canon, Raphael Dalleo and Elena Machado Sáez posit that this sense of latinidad as ethnic difference is also at play in multicultural marketing of Latinoness, which makes “the consumption of Latino/a identity … yet another flavor in the multicultural stew” (2007: 4). While the idea that “Latino” contrasts with “Anglo-American” is regarded as

fairly self-evident, what is less immediately obvious is that “Latino” also potentially contrasts with terms like “Chicana,” “Cuban-American,” or “Puerto Rican.” According to this understanding, what “latinidad” suggests is a Latin-Americanheritage identity that crosses boundary lines among the various specific nationalorigin groups, and implies a panethnic group. It implies, in other words, that a “Latino” identity exists that binds these various groups together in some tangible, substantive ways – ways that matter. It is much like using a term such as “Indian” instead of “Cherokee,” “Chickasaw,” or “Choctaw”; it suggests a grouping together of groups that, historically, have not always seen themselves as belonging to that larger group identity. For example, in 2006, only 23 percent of Latinos said that all Latinos share a single common culture, while an astounding 75 percent said that they did not (Suro and Escobar 2006: 10). When scholars talk about “Latino literature” or a “Latino canon,” what they are implicitly suggesting is that this literature ought to be understood as a “body” of literature, a group with its own internal history and trajectory of paradigmatic themes and literary forms. But the national surveys reveal that there is a serious disjuncture between academic practice and popular sentiment. Indeed, academia aside, Latino/a literary works themselves have seldom made the case for a panethnic Latino identity; unlike “national literatures” that have, as Benedict Anderson (1983) argues, worked through the possibilities for imagined communities called “nations,” Latino/a fiction, poetry, and memoir has much more frequently concentrated on the heritage and US experiences of specific national origin groups, as we shall see. One potential unifier for the various groups is the Spanish language itself; editors

of anthologies of “Latino” or “Hispanic” literature, for instance, often point specifically to Spanish as one common denominator of Latino/a identity in the US (Poey and Suárez 1992; Ray González 1994; Augenbraum and Olmos 1997; Milligan et al 1998; Del Rio 2001; Christie and González 2006; Stavans 2010) that leaves its lingering traces – bilingualism, code-switching, syntax, even word choices and cadences – in current US Latino literary production. Frances Aparicio calls this phenomenon “linguistic tropicalization” (1997: 201). Code-switching has certainly become a visible marker of the “difference” from mainstream, Anglo-American identity in Latino/a literature, first gaining prominence and visibility both in the Nuyorican Poetry Movement (a movement of Puerto Rican writers living in New York that began with the Nuyorican Poets Café in the 1970s) and in Chicano/a (Mexican-American) writing of the 1980s. Prominent Nuyorican writer Tato Laviera’s poem “my graduation speech” (1979) begins “I think in spanish / I write in english”; another poem by

Laviera, “AmeRícan” (1985), seeks to visually demonstrate the way that the “accent” itself, marker of linguistic difference and trace of Spanish, inflicts the poetic speaker’s “Americanness” with “Puerto Ricanness.” Chicano playwright Luis Valdez, founder of El Teatro Campesino (“The Farmworkers’ Theatre”) during the Chicano Movement, uses code-switching liberally; his play Zoot Suit (1992; originally performed 1978), about the so-called “Zoot Suit Riots” that took place in Los Angeles during the Second World War, switches back and forth between English, Spanish, and caló, the slang of the “pachucos.” Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa’s landmark, mixedgenre collection of essays and poetry, Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), not only engages in code-switching (of various sorts) but also foregrounds thematically the very issue of a “hybrid” Chicano language that is not accepted in dominant US culture. But differences in Spanish language usage among the different national-origin

groups abound, and can lead as often to misunderstanding and miscommunication as to a common bond (Suárez-Orozco and Páez 2002; Zentella 2002; De Genova and Ramos-Zayas 2003). Further, some argue that locating the commonality of Latinos specifically in Spanish ignores both the existence of indigenous languages (still the “first” language for many Latin Americans) and the fact that many US Latinos/as speak English, not Spanish, as their primary – or only – language (Oboler 1995; Chanady 1994). The theme of a presumed fluency in both languages that sometimes is not there appears in the poetry of Chicanas Pat Mora (“Legal Alien” and “Elena,” 1984) and Lorna Dee Cervantes (“Refugee Ship” and “Heritage,” 1982) and of Puerto Rican Gloria Vando (“Nuyorican Lament,” 1993a). Cuban-American H.G. Carrillo’s first novel’s tongue-in-cheek title is Loosing My Espanish (2004); novelist and poet Demetria Martínez describes, in her essay “Confessions of a Berlitz-Tape Chicana” (2003), a “generation” of Mexican-Americans, like herself, who learn their Spanish through self-help books and listening to audio lessons on their way to work. Writers, in fact, disagree more generally about whether there is something to the

idea of “latinidad.” Dominican-American novelist and poet Julia Alvarez says there is. In a response to a question in an interview about whether there is such a thing as “Latino” culture that connects different national-origin groups together, Alvarez has responded: “I think we do have a culture … and I think it has to do with language. … [L]anguage creates … is a kind of embryo for who we can become as a people. And I think that sharing the Spanish language … connects us as a widespread Hispanic culture throughout the Americas, and it connects us also with people from Spain” (Alvarez 1998b: 17). Mexican-American writer and performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, on the other hand, adamantly rejects the whole concept:

Terms like Hispanic, Latino … are inaccurate and loaded with ideological implications. They create false categories. … There is no such thing as “Latino art” or “Hispanic art.” There are hundreds of types of LatinoAmerican-derived art in the United States. Each is aesthetically, socially, and politically specific.