National Latinx Heritage Month
How do we read, discuss, and think about Latinx literature now?
As we’re in the middle of National Latinx Heritage Month (September 15-October 15) it’s imperative to meditate on the term itself (“Hispanic” vs. “Latinx”) and how this body of work and its tradition fits within and perhaps against what we think of as “American” literature. Latinx literature has grown substantially over the past two decades, gaining significant institutional presence. The field came into its own in the 1980s as a response to the U.S. identity movements, student movements, and Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, consolidating further as an academic discipline in the 1990s. These elements are important for the field and our literature for three reasons. First, Latinx Studies as a multidisciplinary discipline, has offered invaluable contributions for recovering texts written before 1960—when the field is believed to have officially begun—and studying gendered, diasporic, and border subjectivities. Yet the field also investigates how these areas require reexamination and reorganization. As such, Latinx Studies is currently in a moment of tension between looking to the future yet expressing the need of reassessing the archive. As scholars of the Latinx nineteenth century importantly remind us, the U.S. has always been Latinx-in-the-making. The hemispheric turn in literary studies invites us to account for the broad systems of exchange, movement, and influence across the Americas that call into question the overlapping geographies, movements, and cross-filiations between and among peoples, regions, diasporas, and nations.
As the field moves toward a pan-Latinx analytical methodology and as new subjects for examination arise, Latinx Studies demonstrates the challenges of acknowledging ethno-national and racial differences while underscoring pan-Latinx similarities. Secondly, as I remind my students, the classroom and the student movements that inaugurate Ethnic Studies within the academy are crucial for our understanding of Latinx literature—both as a field that calls back to social struggle and thus points to the study of literature itself as a place for resistance. The inauguration of identity-based fields of study also invites further questions of classification and labeling.
Lastly, Latinx literature can be understood in terms of its historical emergence but also for its engagement with history. The formation of what we understand now as a Latinx literary canon and even the designation “Latinx literature” is a contemporary phenomenon, shaped by universities, readerships, and publishing houses. As such, our literature, in overt and covert ways, reflects on historical moments ranging from conquest, colonialism, expansionism, slavery, dictatorships, revolutions, exile, migration and immigration, assimilation and/or acculturation, and living in the diaspora. What is considered the Latinx literary canon has customarily tackled these issues, while having a representational stronghold by Chicanx, Cuban American, Puerto Rican, and Dominican American writers. Demographic, thematic, generic, and socio-political shifts have instigated a needed and important change in Latinx literature, wherein we are seeing not only writers from central and south American descent enhancing our understanding of the Latinx experience and contributing to a panethnic latinidad but a wider array of genre fiction—such as science fiction, fantasy, horror, and the neo-Gothic—and even texts that veer away from the overt uses of ethno-racial demarcation conventionally observed.
We are living in a moment when overt acts of white supremacy are not only commonplace but condoned by agents of the state; where historical forms of systemic violence and ill-defined notions of critical race theory are omitted from curricula; where the term “Latinx” continues to be lambasted and even banned in a badly disguised act of transphobia. As such, it is crucial to recall the movements that made the study of Latinx literature possible while recognizing the intersectional thematic networks that interlace across our many canons.
The Supreme Court’s decision this summer to strike down race-based affirmative action protections reminds us of the systemic forms of exclusion minoritized communities have experienced in the academy. Data from the Department of Education show that the number of Latinx students grew 30% between 2010 and 2021, making up over a fifth of enrolled students in 2021. As one of the fastest growing demographics in the US, how is our study of literature going to illustrate these shifts and give voice to their experiences?
Pa’lante!
My book recommendations for last year can be found here, and below are my most anticipated books of 2023 and 2024:
Silvia Moreno Garcia, Silver Nitrate (2023): Moreno Garcia has written books in genres ranging from fantasy and science fiction to noir and horror. Her novel, Mexican Gothic was a hit in 2020 and is being made into a television series by Hulu. Silver Nitrate, like many of Moreno Garcia’s novels is set in Mexico City. It tells the story of Montserrat, a sound editor, Tristán, a soap opera star. The pair are presented with a request by Abel Urueta, Tristán’s neighbor and legendary auteur, to shoot the missing scene of a long-vanished film. Urueta tells the pair of a Nazi occultist who imbued magic into a volatile silver nitrate stock and cursed him. Together they must unravel the mystery of the missing film and lift Urueta’s curse.
Justin Torres, Blackouts (2023): One of the most anticipated books of 2023, Torres’ new novel has been long listed for a 2023 National Book Award in Fiction. Torres’ first book, We the Animal (2012), won the Indies Choice Book Awards, and was a finalist for the Publishing Triangle Award and NAACP Image Award; and was adapted into a film of the same name. Blackouts is a book about storytelling and investigation of form to mine the inventions of history and narrative. Set in “the Palace,” Juan Gray has a project to pass along a book, Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns, and its crushing history. Containing stories collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects, many of these voices have been filtered, redacted, and muted. Yet, it is possible to hear them from within the text. In Juan’s volume these voices have been redacted almost on every page, but as he and the narrator recall for each other stories of their lives and those taken from the book, they resist the effects of memory and time. Blackouts asks us to consider how the past is within, beside, and ahead of us while having to contend with its interruptions and erasures.
José Olivares, Promises of Gold (2023): his second collection centers different forms of love―self, brotherly, romantic, familial, cultural―and how forces like gender, capitalism, religion, and the American Dream complicate, misrepresent, and limit such expressions. Olivares also touches on issues of migration, colonization, legacy, community, and identity with tenderness and vulnerability.
Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore (2023). Known for her young adult novel-in-verse, The Poet X (2018) and Clap When You Land (2020), Acevedo’s new book follows Flor Marte, the daughter of a Dominican American family who has the gift of predicting the day when someone will die. When she invites the family for a living wake to celebrate her life, no one, not even her sisters, knows what it means. Over the course of the three days before the wake, secrets are revealed, pasts remembered, and histories relived of all the lives of the Marte women spanning decades, generations, cities, and borders. Acevedo is the winner of the National Book Award and the Carnegie Medal.
Ana Menéndez, The Apartment (2023). Menendez is the author In Cuba I was a German Shepherd (2001), Loving Che (2003), The Last War (2009). The Apartment centers The Helena, an art deco apartment building in South Miami Beach and the many lives of the tenants of apartment 2B: a Cuban concert pianist, the widow of an intelligence officer, a man waiting for a green card, a Tajik building manager with a secret identity. Each tenant infuses apartment 2B with their energy. Dealing with issues of exile, displacement, and homesickness, The Apartment considers points of interconnection we can find in a violence and lonely century. What are the strengths of community and in sharing stories of survival and perseverance?
Yxta Maya Murray, God Went Like That (2023). Maya Murray is a novelist, art critic, playwright, and law professor. She has won a Whiting Award and an Art Writer’s Grant and has been named a fellow at the Huntington Library for her work on radionuclide contamination in Simi Valley, California. Her novels include The Conquest (2002), The King’s Gold (2007), and The Good Girl’s Guide to Getting Kidnapped (2010). In God Went Like That, federal agent Reyna Rodriguez reports on a real-life nuclear meltdown that occurred in 1959, 1964, and 1968 at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory. Creating a toxic legacy of contamination and cancer, the novel takes on the form of an EPA report wherein Reyna presents interviews with individuals affected by the disasters. Murray thus artistically brings to the page an actual 2011 Department of Energy dossier that details the catastrophes and public health fallout, highlighting the costs of environmental racism.
Patricia Engel, The Faraway World (2023). Engel is the author of Vida (2010), a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway and Young Lions Fiction Awards, and Infinite Country (2021), a New York Times bestseller. In Faraway Country, Engel tells the story of two Colombian expats who meet in New York City. Both are burdened with traumatic pasts, while a woman in Cuba discovers that the bones of brother have been stole from his grave, and her lover returns to Ecuador for a one-night visit. Simultaneously, a couple strapped for cash hustle in Miami to life-altering results. Telling panoramic stories that bring to life the vitality of community, Lauren Groff has called Engel’s novel “a wonder.”
Daniel Olivas, Chicano Frankenstein (2024). Olivas is an award-winning author and lawyer, whose works include The Book of Want (2011), The King of Lighting Fixture (2017), and How to Date a Flying Mexican: New and Collected Stories (2022). Chicano Frankenstein, as its name suggests, is a retelling of Mary Shelley’s classic. Addressing questions of belonging and assimilation, the story centers an unnamed paralegal who is brought back to life through controversial methods in a near-future world where the US president expresses anti-reanimation rhetoric. The paralegal falls in love with lawyer Faustina Godínez and his first-life history, which was erased in the reanimation process, is slowly discovered and he meets Faustina’s network of family and friends. Spanning science fiction, horror, political satire, and romance, Olivas’s novel delves into questions of nationhood, belonging, and what it means to be human.