The Criticality of Latino/a Fiction in the Twenty-First Century

The Criticality of Latino/aFiction in the Twenty-FirstCenturyTheresa Delgadillo*

War spills across the pages of twenty-first-century Latino/afiction in unprecedented ways. This should not be surprising con-sidering the history of war in the Americas—occupationist, inter-ventionist, autonomist, and revolutionary; or the fact that Latino/asbecame Latino/as through the Mexican American War of 1848 andthe Spanish American War of 1898; or the record of Latino/aservice in the US military throughout the twentieth century andnow in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Yet it is surprising becausemost Latino/a fiction in the twentieth century did not take war asits central theme or setting.1 One might argue that late-twentieth-century Latino/a fiction addressed a different kind of war: the dis-placement of Latino/a communities by “urban renewal,” the degra-dation inflicted on Latino/a communities by the proliferation ofdrugs and drug wars, and the economic vise grip on Latino/aadvancement. In the twenty-first century, however, it is increas-ingly impossible to write about Latino/a lives and to create Latino/a characters who are not in some way involved in, linked to, ortouched by the horrors of war among national states or intra-national war to secure power for either a ruling elite or an insur-gent group. This transition in Latino/a literature to the new realityof what seems like endless war also opens the conflicts, policies,economies, and perspectives driving war to Latino/a critique.

Writing in the aftermath of multiple late-twentieth-centurywars in Latin America and with the lingering need to make senseof earlier armed conflicts, Latino/a authors have launched the newmillennium with critical explorations of war in varied settings.

*Theresa Delgadillo is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies at OhioState University. Her work in comparative ethnic, gender, and American studieshas focused on spirituality/worldviews, African diaspora, and Latinidad andLatino/as in the Midwest in literature and visual culture.

American Literary History, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 600–624doi:10.1093/alh/ajr024# The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

Novels appear about the US-funded contra war against Nicaragua,the civil war in El Salvador, the genocidal war in Guatemala, theguerrilla/government war in Peru, the Holocaust, the enduringeffects on Latino/as and Latino/a communities of this country’swar against Vietnam, and attempts to overthrow the Cuban govern-ment as well as the long shadow cast by the dictatorial Trujilloregime on Dominicans and Dominican Americans. In this newbody of Latino/a fiction, set in cities, small towns, and rural areasacross the Americas, we encounter the social divisions and physi-cal devastation that war creates in characters that suffer duringbattle as well as long after the cessation of armed conflict. Suchfiction is also about love, greed, creativity, inequality, envy, sex-uality, memory, and loyalty, among other things. That is, thesenovels are not just about war, but about how it happens, why itcontinues, what it does to those involved—matters that underscorethat war is not an empty exercise of power or violence.

While Latino/a literature has always been marked by itstransnational interests, writers in this new millennium expand,extend, and deepen this concern in new ways, frequently linkingthe fates and destinies of Latin Americans and Latino/as, or of theUS and the places where it wages war. They continue in the tradi-tion of a Latino/a literature that Rafael Perez-Torres identifies asone that continually “moves both through the gaps and across thebridges between numerous cultural sites” to explore the “disconti-nuities of history and power” (3, 12). The fact that Latino/a fictionincreasingly sets its stories beyond the borders of the US or imag-ines stories that unfold across multiple national borders reflects anintensification of Latino/a fiction’s border-crossing identificationsas well the extension of a uniquely Latino/a critique throughoutthe hemisphere. Often explicitly in conversation with LatinAmerican literatures and histories, as noted in the acknowledg-ments and notes sections as well as the very subjects of the novelsthemselves, these fictions ask to be read in the “transgeographicalterms” that Jose David Saldıvar suggests are most appropriate forLatino/a fiction (19). In this light, new Latino/a literature aboutLatin American wars puts up a mirror to the conditions by whichthe Latino/a population of the US has grown and diversified whileremaining intimately linked to the rest of the Americas.

This literature, however, is not exclusively focused onlate-twentieth-century conflicts but also includes novels thatimagine the independence struggles, revolutions, and civil wars ofLatin America of earlier eras. These new Latino/a historical novelsalso take up those conflicts and the historic figures involved.2 TheLatino/a perspective that emerges in these fictions criticizes exclu-sionary paradigms of race and ethnicity as well as normative

American Literary History 601

gender and sexuality, thus confirming Ramon Saldıvar’sobservation that Chicano/a, and I would add Latino/a, literature isparticularly attuned to cultural conflict.3 The frequency of NativeAmerican, mestizo/a, and women characters who participate inshaping history, rather than simply being the victims of it, repre-sents an aspect of this Latino/a critique. Gender-bending lesbianprotagonists emerge in several novels, challenging both contempo-rary homophobia and the erasure of non-normative sexuality fromhistory’s actors and events. Indeed, Latino/a fiction brings to thisnew era a recognition that war, migration, and history can nolonger be imagined without considering the varied social locations,ideological influences, material conditions, and historic identitiesof the actors whom it touches. As historical fiction, therefore,these new novels create multilayered histories of the Americas.

Latino/a writers also remain invested in the theme of migra-tion as a significant topic of literature in this century, somethingperhaps not unrelated to current controversies about Latino/as inthe US. In historical fictions that imagine characters interactingthrough the many political, military, economic, social, and culturalroutes that cross this continent, this new literature illuminatesLatino/a migration and belonging in new ways. It also representsthe US as always and already connected to and active in the fatesof Latin Americans.

Yet migration itself remains a key theme in current Latino/aliterature in ways different from that of previous Latino/a novels. Intwentieth-century Latino/a literature, the tensions involved inmigration were largely centered on the adjustments, exclusions, andexploitations that characters encountered post-migration as theysettled in this country. In the twenty-first century, this work moreoften explores dangerous and harrowing border-crossings of LatinAmericans into the US, extreme violence and exploitation at theborder, isolation and poverty in communities left behind in Centraland South America and Mexico, and the personal and social trans-formations—not always positive—that such journeys prompt.

Latino/a literature has now grown to include what some, untilnow, have named “the other Latino/as,” that is, migrants or chil-dren of migrants from all over Latin America who have settledhere, including Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Nicaraguan, Peruvian,and Colombian Americans, among others. In contrast to previousdecades wherein Latino/a literature was written primarily byMexican-American, Puerto Rican, Cuban-American, and, later,Dominican-American authors, today’s Latino/a literature distin-guishes itself by representing a wider spectrum of Latinidad andevinces even greater engagement with hemispheric overexclusively US realities.

602 The Criticality of Latino/a Fiction in the Twenty-First Century

1. Aesthetics and Style

Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo (2002), Junot Dıaz’s The BriefWondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), and Julia Alvarez’s Savingthe World (2006) adopt overtly meta-fictional strategies in creatingthe stories of characters who talk back to their narrator scribes, orstorytelling narrators who provide extensive footnotes on relatedhistorical events and popular culture, or writer narrator/protago-nists. In other Latino/a fictions of this decade, this critical self-reflexivity might unfold via multivoiced or polyvocal as well assynchronous narratives, or it might take the form of a running dia-logue with another text, such as a diary or recording, that a charac-ter negotiates, but a significant number follow a diachronicchronology where we, as readers, typically begin at the beginningand end at the end. At times, we begin at the end, and the novelretrospectively tells us how we arrived at the end, as in Lost CityRadio (2007) by Daniel Alarcon or Calligraphy of the Witch(2007) by Alicia Gaspar de Alba. But even in the seemingly linearnarrative arc, Latino/a fiction values digressions and interruptions,backtracking and temporal shifts as characters recall past eventsand other spaces that impinge on the novelistic present. In thisway, although Latino/a fiction might be more linear in the newcentury, it is also less so.

2. Latino/as in War

It may be that the US government’s two wars in only the firstdecade of this new century, both massive operations that dominatethe media, the economy, and people’s lives—ever present, inshort, in every aspect of life—prompt Latino/a fiction’s focus onwar. In the midst of these events, Latino/a writers turn their atten-tion to the wars of the previous century (and earlier), exploring thesocial and political conflicts, as well as the human costs, that warentails. If this is, in part, an effort to make sense of contemporarywar, we are fortunate that Latino/a writers have gifts and instru-ments at their command that allow us to see both the past and thepresent in new ways.

In three Latino/a novels that feature Vietnam veterans ascentral characters, war brings new migrations and interconnections,but it also shrouds everyone it touches in loss and violence. Forexample, Names on a Map (2008) by Benjamin Alire Saenz, set inEl Paso, Texas, revolves around the Espejo family in the late1960s as the Vietnam War intensifies and local young men areeither drafted or enlist for service. Both anti-war and patriotic


sentiments circulate in the community and within in the family,leading to personal and familial divisions. In Stella Pope Duarte’sLet Their Spirits Dance (2002), the family of the deceased soldierJesse Ramirez sets out to honor his memory by making a pilgrim-age to the Vietnam Wall, a trip that turns into a community andthen national effort to honor all Chicano soldiers who died inVietnam.

The experience of war is more immediate in Alfredo Vea’snovel, Gods Go Begging (1999), where protagonist JessePasadoble, a Vietnam veteran and a practicing criminal defenseattorney, deals with recurring nightmares of his tour of duty inVietnam. In an instance emblematic of the novel’s key concerns,Jesse awakes to the recognition that he is forever tied to a spot nearthe Laotian border: “Last night his own living spirit had been kid-napped from this room and taken there, not for a reunion but for aquick object lesson, a reminder that his soul would never leave thathill, no matter where his body went. No bachelor’s degree, no lawdegree, no jungle grasses could hope to cover the impossible fearand anguish that still lingered there; no roots could ever leach fromthat soil the grief and blood, and the sorrowful shouts that had beensown there” (216). Haunted by the war, and his part in it, nearly 20years after the fact, Jesse succeeds, but not without some cost, atkeeping these demons under control. His intense personal memoryof Vietnam is one node in a constellation of relationships broughtinto creation by the war that connects the violence of the war withthe violence against poor and working-class people in the US. Theviolence of Vietnam, the novel reveals, has followed us home. Inthis way, the novel explores a transnational nightmare that influen-ces the collective fate of its characters.

3. Imagining the Legacy of War in the Americas

Latino/a fiction’s exploration of earlier wars brings us a troveof new historical fiction, much of it centered on hemisphericmovements or moments of critical consciousness through whichwe see the Latino/a critique of traditional US history extended tocritique US involvement in Latin America.4 Here, the Latino/anovel follows Carl Gutierrez-Jones’s suggestion that the focus isnot on recovering forgotten or obscured events or people, butinstead on “rethink[ing] historiography” and contesting “canonicalinterpretative practices” (21). Latino/a historical fiction’s critiquehere, as Gutierrez-Jones argues, lies in its attentiveness to how“specific groups are cultivated into dependent relationshipsvis-a-vis the dominant social classes and castes” (80).


Sylvia Sellers-Garcia’s 2007 novel about a Guatemalan-American young man who returns to Guatemala in the aftermathof military action against the nation’s indigenous and rural peoplesexamines the deep and often life-preserving secrecy and silenceamong the population that also perpetuates fragmentation and iso-lation. When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep is set in the early1990s and centers on Nıtido Aman, the only son of Diego and IrisAman, Guatemalan migrants to California, as he returns to visitthe small hamlet where his parents lived in Guatemala. Against hismother’s unspoken wishes, Nıtido makes the trip following hisfather’s death. Carrying his father’s journals, a written record ofhis silent father’s thoughts not available to him in rememberedconversations, Nıtido meditates on family, memory, imagination,and writing, as he finds himself enveloped in the post-traumaticsocial silence afflicting the inhabitants of Guatemala’s ruralhamlets.

Nıtido recognizes the silence in Guatemala as a familiar one,even a familial one since his parents never spoke to him ofGuatemala or of family in Guatemala. It was a place they hadseemingly left utterly and completely behind. But this absence,rather than the familiarity with place, imprinted itself on Nıtido:

For many years I’d felt the terrible remoteness that camefrom knowing too little. Having corrected it, I found the dis-tance that once stretched out before me, an expanse of blank-ness, replaced by another. I’d often imagined Naranjo, andonly knowing it revealed how completely I’d failed toapproach it. There, in the place I came from, I felt as far aspossible from all I knew. Farther uphill slept houses full ofstrangers. They were unknown to me, and they would remainthat way, and I was lost in a place where all the things I’dever seen, thought, and imagined were lost with me. (275)

Secretive silence had been so much a part of Nıtido’s familylife that the few occasions on which the opportunity for furtherknowledge presented itself were lost, as in this exchange he recallswith his father: “Finally I asked you, ‘Have you ever been in aballoon?’ You shook your head. You said, ‘I’ve only seensomeone fall like that once. From a helicopter.’ And I said, ‘Soyou’ve never been in a balloon.’ You looked at me and after amoment you said, ‘No, I haven’t’” (237). The boy Nıtido, growingup in the US, remains oblivious to his father’s allusion to people“falling” from helicopters, a horrific scene the latter apparentlywitnessed in Guatemala during the government’s genocidal andantiguerilla campaigns. Graphic scenes of violence are few in this


narrative; instead, references to the unspoken and imagined suffusethe novel, haunting the townspeople and Nıtido, and suggesting aplace gripped by dread and fear. The father’s reticence in thisexchange comes to represent the overwhelming silence over it all.

In one scene, Aurelio, the caretaker of the cemetery, explainsto Nıtido that the town lost its priest following the shock of hisaccidental involvement in a man’s death, an unlikely pedestrian ona rural road. Driving at night on a deserted road, the priest sud-denly comes upon and hits a well-dressed man in a suit, obviouslybut mysteriously left there, far from any town (125). The priestnever discovers the man’s identity, despite dogged effort, a failurethat eats at him until he finally leaves the town and area. This lackof resolution or comprehension and loss hover over the town andits inhabitants, becoming a force that Nıtido struggles to grasp,manage, and confront in his Guatemalan journey. Sellers-Garcia’snovel movingly represents the spiritual sickness that its characterslocate at the heart of war.

The narrator of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao byJunot Dıaz, the Watcher, suggests that his story is a counter-spell,a piece of magic narrative to keep violence and suffering at bay(7). What the Watcher initially suggests is unexplainable—thefuku, or enduring curse upon the Cabral/de Leon family—turns outto be a unique configuration of events created by historical circum-stance, particularly the long reign of the Trujillo dictatorship overthe Dominican Republic and the brutality, corruption, exploitation,and greed it both required and reproduced. Both Belicia Cabraland her son Oscar de Leon are victims of this dictatorship and itsenduring influence, and both are nearly beaten to death by Trujillohenchmen and their historical legatees, respectively. Belicia’swounds are described by the Watcher, who offers us an inventoryof her broken body: “her clavicle, chicken-boned; her righthumerus, a triple fracture (she would never again have muchstrength in that arm); five ribs, broken; left kidney, bruised; liver,bruised; right lung, collapsed; front teeth, blown out. About 167points of damage in total and it was only sheer accident that thesemotherfuckers didn’t eggshell her cranium, though her head didswell to elephant-man proportions” (147). When Belicia’s sonOscar later falls victim to similar acts of violence, he fares nobetter than his mother did.

The Watcher’s narrative moves back and forth between theUS (New Jersey and New York) and the Dominican Republic,conveying a sense of the transnational identity which he and othercharacters share as well as the way that events in one locationinfluence or impact events in the other location. Oscar’s isolationin the US, driven not primarily by his Dominican difference from


mainstream society but by his social ineptitude among bothDominican and mainstream groups, creates, according to theWatcher, the fertile ground for tragic miscalculations of love andpower. The circumstances of that power and the limitations itplaces on love—the way a government’s war on its own peoplecan twist and warp everything for a long time after—are alwayspresent in the Watcher’s, and our, reading.

The intractability of war’s influence on both people andevents surfaces less overtly, though compellingly, in AnaMenendez’s 2004 novel Loving Che. This story revolves around ayoung woman, the narrator, in search of information about herlong-lost mother, an artist in love with Che Guevara who remainsin Cuba following the revolution while sending her daughter awayto the US with her departing father. The hint that Che may havebeen her father becomes an opportunity to delve into events andhistories she has never been encouraged to explore, including theinfidelities of her parents and the idealism of the revolutionarymovement as well as the state of Cuba’s economy and society. Hergrandfather, however, maintains a brusque coldness toward theisland and the daughter who stayed there, warding off the narra-tor’s desire for greater connection with her mother. The angry con-frontation eventually does arrive, when she will be put off nolonger, and the grandfather, ironically likening himself to theisland’s leader he so despises, maintains that as the Russianwriters knew, “a man cannot change his nature” (6). His politicaland personal reserve, his hopelessness, becomes her challenge:

I don’t understand how you have not one photograph, notone letter, not one document. For all I know I have beenraised in a lie—what’s to keep me from thinking you didn’tkidnap me, or even that you’re not really my grandfather?With this last, I knew I had pushed too hard, and fell silent.After a long while, my grandfather said, You want docu-ments, photographs. This is truth to you? I didn’t answer.I heard my grandfather shift in his chair, and then we werequiet. When I turned to him, I saw that his hand shook wherehe had brought it to his cheek. (6)

As the scene reveals, there is more to be known, though itmay not be known solely through an examination of documentaryevidence. Loving Che takes up a new Cuban-American genera-tion’s unanswered questions about family and history and itsattempts to understand the significance of the Cuban revolution.The novel’s focus on ideas and character, rather than folklore, andits reflections on memory, history, love, madness, and


revolutionary commitment bring new perspective and awareness tothe question of Cuban-American links to Cuba.

Daniel Alarcon’s 2007 novel, Lost City Radio, needs to makesense of another armed conflict, of a country where a police statereigns, human rights do not exist, and a brutal military campaign toeliminate a violent guerrilla army rages. Told from the perspectivesof a radio host whose show revolves around the lost and disappeared,her activist and now absent, i.e. missing, husband/lover, and thepeople of a small rural village where a mass murder has occurred,Lost City Radio engages questions of truth and justice, dilemmas ofbetrayal and honesty, and ultimately, responsibility. Alarcon’s novelfits into the same groove as Sellers-Garcia’s work in that they bothshare a very intense sense of quiet horror and feature protagonistsliving amidst a violence or past violence that requires some level ofdissociation or suppression to ensure well-being. The novel pits thesecrecy with which a repressive regime shrouds its actions againstthe secrecy of individuals and communities trying to survive. LikeWhen the Ground Turns in Its Sleep, Lost City Radio also seeks rev-elations, without which there can be no reconciliation.

These new Latino/a fictions about war are also historical fic-tions that imagine pivotal events for Latino/as. The US reliance onLatino/a soldiers in the Vietnam War, and the consequences forLatino/a men and women, and for the nation, have not receivedmuch previous attention in fiction, though these have beenexplored in scholarship. The wars in the Dominican Republic,Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Peru—all historic eventsthat contributed to Latin-American migration to the US, andseveral that included this government’s involvement—imaginedthrough the eyes of those persecuted and hunted, become, in thehands of these gifted Latino/a writers, powerful and moving narra-tives of the condition of humanity in the Americas as well as cri-tiques of the imperial geographic imaginaries in which the ruraland indigenous peoples are always backwards and uncivilized,and, therefore, consigned to violence and underdevelopment.These novels form counterweights to histories too soon glossedand forgotten, yet which continue to reverberate in our time. Theyare one part of what appears to be Latino/a fiction’s new millen-nium project of reimagining an America and American historywith Latino/as in it.

4. Transnational Imaginaries in Latino/a Fiction

The other part of that project emerges in several new Latino/a fictions about historical events and personages of much earlier


eras. The colonization of the Americas and the many struggles forindependence that make up the history of this continent featureprominently in new Latino/a fiction, and share a distinguishingfeature: a focus on extraordinary, even heroic, female characters inLatin American and Latino/a history. In some cases, these charac-ters are based on actual historic figures; in others, they are entirelyfictions that, nonetheless, the novels seemingly assert, could haveor must have been there. The constraints on women’s roles in colo-nial eras, and especially limitations on their participation in publicevents, come under critique in the creation of assertive and inde-pendent female characters. State-sponsored violence appears inthis fiction as well, although it is itself less of character than it isin the literature discussed above. Here, it lacks mystery, becauseevents are by now well-known, and provides context for an explo-ration of different eras and events.

The protagonists of two novels, The Divine Husband (2004)by Francisco Goldman, and Our Lives Are the Rivers (2006) byJaime Manrique, are unique in that they reveal two new her-oines—one fictional, the other historical—who, working alongsideJose Martı and Simon Bolıvar, change history. In Goldman’swork, the central character is Maria de las Nieves, a pupil andlater friend of Jose Martı. A working-class mestiza woman born ofan Anglo father and an Indian woman, and raised in the householdof a wealthy criollo family whom she served, Maria de las Nievesbecomes embroiled in political and economic events and intriguethat unfold in her newly independent nation. De las Nieves, seem-ingly a footnote to history, becomes instead a force in effecting thekinds of cross-cultural encounter and hybrid identities thatuniquely characterize the Americas. Manrique’s work imagina-tively recounts the life story of an extraordinary woman in historywho actively joined in the fight for independence from colonialrule and Bolıvar’s battle to unite Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, andVenezuela into one great nation: Manuela Saenz, the illegitimatedaughter of a wealthy criollo woman and her wealthy Spanishmarried lover, who was Bolıvar’s comrade in battle as well as hismistress. Both novels join works such as Treasures in Heaven(2000) by Kathleen Alcala, The Hummingbird’s Daughter (2005)by Luis Alberto Urrea, In The Name of Salome (2000) by JuliaAlvarez, Calligraphy of the Witch (2007) by Alicia Gaspar deAlba, and Forgetting the Alamo, or, Blood Memory (2009) byEmma Perez in portraying resilient female characters who fre-quently lead others in historical movements and moments, and inrepresenting the multiple races, ethnicities, and religions that com-prise the borderlands and Latin America, illuminating the tensionsof colonial and independence movements. In these novels, the US


appears as a partner to historical events on the border or in LatinAmerica, highlighting a truly inter-American history.

Caramelo (2002) by Sandra Cisneros also presents forcefulwomen characters but focuses on a family in history rather than onhistoric events. The intergenerational dialogue that emerges herebetween Grandmother Soledad and granddaughter narrator/scribeCelaya subjects cultural practices of “politeness” to a witheringgender critique. Truly a family saga, Cisneros’s novel, playful lin-guistically, formally and in content, carefully locates herChicago–Mexico transnational, fictional family in the history andpopular culture of the US and Mexico, revealing the culturalexchanges, swaps, and influences moving in both directions thatthis border-crossing family experiences. War appears even inCaramelo, touching both the Father/Inocencio, who witnessed theatrocities of a conquering US army, and the son, Toto, who hasdrawn number 137 in the draft lottery during the Vietnam War.Taken as a whole, the trend toward historical fiction amongLatino/a writers positions a hemispheric context at the center ofour contemporary period, creating for readers vivid and engrossingnarratives that allow us to imagine how our collective fates in theAmericas have long been linked.

Each of these fictions tells well-known stories, and joins theliterature on war by attending to the viewpoint of the colonizedand oppressed, but each, also, reveals something new. InForgetting the Alamo, or, Blood Memory (2009), Emma Pereztakes up events that have certainly been told and retold in a manyforms, but few, if any, have been told from this perspective. Thestory of Texan independence glorified in the annals of US historyis nowhere present in this story of the brutality, avarice, andracism with which Mexicans were dispossessed of their land andrights. Set in 1836, the novel’s central character, Micaela Campos,provides the perspective from which events are known. Micaela isa young lesbian from a Mexican farming and ranching familywhose way of life, and life, faces attack by bands of Anglo settlersamidst the war for the control of Texas. African Americans andAmerican Indians fare no better in the nascent Republic of Texas,as Micaela discovers when forced from her home. Perez’s vividand engaging prose creates characters as unforgettable as thehistoric events that give rise to the first Latino/as, as it restoresqueerness to the historical imagination. Repressed sexual lovebetween women hovers throughout Julia Alvarez’s novel, In TheName of Salome (2000), which moves between three different tem-poral periods in telling the life story of the famous national poet ofthe Dominican Republic, Salome Urena Henrıquez. This novelreveals an Afro-Latino/a legacy as it chronicles thwarted

Taken as a whole, thetrend toward historicalfiction among Latino/awriters positions ahemispheric context atthe center of ourcontemporary period,creating for readers vividand engrossingnarratives that allow usto imagine how ourcollective fates in theAmericas have long beenlinked.


movements for independence and equality. Alvarez again employsthe strategy of moving between multiple temporal frames inSaving the World (2006), which as the title suggests, exploresaltruism and ambition. Treasures in Heaven (2000) by KathleenAlcala focuses on the character of Estela Quintanilla Carabajal, amigrant to Mexico City from the country’s northern frontier wherethe Mexican government’s anti-Indian wars rage and morph intoanti-Semitic assaults as well against her Crypto-Jewish husbandand his family. The historical formation of feminist movement inMexico in this time period enters the novel when Estela becomes apart of popular reform movements in the city, including itsbudding feminist organizations. A paradoxical critique of romanticnotions about female historical figures emerges in Frida (2001) byBarbara Mujica, a narrative of Frida Kahlo told by her sister, hereimagined as overlooked, envious, and troubled. The transnationalhistories that these contemporary Latino/a novels address, and theways that they foreground female protagonists and heroines inhistory do not, however, lead to triumphant and happy endings.These stories are marked by loss, defeat, and failures. How couldthey be otherwise and remain believable in the twenty-first centurythat we live in? This historical veracity, however, does not over-shadow the powerful modes of resilience that open up in eachnovel for our contemporary reading pleasure.

5. Spirituality in the New Millennium

The late-twentieth-century feminist critical engagement withreligious institutions and spiritual traditions continues to bloom inthe twenty-first century, in Latino/a literature that considers spiri-tual commitments and religious leadership.5 Today, these topicsare no longer only the purview of Latina writers. Indeed, thesetopics surface in work by both male and female writers, among allsubgroups included in the pan-ethnic label “Latino/a” (includingPuerto Rican, Chicano, Dominican, Salvadoran, Cuban) and innearly all subject areas, i.e., in fictions about war, history, migra-tion, queer sexualities, and others. There is, however, a new distin-guishing feature to this literature: in the present century, we see aheightened focus on the feminine divine and the female healer,saint, shaman, clairvoyant, or visionary in Latino/a fiction, even inthose fictions that feature repeated references to scripture, and evenin those fictions created by male authors.6

This late-twentieth-century trend manifests in two ways: first,there is a decline in the representation of male religious authorityor spiritual leaders in twenty-first-century Latino/a fiction—fewer


male shamans, priests, and curanderos appear here than in litera-ture of previous three decades. Second, there is a proliferation offemale protagonists who are spiritual leaders and healers inLatino/a fiction, especially in historical fiction, some based onactual figures in history. Why this might be the case, and whatthese fictions reveal about twenty-first-century spiritualties,becomes evident upon closer examination of this work.

6. Latina Spiritual Heroines

In Julia Alvarez’s novel Saving the World, we meet AlmaHuebner, a prominent Latina author experiencing a life/writingcrisis. Huebner’s husband gets an assignment to assist a commun-ity health improvement project in the Dominican Republic whileshe remains in the US to finish her novel about Dona Isabel, acolonial-era Spanish rectoress of an orphanage who accompanies aRoyal sanctioned expedition to eliminate smallpox from the colo-nies, an effort that revolves around the use of orphan boys as car-riers of the cowpox disease, which is then harvested as a vaccineagainst smallpox, on their sea voyages. Based on an actual histori-cal figure, the novel, which we read in chapters that alternate withHuebner’s present-day life crisis and her husband’s service, tracesthe woman’s travels with the expedition through the Caribbean,Mexico, to Philippines and then returns to settle in Mexico, in“Puebla de los Angeles, the City of the Angels” (367).

Huebner and her character both emerge as skeptics of reli-gion who also remain somewhat critical of the scientific project.The writer creates an Isabel who compares the validity and methodof smallpox vaccination with the claims of miraculous healing bypilgrims to Santiago de Compostela (34). Alma’s views emerge inan exchange she has with her neighbor Helen: “Unlike other reli-gious people who can drive her nuts, when Helen mentions God,Alma just does an instantaneous translation in her head—God as ametaphor for the stunning, baffling, painful, beautiful spirit of theuniverse—bypassing the whole thorny question of whether Godeven exists, and instead dealing directly with the little quandariesthat really are the places people get stuck in for life” (80).

Both characters wrestle with doubt about religious, scientific,ethical, and imaginative projects in which they find themselvesenmeshed. The very working out of that doubt, of finding theplace from which one can act, of reconciling one’s personaldesires with one’s ethical obligations or imagined commitments,floats through the both storylines, revealing passionate, thinking,desiring, and spiritual subjects in moments of crisis both personal


and social. Huebner’s questions about the imaginative project anddoubts about whether literature that can make a difference speakto the tendency in Latino/a fiction to link spiritual re-evaluationwith social justice.

The ugliness and degradation of the present and the challengethese present to religious belief and practice surface also in StillWater Saints (2007) by Alex Espinoza, which revolves aroundPerla Portillo, described on the opening page of the novel as “aBruja. A Santa. A Divina. A Medium, Prophet, and Healer. Ableto pass through walls and read minds, to pull tumors from ailingbodies, to uncross hexes and spells, to raise the dead, and to stoptime” (3). Perla has been trained by Senor Dario, a traveling spiri-tual counselor and curandero raised in both Lucumı/Santeria andCatholic religious traditions. When we meet here, she is an olderwoman and a widow, with a botanica in a strip mall on the declinethat mirrors her apparently diminishing powers. She is not all-seeing, though incredibly intuitive and sensitive; she cannot healeverything, but has wide knowledge of healing herbs and rituals.In her practice, she confronts Rodrigo, a victim of human traffick-ing, whose suffering shakes her in ways that appear to require anew approach to healing. The novel presents her as an importantfigure in the community by showing her amidst people gathered atthe mural of the Virgen de Guadalupe painted on the side of hershop “moving through the crowd, reciting a prayer, touching theirhands and faces when the people gathered around her. They hadfelt ache and disappointment and had borne witness to passing andloss. This was just a moment, Perla told them. Death was alwaysstirring. It hid in the wind, in those palm trees, on the banks of theSanta Ana Rıo. But if you stood there long enough, if you stoodthere and watched and listened, you could see what that river hadonce been, and you could see so much life in the still waters thatremained” (240).

Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Calligraphy of the Witch (2007), asequel to her earlier novel Sor Juana’s Second Dream (1999), fea-tures Sor Juana’s servant Concepcion Benavidez, an illegitimatemestiza daughter of a mixed-race (figured as Philippine, African,indigenous, and Spanish) tavern keeper and Spanish nobleman inNew Spain. Having escaped with her dear friend Alendula, who isblack, from her indentured servitude and Alendula’s enslaved statein the Convent, and fleeing to join cimarron communities inVeracruz, the two women are captured by pirates and shipped toNew England. Concepcion’s spirituality, which blends Catholicismand particularly devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe, with anunderstanding of the sacred natural world and knowledge ofhealing horticulture, marks her as different in Puritan, colonial


Boston, and she is soon targeted in the witch hunts and trials ofcolonial New England, and jailed, along with Tituba, the nowwell-known historical figure depicted by Maryse Conde in hernovel about the Salem witch trials. In this narrative, ConcepcionBenavidez endures horrific treatment in jail, public humiliationand vilification, the loss of her daughter, who is taken from her aswell as the loss of a livelihood. This historical fiction about thevilification of “others” in Puritan New England representsConcepcion as the target of another character’s machinations totake Concepcion’s daughter and property for her own by using herSpanish language, lack of fluency in English, and “strange” reli-gion as pretexts for accusations of witchery.

Finally, Luis Urrea’s The Hummingbird’s Daughter, also ahistorical fiction, features another important female spiritualleader: the well-known Teresa de Cabora, known as Santa Teresade Cabora, of northern Mexico. The Hummingbird’s Daughterimagines Teresa’s life chronologically, from her childhood in theshacks of hacienda workers as an illegitimate daughter of thehacienda owner, through her adoption by Huila, the curandera andhousehold manager of the hacienda house (the house of Teresa’sfather), to the emergence of her gifts as a healer amidst theMexican Army’s war against the Yaqui and Mayo peoples innorthern Mexico (making it safe for investment and development),and the following that develops around her. She becomes a leaderof the people in their struggles to hold onto their land and lives,and also, therefore, becomes a target of the Mexican Army. Likeboth Alvarez’s and Gaspar de Alba’s novels, this one is based onhistorical research, yet it still falls to the novelist to invent andcreate a Teresa with personality and character, or to imagine whatkind of personality, character, and spiritual calling might be neces-sary in the circumstances in which she lives.

A challenge to traditional gender dichotomies emerges inUrrea’s Teresa de Cabora, as in the scene where she is taken byHuila to a learned curandero, Manuelito, for further instruction. Inthe exchange between Teresa and Manuelito, she begins to learnthe depth of the knowledge required for a life as a curandera, andshe is introduced both to her masculine side and an indigenoussociety that values both masculine and feminine as essential to spi-ritual leadership. Her training with Manuelito is only the begin-ning of her healing work, which develops in extraordinarydirections to include miraculous healings, and her own resurrectionfrom the dead. The qualities that Manuelito proposes as essentialto curandera life include strength, knowledge, wildness, honoringwomen, and fierceness in battle. In many ways, Teresa’s story isone of undoing the colonial and patriarchal genealogies by which


the descendants of Indian women are dispossessed and forevermarginalized. Her coming to power provides a beacon to the strug-gles of Yaqui and Mayo.

7. Hagiography Provides Clues

Like the hagiographies that date back to early Christianity,which combine history and biography with an overt interest in pro-viding guides for human behavior, contemporary Latino/a fiction’spreponderant representation of strong female spiritual leaders, itsoverarching desire to imagine the significance of gender in reli-gious community and movement may be a kind of call for ourtime.7 In their focus on female spiritual heroines, the above fic-tions appear to embrace shifting conceptions of gender, new rolesfor women, dynamic spiritual formations, and particular qualitiesof character. We often see in these novels women freed from tradi-tional gender constraints to act both “womanly” and “manly,”emphasizing a departure from the superficialities of gender appear-ance in favor of an investment in androgyny. The several figuresof imagined female healers, curanderas, and everyday heroinespresent women as spiritual leaders to a contemporary audience,and valorize local spaces as sites of ministry and healing. Theengagements with Christian, Indigenous, and African Diasporicbeliefs, practices, and discourses that these novels mediate high-light ongoing processes of hybrid spiritual formation. Finally,whereas early Christian hagiographies upheld piousness, chastity,sacrifice, and bodily mortification, twenty-first-century Latino/anovels appear to value in their heroines and protagonists self-lovein the face of vilification, unwavering determination against degra-dation and injustice, self-reflection, compassion for others, andfaith in one’s own powers and abilities.

8. Dangerous Crossings, New Migrations

Migration looms large as a concern of this era’s literature,including in genres other than fiction. This work, like literatureabout war and historical fiction, both depicts and critiques on mul-tiple levels. As I noted earlier, the horrific conditions of border-crossing, violence, and exploitation, drug cultures, class conflicts,human trafficking, and the challenges these pose not only todemocracy and sustainability but also to humanity, ethics, spirit,and moral being proliferate in this work. Migration within the US,as in the migrant farm worker circuit, is rarely the subject of this


fiction, although a notable exception is Rigoberto Gonzalez’sCrossing Vines (2003), which focuses on grape pickers inCalifornia. In contrast to its well-known predecessors, this novel’scontemporary farm workers share both a collective existence asexploited workers, which they collectively attempt to remedy, anddeep fissures driven, in part, by gender and sexuality. More thanan exploration of a common fate, Crossing Vines examines theruptures and differences among farm workers, particularly thosethat call into question old patriarchal models of family and com-munity. The overwhelming focus in twenty-first-century Latino/aliterature about migrants, however, is on the inter-American crisisof migration, the circumstances that prompt border-crossing, thetrauma of crossing, and the permanent afflictions that traumacreates.

Ana Castillo’s The Guardians (2007) presents the bordercrisis as war. Set in a small, rural New Mexican town not far fromJuarez, the novel revolves around the search for Rafael, brother toRegina and father of Gabriel, who has gone missing in crossingfrom Mexico to the US. No longer simply a marker betweennations, the border exists as a battlefield where, as the characterMiguel observes, a series of “dirty wars” involving drugs, guns,and human trafficking play out, spreading out in concentric circlesfrom the border to visit death and brutality upon migrants, borderinhabitants, and people on both sides of the border. In casting themissing Rafael as a progressive idealist from another era, reader ofMarx and follower of Comandante Marcos, who, though a veteranof desert crossings must now, like everyone, pay to cross because“the coyotes and narcos own the desert now” (4), the narrativeappears to underwrite Miguel’s observations. Gabriel and his auntRegina harbor individual desires to combat the social diseasearound them through religious vocation and community improve-ment, respectively; their seeds of hope form important counter-points to the world around them. The distinct voices andperspectives of Gabriel, Regina, and Miguel alternate in interre-lated chapters as each moves the action, and search, forward.Gabriel’s chapters take the form of prayers while Regina’s andMiguel’s chapters reveal how their own perspectives on effectingsocial change at the border drive their lives and actions in this cir-cumstance. In this novel, migrants are warned at the border that“the search for the American Dream could be your worst night-mare” (115); in this sense, Miguel’s question hovers over theentire narrative: “how long can the United States contain what itsvices and counterproductive prohibitions have wrought?” (151).

The dilemma of whether or not to leave, along with thepoverty that prompts the journey and the doubts about loss and


betrayal hanging over such a decision, emerges in varying degreesof seriousness in this century’s Latino/a fiction. Ruins (2009) byAchy Obejas pictures a decaying and poor Cuba beyond the brinkof repair where even a cautious decision to maintain the status quobecomes impossible and despair sets in, fueling migrations by searafts. The wrenching sense of abandoning oneself that thoughts ofthis migration provoke for the protagonist of Ruins also manifestsfor the central character of Across a Hundred Mountains (2006) byReyna Grande. In the latter novel, a young woman decides that shecan only save her mother and family from the depredations ofothers and economic ruin by leaving her pueblo to find the fatherwho disappeared from their lives upon making the journey northto the US. Whatever success becomes possible in the US is alwayshaunted by that loss and by the constant search for the missingparent. In both Benjamin Alire Saenz’s In Perfect Light (2005)and Still Water Saints (2007) by Alex Espinoza, human traffickingacross borders emerges as a new and terrifying reality. In InPerfect Light, two orphaned children become victims of humantraffickers when, led by their misguided older siblings, they crossthe border from El Paso to live in Juarez. In Still Water Saints, aboy from southern Mexico attempting to cross to the US can onlymigrate when he is sold into sexual slavery as the “property” of asadistic Anglo-American character.

A lighter, more playful take on migration, and the hemi-spheric economic crisis known as globalization, appears in Intothe Beautiful North (2009) by Luis Alberto Urrea. Here, thewomen of the small town of Tres Camarones (state of Mazatlan),Mexico, take over the municipal government, an empowering shiftthat only occurs because so many of the town’s men have left forthe north, no longer able to earn a decent living in their owncountry. But when drug lords move in looking to take over thetown, a group of young women, inspired by a local screening ofThe Magnificent Seven, set out to bring back their “magnificentseven,” the men of Tres Camarones living and working in the US.With picaresque flavor, the novel represents its merry band ofyoung people as they make their way across the border and acrossthe country to Kankakee, Illinois, in search of the town’s men.

9. Latino/a Change in the US

The neighborhood, the home, the city, the steel mill, theclub, the artist studio, the bus, the office, the restaurant, the fields,that is, the ordinary and everyday sites of life unfolding for peopleof varied races, classes, genders, and sexualities continue as


featured settings in current Latino/a novels and short fiction. Itmay be that sites of working-class labor and working-class charac-ters predominate in this fiction, as they have tended to in the past.But even here, in the area of Latino/a literature with strictly USsettings, new perspectives emerge about the Latino/a experienceand new literary trends take shape. Denise Chavez’s Loving PedroInfante (2001) explores the seduction of movies in the lives of itssmall town women characters. Their Dogs Came With Them(2007) by Helena Viramontes and Music of the Mill (2005) byLuis J. Rodriguez are two examples of domestically orientedLatino/a fiction that depict the consequences of urban renewal forLatino/as and the affirmative action era entry of Latino/as, finally,into unionized industries in significant numbers. These settingsalso predominate in this century’s Latino/a short fiction, a formthat remains important for new and experienced writers, thoughone that requires a fuller discussion than can be offered in thespace of this essay.8 Working-class characters and settings are astaple in the work of Latino/a graphic fiction writer JaimeHernandez, whose serials have gained greater attention with thegrowing popularity of graphic novels. The Education of HopeyGlass (2008) and Dicks and Deedees (2003) combine several sepa-rate serials into one collection, providing uninterrupted storylines.New graphic fiction writer Jessica Abel’s 2006 graphic novel LaPerdida, also a republication of previously separate serials, tellsthe story of a Latina transplant to Mexico City with romanticnotions about reconnecting to her Latino/a roots. A cautionary taleabout privileging ethnicity above all else, Abel’s work joinsHernandez’s in expanding the forms of Latino/a literature. UrbanChicago figures centrally in Ana Castillo’s Watercolor WomenOpaque Men (2005), a novel in verse that blends the narrative andthe lyrical, reveling in a two-spirited ethos through which it tellsthe story of two women, a working-class Latina woman and amother/writer, seeking sexual and social freedom.

Latino/a novels of this century set in the US expand thedefinition of Latino/a by presenting characters from backgroundsother than Mexican or Puerto Rican or younger contemporarycharacters, often of mixed Latino/a and non-Latino/a backgrounds,who represent a new generation. When the younger Chino, inBodega Dreams (2000) by Ernesto Quinones, tells the Willie,older Puerto Rican gangster who runs things in El Barrio, that“I’m only half Rican, my father is from Ecuador,” he represents anewer generation of Latino/as with a changing ethnic and demo-graphic profile who, nonetheless, become/remain Latino/a, asWillie asserts when he responds, “So what? You Spanish, this isyour neighborhood. You grew up here, got beat up here, and I


hope beat someone up too” (36). The Latino/a novels What NightBrings (2003) by Carla Trujillo, Drift (2003) by Manuel LuisMartinez, In Perfect Light (2005) by Benjamin Alire Saenz, andThe Buddha Book (2001) by Abraham Rodriguez also focus onconflicts between younger and older Latino/as, offering, in manyways, a generational critique of Latino/a politics, cultures, andnorms. With the exception of What Night Brings, these works takeas their settings gritty urban environments, feature mostlyworking-class characters, and take on intra-Latino/a conflicts suchas domestic violence; social forms of violence in drug use, prosti-tution, human and child trafficking; homophobia and violenceagainst gays, lesbians, and trans-identified characters. As such,they turn the Latino/a creative and critical gaze in new and impor-tant directions.

Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties (2003) and Like Son(2007), both by Felicia Luna Lemus, and Crossing Vines byRigoberto Gonzalez join What Night Brings and In Perfect Lightin presenting protagonists and secondary characters with non-normative sexualities. Acceptance of their sexuality among familyand friends as well as society generally becomes a key tension ineach of these works, but in very different ways. Luna Lemus andTrujillo explore the anxieties, fears, and rejections around publiclyacknowledging lesbian identities among Latino/a families andfriends. For Trujillo’s principal character, Marci, such an admis-sion runs the risk of bringing even more violence down on herfrom an already abusive father, yet she does not stop trying toanswer her own questions about her sexuality and finds support inseemingly unlikely places. Saenz’s In Perfect Light critiques thesocially sanctioned exile of Latino/a transvestites to Ciudad Juarez,and the forced prostitution of men and women there, as it locatesheroism, courage, and compassion in a Chicano transvestite char-acter. Lemus’s work, in particular, forms part of a growing area ofwork by Latino/a writers exploring varied facets of lesbian andgay sexualities. Writing beyond the question of “coming out” andintra-Latino/a tensions around homosexuality, this newer workaddresses roles, norms, and violence among queer communitiesand individuals; presents lesbian and gay love and relationshipstories; and imagines queer antecedents in Latino/a folklore,culture, or history, as in Lemus’s versions of La Llorona, or themysterious modernist figure Nahui Olin. Another character in thisvein is Emma Perez’s Tejana, Micaela Campos, discussed earlier.The publication and circulation of fiction featuring gay and lesbiancharacters in different regions, at different ages, and in differenthistorical periods represent a key development in Latino/a litera-ture of the past decade.


10. Conclusion

The unique Latino/a critique, one informed by a long historyof exclusion as well as organized social and political movement,extends outward in this century to imagine global and hemisphericevents and stories. To its great credit, Latino/a fiction criticallyremembers the violence of previous decades and earlier eras at atime when we are everywhere surrounded by violence, whennational resources are devoured by the imperative to violence—whether in Afghanistan or in the US–Mexico border—and whenthe consequences of prior US involvements in war in our hemi-sphere are routinely papered over. Latino/a fiction’s investment inthis century in representing characters impacted by migrationmatches its long-standing interrogation of mobilities imposed andembraced in the Americas. That so many of its narrators and pro-tagonists in this era are imagined as determined and resilientwomen, young men with heart, and fearless lesbian and gay mensuggests that Latino/a mettle is a much prized quality in our times.

Appendix: Twenty-First Century Latino/a Fiction

Novels

Abel, Jessica. La Perdida. New York: Pantheon, 2006.Alarcon, Daniel. Lost City Radio. New York: Harper, 2007.Alcala, Kathleen. Treasures in Heaven. San Francisco: Chronicle,

2000.Allende, Isabel. Portrait in Sepia. New York: Perennial/Harper,

2001.Alvarez, Julia. In the Name of Salome. Chapel Hill: Algonquin,

2000.Alvarez, Julia. Saving the World. Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 2006.Anaya, Rudolfo. Alburquerque: A Novel. Albuquerque: U of New

Mexico P, 2006.Carrillo, H. G. Loosing My Espanish. New York: Random/

Pantheon, 2004.Castillo, Ana. Watercolor Women, Opaque Men: A Novel in Verse.

Willimantic: Curbstone, 2005.Castillo, Ana. The Guardians. New York: Random, 2007.Chavez, Denise. Loving Pedro Infante. New York: Farrar, 2001.Cisneros, Sandra. Caramelo. New York: Knopf, 2002.Dıaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York:

Riverhead, 2007.


Duarte, Stella Pope. Let Their Spirits Dance. New York: Harper,2002.

Espinoza, Alex. Still Water Saints. New York: Random, 2007.Garcia, Cristina. Monkey Hunting. New York: Ballantine, 2004.Garcia, Cristina. A Handbook to Luck. New York: Knopf, 2007.Gaspar de Alba, Alicia. Sor Juana’s Second Dream. Albuquerque:

U of New Mexico P, 1999.Gaspar de Alba, Alicia. Calligraphy of the Witch. New York:

St. Martin’s, 2007.Goldman, Francisco. The Divine Husband. New York: Grove,

2004.Gonzalez, Rigoberto. Crossing Vines. Norman: U of Oklahoma P,

2003.Grande, Reyna. Across A Hundred Mountains. New York: Atria,

2006.Hijuelos, Oscar. A Simple Habana Melody. New York: Harper,

2002.Hijuelos, Oscar. Beautiful Marıa of My Soul. New York:

Hyperion, 2010.Lemus, Felicia Luna. Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties.

New York: Farrar, 2003.Lemus, Felicia Luna. Like Son. New York: Akashic, 2007.Manrique, Jaime. Our Lives Are the Rivers. New York: Harper,

2006.Martinez, Manuel Luis. Drift. New York: Picador, 2003.Martinez, Manual Luis. Day of the Dead. Mountain View:

Floricanto, 2009.Menendez, Ana. Loving Che. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2004.Mujica, Barbara. Frida. Woodstock: Overlook, 2001.Murray, Yxta Maya. The Conquest. New York: Harper, 2002.Obejas, Achy. Ruins. New York: Akashic, 2009.Perez, Emma. Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory. Austin:

U of Texas P, 2009.Quinonez, Ernesto. Bodega Dreams. New York: Vintage/Random,

2000.Ramos, Manuel. The King of the Chicanos. San Antonio: Wings,

2010.Rodriguez, Abraham. The Buddha Book. New York: Picador,

2001.Rodriguez, Luis J. Music of the Mill. New York: Rayo, 2005.Rosario, Nelly. Song of the Water Saints. New York: Vintage,

2003.Sellers-Garcıa, Sylvia. When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep.

New York: Riverhead/Penguin, 2007.


Sirias, Silvio. Bernardo and the Virgin. Evanston: NorthwesternUP/Latino Voices, 2005.

Sirias, Silvio. Meet Me Under the Ceiba. Houston: Arte Publico,2009.

Tobar, Hector. The Tattooed Soldier. 1998. New York: Penguin,2000.

Trujillo, Carla. What Night Brings. Willimantic: Curbstone, 2003.Urrea, Luis Alberto. The Hummingbird’s Daughter. New York:

Back Bay/Little, 2005.Urrea, Luis Alberto. Into the Beautiful North. New York: Little,

2009.Valdes-Rodriguez, Alisa. The Dirty Girls Social Club. 2003.

New York: St. Martin’s, 2004.Vea, Alfredo. Gods Go Begging. 1999. New York: Plume, 2000.Viramontes, Helena Marıa. Their Dogs Came With Them. 2007.

New York: Washington Square, 2008.

Short Fiction

Alarcon, Daniel. War by Candlelight. New York: Harper, 2005.Baca, Jimmy Santiago. The Importance of a Piece of Paper.

New York: Grove, 2004.Casares, Oscar. Brownsville. New York: Back Bay/Little, 2003.Gomez, Hector and Hugo Camacho. The Legacy: Valley of Tears

1. Lulu.com, 2010.Henrıquez, Cristina. Come Together, Fall Apart: A Novella and

Stories. New York: Riverhead/Penguin, 2006.Hernandez, Jaime. Dicks and Deedees. Seattle: Fantagraphics,

2003.Hernandez, Jaime. The Education of Hopey Glass. Seattle:

Fantagraphics, 2008.Menendez, Ana. In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd. New York:

Grove, 2001.Rodriguez, Luis J. The Republic of East L. A. New York: Harper,

2002.Shapard, Robert, James Thomas, and Ray Gonzalez, eds. Sudden

Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United Statesand Latin America. New York: Norton, 2009.

Urrea, Luis Alberto. Six Kinds of Sky: A Collection of ShortFiction. El Paso: Cinco Puntos, 2002.

Yanez, Richard. El Paso del Norte: Stories on the Border. Reno:U of Nevada P, 2003.


Notes

1. There are, of course, exceptions to this general observation—for example,Demetria Martınez’s Mother Tongue (1994) and Graciela Limon’s In Search ofBernabe (1993), both of which revolve around the war in El Salvador, or HectorTobar’s The Tattooed Solider (1998), which focused on Guatemalan migrants trauma-tized by war in that country, or Americo Paredes’s George Washington Gomez (1990),which opens with a war at the border and ends with the eruption of World War II.

2. Simon Bolivar, Manuela Saenz, Jose Martı, Salome Urena, and Santa Teresade Cabora appear as protagonists of Latino/a fiction, and events such as theAnglo conquest of Tejas and the Mexican-American War; the Mexican warsagainst Yaqui and other Native Americans; the colonization of the Americas andthe Salem witch trials become the contexts for imaginative storytelling

3. See Ramon Saldivar, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference(1990), 73.

4. One exception to this is Oscar Hijuelos’s A Simple Habana Melody (2002)about a prominent Cuban Jewish composer caught in Europe duringWorld War II.

5. Another aspect of this appears in work such as Julia Alvarez’s Saving theWorld, which addresses the ethical and emotional quandries of first world partici-pation in third world social justice work.

6. In my earlier work, I address Chicana novels and documentary films wherereligion surfaces as a key concern. Narratives that frequently address Latino/amarginalization and exploitation in dominant culture and intra-Latino/a sexismand misogyny, these stories of Latina lives, including lives different than thosehistorically accorded to Latinas in the US, imaginatively confront religious dis-course and specific religious traditions. This Chicana literature imagines femalecharacters awakening to a different kind of spiritual consciousness and shapingcontemporary religiosity, offering a critique of religion as it works to recoverfemale and feminist spiritual power. This work often includes curanderas as sec-ondary characters whose indigenous healing represents alternative world views,but focuses on female characters engaged in creating new spiritualities. See myforthcoming work from Duke University Press, Spiritual Mestizaje: Religion,Gender, Race and Nation in Contemporary Chicana Narrative, which takes upDemetria Martınez’s Mother Tongue, Judith Gleason and Feminist Collective ofXalapa’s Flowers for Guadalupe, Lourdes Portillo’s Senorita Extraviada, NormaCantu’s Canıcula, Face of an Angel by Denise Chavez, Spirits of the Ordinary,Treasures in Heaven, and Flower in the Skull by Kathleen Alcala.

7. See Jodi Bilinkoff, “Introduction,” Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy inthe Americas (2003), ed. Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff, xiii–xiv.

8. A new trend of note is the late-twentieth-century emergence of “suddenfiction,” which, in the twenty-first century, also became Latino/a, as representedby the publication of Sudden Fiction Latino (2009). This volume melds togetherthe work of Latino/a and Latin American writers working in this genre, oneperhaps most reflective of the digital age where the expression and enjoyment of


literary puzzles and riddles, the clever paradox, the enduring irony, and thesacred moment bloom. See the appendix for titles of volumes of short fiction pub-lished between 2000 and 2010.

Works Cited

Alvarez, Julia. Saving the World.

Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 2006.

Castillo, Ana. The Guardians.

New York: Random, 2007.

Dıaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of

Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead, 2007.

Gutierrez-Jones, Carl. Rethinking the

Borderlands: Between Chicano

Culture and Legal Discourse.

Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.

Menendez, Ana. Loving Che.

New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2004.

Perez-Torres, Rafael. Movements in

Chicano Poetry: Against Myths,

Against Margins. Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 1995.

Quinonez, Ernesto. Bodega Dreams.

New York: Vintage/Random, 2000.

Saldivar, Jose David. The Dialectics

of Our America: Genealogy,

Cultural Critique, and Literary

History. Durham: Duke UP,

1991.

Sellers-Garcıa, Sylvia. When the

Ground Turns in Its Sleep.

New York: Riverhead/Penguin,

2007.

Vea, Alfredo. Gods Go Begging. 1999.

New York: Plume, 2000.


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The Criticality of Latino/a Fiction in the Twenty-First Century

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