Latino American Identity in Literature

At Issue

In the last decades of the twentieth century, a new generation of Latino writers in North America established a strong literary reputation, enriching mainstream literature. This development reflects demographic changes. Latino literature, characterized by impressive versatility, provides critical insights into the problematic issues of identity in terms of language, family, religion, education, acculturation, and artistic expression. Latino literature is in essence a literature of uprootedness, self-search, and recovery. The American experience constitutes a collective cultural heritage, and the readership of an ethnic literature is not confined to one minority.

Historical Context

Latinos do not represent a homogeneous group. The term “Latino” includes a diversity of ethnic, racial, national, and cultural groups, with historic, economic, and social differences. (“Latino” is often used interchangably with “Hispanic,” although the latter term may not include Brazilians; in addition, when referring to individuals, “Latina” is the feminine form; “Latinx” is sometimes used as a gender-neutral form.) The diaspora from Central and South America is also being included in what is becoming a transnational culture, with a greatly varied collective identity that has at root the use of the Spanish language. The most heterogeneous of the Latino American groups are those of Caribbean origins, residing mostly on the Eastern coast of the United States.

The beginnings of the presence of Spanish-speaking groups in North America can be found in the mid-sixteenth century, when Spaniards arrived in what became the United States. Since then, Latinos have been documenting their life experiences in writings that combine autobiographical and imaginative modes, expressing feelings of rupture and displacement, and a need to recapture the past in order to find the “true” self. A most active period of literary production emerged in the late 1960s, generated by cultural and political awakening, with each writer often excelling in several genres.

Two literary groups have been recognized in the United States: the native Hispanic, and the migrated Hispanic. There are problems of definition for “migrated” and “native”—for example, with Puerto Ricans—but in terms of literary records, these problems are moot. Both groups—those who were born in the United States and those who left their countries as emigrants or exiles—come to feel that their home is “neither here nor there,” exemplifying a polarized identity and a common sense of marginality. Through nostalgic remembrances and memories of their ancestors or their own countries, writers create an idealized homeland as a key source of reference. They write in Spanish, English, or in both, according to personal experiences and objectives. For example, Rosario Ferré, a leading Puerto Rican writer, wrote The House on the Lagoon (1995) in English; the migrated Puerto Rican Esmeralda Santiago translated her novel When I Was Puerto Rican (1993) into Spanish to reach more Latino readers.

Regardless of their status as native or migrated Latinos, writers often indicate sociocultural hybridism and a need to preserve roots by including Spanish words and expressions in English text. Such switching from one language to another reflects the recognition of a double identity, Hispanic and Anglo, in New York–born Puerto Rican Nicholasa Mohr’s Nilda (1973), New York-born Cuban Oscar Hijuelos’ Our House in the Last World (1983), Puerto Rican Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Silent Dancing (1990), Dominican Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), and Cuban Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992). In these works, the rendering of growing up Latino in America includes self-exploration through writing as an act of artistic survival.

Puerto Ricans have migrated to the United States in search of a better life. Those settled in New York became known as Nuyoricans. A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches (1961), the landmark work of essays and reminiscences by the Puerto Rican activist Jesús Colón, marks the birth of Nuyorican literature. Written in English with the inclusion of colloquial Puerto Rican Spanish, Colón’s book depicts the brutal existence of young immigrants in the barrio. Piri Thomas, born in New York, documents dehumanizing life in urban streets and prison in the autobiographical classic Down These Mean Streets (1967) and in Seven Long Times (1994), as Miguel Piñero does in his play Short Eyes (1975).

Pedro Pietri’s Puerto Rican Obituary (1973), Mohr’s El Bronx Remembered (1975), In Nueva York (1977), and Rituals of Survival: A Woman’s Portfolio (1985), Edward Rivera’s Family Installments: Memories of Growing Up Hispanic (1982), Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican, and Alba Ambert’s A Perfect Silence (1995) portray survival strategies and the courage needed by underprivileged youth.

Ed Vega’s novel The Comeback (1985) and short fiction Mendoza’s Dreams (1987) offer a Puerto Rican interpretation of the American Dream. Vega’s Casualty Report (1991) chronicles the death of dreams in the face of racism, poverty, and crime. Victor Rodriguez’s novel Eldorado in East Harlem (1992) depicts nostalgia for the island and dreams of making it on the mainland. Nuyorican poetry, inspired by Caribbean rhythms of African origin, exhibits pride in Victor Hernández Cruz’s Mainland (1973), Tropicalization (1976), and By Lingual Wholes (1982). Miguel Algarín’s On Call (1980), Miguel Piñero’s La Bodega Sold Dreams (1985), and Tato Laviera’s La Carreta Made a U-Turn (1979), Enclave (1981), AmeRícan (1985), and Mainstream Ethics (1988) affirm that Latinos must lay claim to territory in the literary and cultural mainstream because Latinos are transforming the national American identity. Mohr and Laviera also write about discrimination in Puerto Rico against Nuyoricans, who are marginalized as gringos.

The major Cuban wave of immigration to the United States occurred after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Typically middle-class political refugees, hoping to return home soon, older Cuban writers distanced themselves from the US mainstream experience and wrote in Spanish. Most often settled in Miami, Cuban writers focused on the exile experience. Younger writers who arrived in their teens or early twenties, such as Eliana Rivero, Achy Obejas, Rafael Catalá, and Dolores Prida identified with the social struggles of minority groups. Spanish remained the primary language, and bilingual discourse captured their sense of a divided self, questioning the values of both cultures—the ancestral and the adopted one. Many of those who came on the 1980 Mariel boatlift focused on political and sexual persecution in Fidel Castro’s Cuba and exile experiences, as exemplified in Reinaldo Arenas’s works.

Virgil Suárez, the author of two novels, Latin Jazz (1989) and The Cutter (1991), and the short fiction collection Welcome to the Oasis and Other Stories (1992), which shows the United States through the eyes of a recent arrival from the Mariel boatlift, explores generational change in Havana Thursdays: A Documentary Novel (1995), noting that sorrow and joys transcend ethnicity. Suárez has also edited Paper Dance: Fifty-Five Latino Poets (1995). Roberto Fernández portrays the Cuban American experience in the satirical Raining Backwards (1988) and Holy Radishes (1995). Elías Miguel Muñoz’s musical theater adaptation of the novel Crazy Love (1988) had a successful run in 1990. Muñoz’s poetic novel The Greatest Performance (1991) reflects cultural and sexual alienation.

Oscar Hijuelos, born in New York, recalls the rich Afro-Cuban musical tradition in The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989). This novel, a 1990 Pulitzer Prize winner, was made into a film. Hijuelos reflects on exile in The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien and depicts goodwill in ethnically divided urban America in Mr. Ives’ Christmas (1995). Pablo Medina shares personal recollections in Exiled Memories: A Cuban Childhood (1990) and examines the spiritual and material effects of exile in his novel The Marks of Birth (1994). Gustavo Pérez Firmat, poet and fiction writer, reveals exposure to cultural differences in his memoir Next Year in Cuba: A Cubano’s Coming of Age in America (1995). Editor Rodolfo Cortina’s Cuban-American Theater (1992) includes works by leading playwrights concerned about exile, culture clash, the generational gap, and discrimination.

Latina writers combine the Hispanic experience with a feminist overview of women’s lives in American society. Doubly marginalized as women and as Latinas, Latina writers approach myths of religion and marriage with a critical look at Catholicism. Dolores Prida, a Cuban American journalist, poet, playwright, actress, and director, addresses ethnic identity, assimilation, and women’s sexuality with feminist satire—American style—in her musical Beautiful Señoritas (1977) and in Coser y Cantar: A One-Act Bilingual Fantasy for Two Women (1981). Sandra María Esteves, a Nuyorican poet, painter, and actress, who shows women’s poetic militancy in Yerba Buena (1981), blends the realities of the urban poor with spiritual, blues, and women’s poetics in Bluestown Mockingbird Mambo (1990). The novel In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) by Julia Alvarez describes the horrors lived by four sisters under Rafáel Trujillo’s dictatorship; as in her family saga How the García Girls Lost Their Accents she explores life in exile and return to the homeland in the poems of The Other Side-El Otro Lado (1995).

An important development since the early 1980s has been a growing interest by mainstream media and academic scholarship in Latino literary discourse. Critical and historical studies have been describing the evolving Latino culture. Readings in anthologies edited by Latinos, representing a whole spectrum of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and political experiences, are often organized around central themes, such as family, religion, immigration, language, and the arts.

Historical overviews, contexts, and approaches are to be found in anthologies such as Miguel Algarín and Piñero’s Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings (1975), Francisco Jiménez and Gary Keller’s Hispanics in the United States: An Anthology of Creative Literature (1979), Evangelina Vigil’s Woman of Her Word: Hispanic Women Write (1983), Alma Gómez, Mariana Romo-Carmona, and Cherríe Moraga’s Cuentos: Stories by Latinas (1983), Carolina Hospital’s Los Atrevidos: Cuban American Writers (1988), Delia Poey and Suárez’s Iguana Dreams: New Latino Fiction (1992), Nicolás Kanellos’s Short Fiction by Hispanic Writers of the United States (1993), Harold Augenbraum and Ilan Stavans’s Growing Up Latino: Memoirs and Stories (1993), and Roberta Fernández’s In Other Words: Literature by Latinas of the United States (1994).

Chronicling of the Latino immigrant experience continued into the twenty-first century, with crucial work by Dominican American writer Junot Díaz, whose novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. Other prominent Hispanic writers active in the twenty-first century included Giannina Braschi, Sergio Troncoso, and Alisa Valdes, among many others. LGBT Hispanic writers gained a notable presence too, such as gay Chicano writer Rigoberto González and science fiction writer Carmen Maria Machado.

Impact

Latino writers chronicling the Hispanic experience in America have taken center stage, receiving recognition through prizes and awards. The nature of the bilingual texts, giving voice to lives attempting to come to terms with intertwined cultures, has led to the consideration of a redefinition of the literary canon. Latino American writings, with differences of voice, style, and expression, have become part of American literary life, making it more representative and contributing to the cultural identity of North America.

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