Cultural Citizenship and Agency in the Genre of Chica Lit and Sofia Quintero’s Feminist Intervention

Abstract

What does it mean to claim one’s cultural belonging as a Latina citizen living in the United States? Cultural citizenship accounts for the space between legal and political citizenship: the affective and everyday experience of living within and belonging to a nation state. Latina chick lit, also known as “chica lit,” offers a rewarding site for the study of US cultural belonging. This relatively recent genre, inaugurated in 2003 with Alisa Valdes’s (previously Valdes-Rodriguez) The Dirty Girls Social Club, reflects the culturally blended experiences of US Latinas. Furthermore, the depictions of Latina cultural citizenship found in chica lit contrast sharply with earlier portrayals found in Latina literature published from the 1970s to 1990s. This newer genre, unlike many of these earlier literary works, features characters that often fit seamlessly into US culture. Very little happens in either their lives or in the world around them that disrupts their sense of belonging to, and within, US culture; the Latina characters in these novels seem to possess full cultural citizenship. As comforting as these depictions of Latina protagonists who have achieved full cultural acceptance might be, the “seamless fit” that these characters experience is actually a warped representation of cultural belonging, one that falsely assures readers that Latinidad has been fully incorporated into the US cultural imaginary. This distortion results from these novels’ shared neoliberal conception of agency that centers on individual action and success. However, one novel, Sofia Quintero’s Divas Don’t Yield (2006), presents new forms of Latina identity similar to that found in other chica lit but, unlike its generic siblings, self-consciously offers a corrective to the representations of full cultural belonging found in much of chica lit. Most chica-lit novels, regardless of category, share an ethos of individual empowerment, a quality that creates a false sense of full belonging. Reading Quintero’s novel against other chica lit illustrates how Divas Don’t Yield disrupts the genre’s depiction of neoliberal empowerment by skewing the chick-lit formula as feminist. As a result of adopting feminist beliefs, Quintero’s protagonists understand their position within US class and racial hierarchies and recognize the ways that US cultural and social forces constrain their agency and produce for them an incomplete and partial cultural citizenship.