Literatures of the Americas, Latinidad, and the Re-Formation of Multi-Ethnic Literatures

Abstract

In December 2002, The New York Times informed readers of a linguistics study that compares pronoun usage among Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, and Mexican communities in New York City. This study of consequences of collision of Spanish dialects in New York is motivated by a root interest in the evolution of Latino identity in city and beyond. If linguists find dialects converging, they say may signal rise of a New York Spanish and perhaps signify an eventual of identities too. Professor Richard Otheguy explains, it could suggest that Latinos in New York are thinking of themselves less as members of national groups than they did in past and more as members of a broader community. However, he also emphasizes the possibility may be that contact with other Hispanics does not create a sense of Hispanic fraternity but just opposite. It creates a sense of wanting to be not mistaken for Mexican or Cuban. 'I want to be Ecuadorean' (Scott, B1). Among other things, this study and its rationale suggests a shift in how nation is figured in contemporary discussions of ethnic identity in United States. Together, these immigrants from across Americas (Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Central America, Mexico, etc.) and linguists who parse their dialects demonstrate persistence of national identifications in Latino communities. And yet linguists' study and its guiding questions also suggest a perceived convergence of these groups into a new Latino identity and community in United States. In tracing linguistic origin point of a US-based latinidud, these scholars are participating in academic growth industry located at intersection of diasporic migration orders and dynamics of US ethnic community formations. Such enterprises are flourishing partly because of rising media interest in the Hispanic population explosion, but more importantly, I argue, also because example of Latinos suggests a number of cataclysmic shifts in how we understand ethnicity and community in United States. (1) Recently, Romain de la Campa offered model of split state as a means of conceptualizing these Latino communities in US who maintain economic, familial, and cultural ties to various homeland nations in Latin America and Caribbean from which (and to which) they migrate. (2) Numerous scholars working in many subfields of US ethnic studies are likewise concerned with constitutive transnational histories and relations that define contemporary conditions of minority ethnic communities in United States and elsewhere. (3) These projects highlight multiple national imaginaries (and government policies and economies) that constitute cultural and demographic realities in a transnational, multicultural United States in this epoch of globalization. Likewise, study of literatures has begun to acknowledge its own transnational and diasporic dimensions. In contrast, and perhaps with these trends in mind, MELUS editor Joseph Skerrett in 1998 describes his understanding of ethnic literatures in US as an fashioned construction of field (1). In Skerrett's view, multi-ethnic literatures need to reflect the range and depth of literary output of particular ethnic communities in US, which he defines by nation-state origins. Thus, Skerrett bemoans paucity of scholarship that prevented MEL US from being able to devote whole issues to Puerto Rican or Cuban-American or Brazilian-American Literature, but instead generated umbrella Latino/a Issue in 1998 (1). The paradigm of ethnic Americans that Skerrett invokes runs counter to most discussions of latinidad, as well as implicit de sign of those linguists who anticipate emergence of a New York Latino identity that reflects new political formations and goals rather than old nation-state origins and histories. …