Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature ed. by Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera

Abstract

Reviewed by: Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature ed. by Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera Angel Daniel Matos (bio) Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature, edited by Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera. UP of Mississippi, 2020. In the forum on Latinx Young Adult Literature published in volume 47 of Children's Literature, Marilisa Jiménez García introduces the compilation of essays by highlighting how Latinx literature pushes scholars to question what people and experiences are often excluded from academic discourse. In particular, Jiménez García highlights the potential that Latinx literature possesses to reframe and recontextualize our critical and pedagogical relationship with youth literatures and cultures: "Latinx literature is a liminal space daring us to transcend disciplines and borders, asking us to go beyond our neat definitions" (7). In addition to underscoring the critical potentialities of Latinx youth literatures, Jiménez García urges scholars to resist the homogenizing pressures of perpetuating a single story through our research and to move beyond mainstream narratives that frame Latinxs as "light-skinned [End Page 277] Spanish speakers" (6). In more ways than one, Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera's Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature (henceforth Nerds) not only celebrates people, experiences, and texts that push us to rethink normative understandings of young Latinx life, but further complies with Jiménez García's call for critical interventions that push us to acknowledge the complexity, richness, and paradoxes present in multiple representations of Latinx experience. This exemplifies a crucial intervention within the field of young adult literature, especially within the intersection of Latinx literature, youth cultures, and existing conversations on marginalization and liminality in teen cultural productions. The essays in Nerds scrutinize representations of teen Latinx life that contest or pressure mainstream narratives that associate these teens with "cool" and "hip" practices and beliefs. Most of the essays focus on teens who would commonly be described as "uncool," or that challenge the stereotypical representation of Latinx adolescents in literature and media. Additionally, the essays push readers to interrogate the ways in which "uncool" and ostracized teens must negotiate their outsider status given their positionality as members of marginalized Latinx communities. Although Nerds could have implemented a more robust introductory framework that would assist readers in further understanding the tensions that exist between Latinx contexts and "uncool" experiences and identities—which are often aligned with frameworks pertaining to ideological whiteness—this collection excels at highlighting new, unprecedented, and academically rigorous ways of thinking about Chicanx and Latinx young adult literature. The volume succeeds in its mission to challenge normative and monolithic notions of what teen Latinx life looks and feels like—and in the process, it pushes readers to engage in necessary, albeit difficult conversations on topics such as cultural authenticity and the limits of mainstream representations. Nerds is organized into four overarching sections, and each of these is focused on Latinx teen characters who embody different types of marginalized or "outsider" identities: artists and creators, superheroes and nonhuman beings, nerds and academically driven teens, and "non-cholo" characters who contest norms of gender and sexuality. The first section, "Artists and Punks," more specifically focuses on characters who are outsiders given their creative interests—with a particular attention in young Latinx women who engage with writing and zine crafting as a way of negotiating their liminal positionalities. The section opens with Amanda Ellis's "Chicana Teens, Zines, and Poetry [End Page 278] Scenes: Gabi, A Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero," which traces how Quintero's book offers a gripping representation of a geeky Chicana feminist by highlighting the transformative and political potential of creative writing and journaling. Lettycia Terrones's standout essay, "Praxis of Refusal: Self-Fashioning Identity and Throwing Attitude in Pérez's The First Rule of Punk," examines the social challenges that bicultural and mix-raced girls often experience, focusing particularly on how the protagonist of Celia C. Pérez's middle-grade novel invokes a punk-rock sensibility in order to develop an activist-oriented identity that resists assimilative pressures. Terrones's essay rigorously grapples...