Abstract
One of the chief cultural dynamics in the contemporary United States is the omnipresent commodity fetishism that drives its consumer society, so it comes as little surprise that this figures prominently in the attempts of much contemporary U.S. Latina/o fiction to come to terms with the social milieu of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century United States. This essay argues that Helena Maria Viramontes’s Miss Clairol, Sandra Cisneros’s Barbie-Q, and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao each manifest a deep-seated ambivalence towards commodity fetishism: an awareness of how the agency to break with traditionalist modes of being and some measure of cultural assimilation might be achieved through engagement with fetishized attributes commodities place on offer, yet one that is tempered by an appreciation of the dangers such as alienation and cultural homogenization that also proceed from immersion in a world defined by commodity fetishized relations.
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