Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size This investigation was supported by the University of Kansas General Research Fund allocation #2301127-003. Revisions were supported in part by a Fellowship from the University of Kansas Hall Center for the Humanities. Notes Very recent U.S. Latina/o novels, such as those by Cristina García and Junot Díaz, move increasingly away from this paradigm. For an extended discussion of how U.S. Latino/a writers have (or more often, have not) dealt with the notion of a “Latino” identity that encompasses various national-origin groups, see my book, On Latinidad. The relative dearth until quite recently of U.S.-Central American literary texts that have seen print through U.S. publishing houses is not synonymous with an absence of literary production by U.S. Central Americans. A Central American presence in the United States dates back to the early twentieth century, linked to U.S. investment in the Salvadoran coffee trade and to the dominance of the United Fruit Company in banana production (Hamilton and Stoltz Chinchilla 23–25). New Orleans is home to one of the oldest and largest communities of Honduran Americans in the United States; it has also historically been a site of Spanish literary activity in the United States through Spanish-language journals and newspapers (Lima 354, 358). However, the booming popular and academic market for Latino/a literary texts within the last two decades or so has dramatically increased publishing venues and opportunities for U.S.-Central American letters. Arias identifies The Tattooed Soldier as the “first novel written in English by a Guatemalan-American author” (169), although that distinction might more properly go to Goldman's earlier novel The Long Night of White Chickens (1992), depending on whom we decide to “count” as a Guatemalan American author. Goldman was born in New York in 1954; his mother was Guatemalan, his father Jewish American. Tobar, like Goldman, was born in the United States—in his case, to parents who both immigrated from Guatemala in 1962. According to Tobar's own autobiographical account in Translation Nation, his mother was already pregnant with him at the time (4). As Marcelo Suárez-Orozco and Mariela Páez have put it, “Latinos are made in the USA” (4; see also Jones-Correa and Leal 229). Of course, Mexican immigrants and Puerto Ricans living in the continental United States are themselves largely separated by citizenship rights. In one telling illustration of the problems and tensions concealed by panethnic labels like “Latino,” some advocacy groups were reportedly angered and frustrated by the results of the 2000 census, in which specific Central American populations in U.S. cities were underreported (Barreto 39–40, 45–47). Matt Barreto, noting that Salvadorans and Guatemalans were two of the most under-counted groups, has explained: “Changes in the census form have potentially resulted in less recognition and fewer resources for specific Latino communities living in the United States…. The political implications of misidentification are clear for advocacy organizations and city planning departments” (40, 47). What such controversy underscores is the point that different Latino immigrant groups have different needs, which cannot simply be addressed by “counting” them all as “Latinos.” See, for example, the discussion of historically Mexican and Puerto Rican neighborhoods in Chicago in Felix Padilla's Latino Ethnic Consciousness (20–22, 40–42). As De Genova and Ramos-Zayas have written more recently of these neighborhoods, “In Chicago, one of the most racially segregated cities in the U.S., ubiquitous distinctions about ‘neighborhoods’ are virtually inseparable from their…racial and also class-inflected meanings…. [T]he mere mention of ‘Humboldt Park’ signaled…a particularly stigmatized image of ‘Puerto Rican’-ness, associated with criminality, poverty, and ‘welfare dependency'…. Similarly, a simple reference to ‘26th Street’ could automatically trigger discourses about Mexican ‘illegal aliens’ or ‘gangs'” (32). As the authors point out, these associations held true even in the minds of Mexicans (about Puerto Ricans), and vice versa, suggesting the degree to which “ethnic enclaves” do not automatically signal the spacial grounds for panethnic identity formation or for incorporation of diverse “Latino” groups. Juan Gonzalez has emphasized differences between the “stable ethnic enclaves” of prior generations of Latinos and the new influx of Central Americans in the 1980s and 1990s (140). As Hamilton and Stoltz Chinchilla note in Seeking Community in a Global City: Guatemalans and Salvadorans in Los Angeles, the 1980s saw a dramatic upswing in Salvadoran and Guatemalan emigration, while the economic crisis in Mexico made it an increasingly difficult endpoint for that migration flow (33). The Salvadoran population in the United States rose by more than 500 percent between 1980 and 1990 (Menjívar 6). In 2005, the percentage of Latinos in the United States who were of Central American descent had risen to 7.5 percent, exceeding the percentage of Latinos who were Cuban (3.5%) or Dominican (2.7%) (Pew Hispanic Center, Table 3); the estimated number of unauthorized Central American migrants residing in the United States was almost 1.4 million (Passel 6). Alejandro Portes elaborates that members of transnational communities “are at least bilingual, move easily between different cultures, frequently maintain homes in two countries, and pursue economic, political, and cultural interests that require a simultaneous presence in both” (76). Indeed, Inderpal Grewal has argued in Transnational America that, rather than “focusing on the mobility and immobility of people as the key to identity formation at the end of the twentieth century,” we should instead recognize that under the conditions of globalization, “those who stayed in one place were just as much transformed by transnational formations as those who moved” (36). See also Escobar, Levitt, and Waters; McClennen 48. This concept of transnationalism, it should be noted, is at odds with a different model that sees transnationalism as virtually synonymous with “postnationalism,” a conceptionalization of the “global order in which the nation-state has become obsolete and other formations for allegiance and identity have taken its place” (Appadurai 169). It would seem a huge leap, however, from the observation that “the nation-state is by no means the only game in town as far as translocal loyalties are concerned” (Appadurai 165) to the argument that it is no longer significantly operative at all (or is on the way to being so) in the formation of loyalties. The latter is increasingly an untenable position in the face of fierce, re-emergent nativism in the United States and the high level of emotionality attached to current rhetoric of reinforcing national borders. In a fascinating study, Michael Jones-Correa and David Leal report that the likelihood of panethnic self-identification (i.e., the use of a term such as “Hispanic” or “Latino” to self-identify) increases by generation; that is, 3rd generation U.S. Latinos/as are more likely to self-identify as “Hispanic” or “Latino” than the 1st or 2nd generation. By contrast, recent immigrants, such as the newer waves of Central Americans, are much more likely to identify by national origin. I borrow and adapt my use of the term “contact zones,” of course, from Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes, where she uses it with reference to “colonial encounters”: the term “refer[s] to the space…in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations” (6). Several critics have referred, in passing, to lingering allegiances and commitments to family and home country politics as “baggage,” finding this an appropriate metaphor for the affective content that they bring with them in their migratory “travels” to their new context. See Castillo 8; Rodriguez 401; Arias 170. See, for instance, Allatson's discussion of the two terms. Dávila cites figures from Strategy Research Corporation's 1998 U.S. Hispanic Market Study. Puerto Ricans, once the largest Latino group in New York by far, represented only 43 percent of New York Latinos by 1998 (Dávila 19). Of course Los Angeles too has seen a growing diversification of its Latino population, and Central American influx to New York, as to Los Angeles, has increased rapidly over the last two decades (Dávila 19). But the primary Central American destination in the United States has been Southern California, where “the concepts of ‘Latino’ and ‘Hispanic’ had long been identified with Mexicans and Mexican Americans” whose presence in the region dated prior to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and whose migration patterns north were much more firmly established. Interactions between rooted Mexican American communities and the newly arrived Central Americans were “sometimes friendly and cooperative, [but] sometimes contentious” and marked by inter-group resentments (Hamilton and Stolz Chinchilla 33, 53, 56). As Davis writes of the 1992 L.A. riots, “only a third of the ‘rioters’ incarcerated were Black.” Needless to say, New York has also seen its fair share of racial rioting, including the Harlem Riot of 1935 and the Crown Heights Riot of 1991. These riots, however, have been characterized in the U.S. imagination primarily in terms of black–white or black–Jewish tensions, rather than as inclusive of tensions involving Latinos. Consider, for instance, Helena María Viramontes's rendering of this paradox in her novel of migrant farmworkers, Under the Feet of Jesus. In one passage of the novel, two adolescent laborers discuss the concept of being “stuck.” You know where oil comes from?…If we don't have oil, we don't have gasoline. Good. We'd stay put then. Stuck, more like it. Stuck. Aren't we now? (86) Estrella, the novel's protagonist, recognizes that mobility across space in no way guarantees social mobility—in fact, the economically-forced mobility of the migrants' lives (they must follow the crop harvests in order to scrape a living) is one characteristic of their being “stuck.” This meditation would seem to rub against Rodriguez's claim that the characters' political differences are momentarily “suspended” (406); rather, the thrust of such passages is to suggest that those differences might never have been all that pronounced to begin with. See, for example, Rumbaut 75. For an excellent article on this aspect of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, see Davis. Additional informationNotes on contributorsMarta Caminero-SantangeloMarta Caminero-Santangelo is Professor and Chair of the English Department at the University of Kansas. She is the author of On Latinidad: US Latino Literature and the Construction of Ethnicity and The Madwoman Can't Speak: Or Why Insanity is Not Subversive.