Latina Writers Research Articles

Confronting the Wound: Feminicidio on the US-Mexico Border

Abstract: This essay focuses on the social crisis Brown subalternized women have faced in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, since the early 1990s. I study counterhegemonic representations of the Juárez feminicides to bring out of the shadows the tacit, and tangible, social, cultural, spiritual, and even physical repercussions of these murders. Stemming from the “theories of the flesh” put forward by Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004), Cherríe Moraga (b. 1952), and other Chicana and Latina writers and scholars, I investigate manifestations of the wound in Lourdes Portillo’s highly acclaimed documentary Señorita Extraviada (2001) and Mexican film director Carlos Pérez Osorio’s Netflix documentary The Three Deaths of Marisela Escobedo (2020), along with Marisela Treviño Orta’s play Braided Sorrow (2005). Drawing on Stephanie Fetta’s theories of the soma and somatic analysis, I examine testimonios and other articulations and renderings of the wound as a means of discussing the internalized and somatic responses to the psychosocial repercussions brought forth by this wave of feminicides.

Latinos & Latinas in American Sport: Stories Beyond Peloteros ed. by Jorge Iber

Reviewed by: Latinos & Latinas in American Sport: Stories Beyond Peloteros ed. by Jorge Iber Samuel O. Regalado Latinos & Latinas in American Sport: Stories Beyond Peloteros. Edited by Jorge Iber. (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2019. Pp. 272. Notes, index.) It is with great satisfaction that I have witnessed Latinos and Latinas gain vital ground in United States sports history. Since the late 1980s, academic publishers, with a keen sense of their business and of changing demographics in academia, have tapped into this new scholarly vein and recruited young Latinx researchers, many still in doctoral programs, to become authors. This new generation bore fruit in the form of monographs, journal articles, and anthologies. After 2000, historian Jorge Iber, through his early work on Mexican American sport, emerged in the top tier of scholars who have taken Latinx sports history to a new level. Iber was well positioned to pull together a team of scholars for his latest contribution, the aptly named anthology, Latinos & Latinas in American Sport: Stories Beyond Peloteros. Their expertise and contributions are vast, pinpointing Latinx sporting experience within the context of family, community, nationalism, diplomacy, gender, and race. Furthermore, alongside the familiar sports of baseball and football, readers will find competitions like drag racing as historical conduits for Latinx opportunity and also observe the impact of sport on the lives and communities of individuals like "Nemo" Herrera and Wally Rodríguez. The book features thirteen essays packed nicely into 259 pages of text and endnotes presented in a remarkably consistent format, given the diverse disciplines of its contributors. Of the thirteen essays, six are from history, two are from English, and one each are from American studies, journalism, and political science, and investigative reporting. The thirteenth is Iber's conclusion. Such consistency results in a reading experience that is clear and manageable. And on this count, Iber's experience with anthologies is strongly demonstrated. For all of the book's merit, the absence of a Latina contributor is not unnoticed. And this is not for lack of subject matter, as there is ample material from which an ambitious researcher might draw. Thankfully, Ben Chappell's work on Latinas and softball tournaments, Gary Selber's look at high school girls in basketball, and the essay by Paul Cuadaros, who observed the advancement of Latina integration through soccer, all satisfy that vacuum. This, however, was not an oversight on Iber's part. Latina writers of sport history, if any, are few and far between. Indeed, if there is a [End Page 363] drawback in this research area, this would be it. In short, a Latina perspective is sorely in need. Nonetheless, this anthology is a real gem, especially for those wishing to get into the weeds to uncover the dynamics and evolution of U.S. ethnic communities and to explore the impact Latinx sports figures made on a larger scale. Along with historians, students in ethnic studies, American studies, and political science will benefit from this collection. Indeed, these essays describe a distinctive part of the overall story of the United States and its people. And it is to Jorge Iber's credit and astuteness that he recognized it. Samuel O. Regalado California State University, Stanislaus Copyright © 2021 The Texas State Historical Association

Not With the Program: Sandra Cisneros on Feeling and Being a Latina Writer in the Program Era

This essay examines Sandra Cisneros's experience as a Latina writer in the Iowa Writers' Workshop during what Mark McGurl calls the Program Era. Through readings of her 1984 The House on Mango Street and her 2015 autobiographical book A House of My Own, this essay complicates standing theorizations of Program Era affects and emotions in order to develop a deeper understanding of the Program Era as a period of literary history. Integrating affect theory and other scholarship on emotion with Cisneros's writing, the essay lays out the variety of textured feelings and attachments related to the Program Era experience, especially for writers of color and women writers. Readings of The House on Mango Street elucidate in particular Cisneros's theory and aesthetics of esperanza—an understudied, wistful sort of hope conceptualized in the character of Esperanza. Through esperanza, Cisneros forges a mode of creative practice that nourishes hope, even amidst structural harm.

Casi Víspera / Colibrí Resucitado Crónica

AbstractSusana Chávez-Silverman is a Califas-born U.S. Latina writer and flaneuse who (against all odds) is also an educator, although she mostly laments what’s happened to la cacademia over the last decade or so. She still finds joy and hope in being la High Priestess of SLOW to her students and former students, some of which are among her closest compinches. Of the two crónicas included in this special curated issue of cultural works in PORTAL under the theme Transitions and Dislocations, she says: ‘My writing/life took a major detour in 2016. For most of the year, I wrote nothing at all. Or rather, nothing except e-mail after email: to administrators, colleagues all over the world, attorneys, friends and relatives. I had scheduled my sabbatical in order to finish a book project, but had been derailed by a Title IX investigation and plagiarism case at my home institution, and the accompanying anxiety and anger . I returned to my book over the summer, culling and editing hundreds of pages of primary texts (letters and emails). But this book is much longer—and truer—than anything I’ve written before and takes a different kind of writing energy, uninterrupted time, and commitment. Writing from a place of anger and anxiety doesn’t serve this book. The two crónicas included in this special curated issue are not part of my book in progress, Our Ubuntu, Montenegro: del Balboa Café al Apartheid and Back. Rather, they were my way of easing back into my (he)art space. ‘Casi Víspera’ proves I did write something in 2016 after all (other than email, I mean)—I had no memory of it until early this year! ‘Black Holes’ talks about precisely this (remembering and not). I was determined not to let 2016’s plagiarism/Title IX toxic double helix continue to poison me. I wanted to begin 2017 with a bang, and wrote this for my son, for his 30th birthday.’

Black Holes—Deshielo Crónica

AbstractSusana Chávez-Silverman is a Califas-born U.S. Latina writer and flaneuse who (against all odds) is also an educator, although she mostly laments what’s happened to la cacademia over the last decade or so. She still finds joy and hope in being la High Priestess of SLOW to her students and former students, some of which are among her closest compinches. Of the two crónicas included in this special curated issue of cultural works in PORTAL under the theme Transitions and Dislocations, she says: ‘My writing/life took a major detour in 2016. For most of the year, I wrote nothing at all. Or rather, nothing except e-mail after email: to administrators, colleagues all over the world, attorneys, friends and relatives. I had scheduled my sabbatical in order to finish a book project, but had been derailed by a Title IX investigation and plagiarism case at my home institution, and the accompanying anxiety and anger . I returned to my book over the summer, culling and editing hundreds of pages of primary texts (letters and emails). But this book is much longer—and truer—than anything I’ve written before and takes a different kind of writing energy, uninterrupted time, and commitment. Writing from a place of anger and anxiety doesn’t serve this book. The two crónicas included in this special curated issue are not part of my book in progress, Our Ubuntu, Montenegro: del Balboa Café al Apartheid and Back. Rather, they were my way of easing back into my (he)art space. ‘Casi Víspera’ proves I did write something in 2016 after all (other than email, I mean)—I had no memory of it until early this year! ‘Black Holes’ talks about precisely this (remembering and not). I was determined not to let 2016’s plagiarism/Title IX toxic double helix continue to poison me. I wanted to begin 2017 with a bang, and wrote this for my son, for his 30th birthday.’

The translation of identity on the frontera. Sandra Cisneros in Mexican Spanish, Galician and Catalan

Apart from referring to a geographical or physical border, the notion of frontera has also become a metaphorical or psychological construct which represents any situation of contrast, such as belonging to two different national, cultural or linguistic communities. Latino writers in the United States live and write on the frontera. The coming together of two cultures forges a new hybrid identity which fights against essentialism and homogenization. This hybrid identity is reflected in these writers’ language, a border tongue constantly switching from English to Spanish. Sandra Cisneros is one of those Latina writers who resort to code-switching as an identity hallmark. By introducing Spanish words, phrases or syntactic constructions into her English texts, Cisneros tries to evoke the feeling of inhabiting two worlds which can be conflicting and complementary at the same time. Departing from the notion of frontera, several translations of Cisneros’s works are analysed, paying special attention to those aspects related to identity and language. Particularly, I focus on the Mexican Spanish, Galician and Catalan versions of The House on Mango Street, the translation of Woman Hollering Creek into Mexican Spanish, the Catalan versions of several short stories from Woman Hollering Creek and the Galician translation of Loose Woman. In all the analysed versions, the translators use strategies which reflect the border identity present in the source text, such as the resource to code-switching and typographical markers or the use of calques and other borrowings, dialectalisms, and non-standard vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar.

Troubling Nationhood in U.S Latina Literature: Explorations of Place and Belonging MayaSocolovsky. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013.

Troubling Nationhood in U.S Latina Literature: Explorations of Place and Belonging Maya Socolovsky. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013.During 1990s and 2000s US Latinas produced a surge of literary narratives that explore intersection of place and identity within reimagined borders. In Troubling Nationhood in U.S. Latina Literature, Maya Socolovsky analyzes texts of six feminist Latina writers, writing from liminal zones, whose narratives act as sites of cultural resistance against xenophobic US rhetoric of nationhood which positions Latinos/as as outsiders. Socolovsky argues that Latino/a literary narratives imagine collective geographical, political, and cultural presence, where Latina America becomes part of, not apart from, political and national identity of United States (3). These texts reconceptualize Latina identity through a rhetoric of belonging-one that challenges hegemonic US national identification which defines porous national and cultural borders between US and Latin America as an insidious threat to US cultural and political identity while it simultaneously ignores West's history of hemispheric transnationalism and Latino/s presence in United States. In her literary and rhetorical analysis, Socolovsky urges textual readings that reveal process whereby geographical landscapes, cultural practices, and narrative spaces all become intersecting aspects of national identification and experience (5).Taking into consideration panethnic commonalities, Socolovsky divides her book in various ways to promote a remapping of Americas: through geopolitical histories of national-origin groups (Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American), geographic regions (Southwest, Midwest, Puerto Rican and Cuban island and mainland experiences), and racial identities (Native American, African, and mestizaje). Rooted in Borderland and Hispanic Studies, Socolovsky's study emphasizes interconnectedness of regional landscape and women's sense of survival and maintains that the literature creates, suggests, or reveals radical social change (6). Through storytelling, writers of US Latina boom expose physical and psychological trauma of 'othering' while asserting their belonging to/in same nation that denies them agency and autonomy.Socolovsky begins with Denise Chavez's portrayal of female body as site of cultural ills in The Last of Menu Girls (1986) and Face of an Angel (1994). In these texts, generations of abuse represent (and are a consequence of) violent national histories in Southwestern region of US. Chavez provides a metaphor for cultural healing in her portrayal of Latinas overcoming familial and institutional cruelty, specifically through writing process, while redefining American to include indigenous identities of Americas. …

An Angle of vision: women writers on their poor and working-class roots

Lorraine Lopez, ed. An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on Their Poor and WorkingClass Roots. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan 2009. 203 pp.This is an admirable, if not entirely successful attempt by a Latina writer assemble a collection of memoirs of women writers who have through education crossed class borders become successful writers whose works give voice other women from poor and/or working-class backgrounds. The editor of this anthology has chosen for inclusion writers who, in main, were driven by writing to reach beyond their beginnings and inspire others who grew up in poor or working-class homes (3). Each contributor is carefully identified at close of book by a useful bio-bibliographical sketch: Dorothy Allison, Joy Castro, Lisa D. Chavez, Mary Childers, Sandra Cisneros, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Teresa Dovalpage, Maureen Gibbon, Dwonna Goldstone, Joy Harjo, Lorraine M. Lopez, Karen Salyer McElmurray, Amelia Maria de la Luz Montes, Bich Minh Nguyen, Judy Owens, Lynn Pruett, Heather Sellers, and Angela Threatt. In preface of anthology, Lopez offers a clear explanation of purpose of book: ... extend inspiration and direction other women trapped... in crosshairs between desperation and hopelessness (4). Lopez is artistically adept at exploring many layers of theme of the divided self, examining pull between dominant societal values and competing familial pride and dissension. A number of contributors share similar backgrounds of poverty, single motherhood, challenges in educational pursuits, and limiting effects of class that persist despite improved economical and educational conditions.The number and diversity of angles of vision treated in this anthology makes a review of all of essays/memoirs impossible. Hence, we will limit our discussion those essays in which personal, political, and emotional realities and ramifications of poverty are more in evidence than in other essays in book.In collection's first essay, Dorothy Allison, born in 1949 a fifteen-yearold unwed mother and presently living in Northern California, confesses lasting effects of being born poor. Writing for her is cathartic, and her essay outlines beginning of her writing and motivation for her personal stories. Most important for her is not craft of writing, rather emotions she wants her evoke, realizations she wants her readers encounter and undergo such as grief, anger, and change. Alison remarks: Sometimes I was so angry, I wrote stop my own rage (13). The stubborn girls of her mean stories are Southerners and offspring of working class parents who stubbornly endure racist, classist, homophobic, and sexist insults.The essay entitled Queen for a Day by Amelia Maria de la Luz Montes, offers a critical perspective on one of television's earliest versions of reality television, Queen for a Day, audience members of which are from poor, working class backgrounds with sad and sometimes tragic stories. The backtracking method Montes uses in this essay is a very effective tool, as it gives reader and her a chance pinpoint details in her past that correspond her strengths rather than her personal hardships and disappointments. Montes seeks about her mother from DVDs of this television game show whose contestants tell their sad and tragic in hopes that theirs will be judged saddest and one warranting jeweled crown and throne. The prospect of Montes discovering about her mother quickly disappears when Montes views footage of show where her mom is called stage and instead of truth her mom creates a facade, not surprising Montes or reader since No digas was her mother's favorite phrase, don't tell anyone truth, what's really happening. You want put your 'best face' out in public (24). Initially, Montes takes pride in telling a college classmate about her mother's appearance on show. …

When the First World Becomes the Third: The Paradox of Collapsed Borders in Two Novels by Gabriela Alemán

There are concrete reasons why students of literature or Latino/a studies may not have read either of Gabriela Aleman's two novels: neither has been translated into English and Aleman does not fit into pre-established categories of either US of Latina writers. A native of Ecuador, Aleman has published five books of fiction--two novels and three collections of short stories--all of which were written in Spanish. One could imagine Aleman's work appearing in a Spanish class on contemporary Latin literature, but certainly not in a class on Latino/a studies or literature. However, as a writer who is deeply immersed in Latin tradition of writing and actively engaged in realities of development and power, Aleman provides an excellent test for pushing against more traditional conceptualizations of both and Latino/a Literature. She not only explores fluidity of form and genre, but also offers an ambitious conceptualization of contradictory and paradoxical nature inherent to borders of all types. While recent conference and panel themes at Studies Association, Modern Language Association, and Latin Studies Association suggest that inter-American studies is a recent, pressing issue, scholars throughout Americas have for two to three decades considered national borders of United States as both outdated and even misguided when thinking about and examining conceptual paradigms such as Studies. US and Latin scholars such as Jose Saldivar, Donald E. Pease, Sophia A. McClennen, Daniel Mato, Nestor Garcia Canclini, and Jesus Martin-Barbero have long questioned emphasis Studies places on US national borders as legitimizing force behind what we understand as American studies. Under rubrics of inter-American, hemispheric, transamerican, transnational, and postnational studies--all terms that are intimately connected to what is now generally referred to as transnational turn--scholars have argued that Studies is a field of inquiry that extends far beyond national borders of United States. McClennen suggests that one of most encouraging aspects of inter-American studies is its potential for critically engaging previously marginalized works such as those by Brazilian and indigenous writers. McClennen favors an inter-Americanist approach because of its ability to put pressure on nationalist and cultural essentialist epistemes by focusing on ways that culture often transgresses borders, both geographic and identitarian (393). The benefit of inter-American studies is its inherent ability to go beyond stolid, overly determined, and outdated borders while simultaneously turning attention to marginalized voices. For other scholars, such as Debra A. Castillo, turn toward inter-American conceptualizations of literature and culture reflects certain key, hard-to-ignore demographic realities (for example, presence of at least forty million Latinos/as presently residing in US). Castillo suggests that to speak of US without addressing Latin America is to dangerously ignore this undeniable demographic shift. The recent patterns of migration that have brought millions of Latin Americans to United States have had profound implications in Latin America as well. Castillo argues this point by citing work of Garcia Canclini, who writes that the actual condition of latin America exceeds borders of its territory.... latin America is not complete in Latin America. Its image is reflected back by mirrors dispersed throughout archipelago of migrations (qtd. in Castillo 4). (1) Castillo's citation of Garcia Canclini draws attention to notion that a collective understanding of identity is a process that transcends geography. As an idea, Latin America is manifest in lives of Latin Americans in Latin America, but idea is incomplete without consideration of Latin lives developing beyond geographical confines of region. …

"An Eloquent and Impassioned Plea": The Rhetoric of Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don

"An Eloquent and Impassioned Plea":The Rhetoric of Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don Elisa Warford (bio) Since Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita's publication of a new edition of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don in 1992, a steadily growing body of work on Ruiz de Burton and her novels has emerged. The critical corpus on her is still not large enough, though, to match her significance in California history and in the literary tradition of Latina writers in California. As the first narrative about the state's Mexican landowners published in English by a Mexican American woman and from the perspective of the conquered Mexican culture, The Squatter and the Don (1885) is remarkable for the ways it complicates nineteenth-century stereotypes of Latin Americans, particularly Latin American women, as several critics have successfully argued. But what is often overlooked is the novel's pervasive rhetorical appeal. The narrator of this "novel with a purpose," as more than one reviewer called it, is constantly aware of her readers and seeks to educate them about the plight of the Californios and to persuade them to take action against the injustices the Californios suffered at the hands of the US government, which promised them the full protection of the law due any citizen of the United States (Ruiz de Burton, Conflicts 568). While the novel did not attract the national audience Ruiz de Burton might have hoped for, contemporaneous reviews uniformly praise it for its stylistic control, "well drawn" characters, "sprightly, natural" dialogue, "entertaining style," and "dramatic power" (Ruiz de Burton, Conflicts 566, 566, 566, 569). The review from the Daily Examiner notes, "people with grievances are not usually popular, as frequently they are wearisome. But this failing cannot be laid to the charge of the author of 'Squatter and the Don.' … The author has managed to combine instances of all these sins of omission and commission in a very pleasant and readable tale" (Ruiz de Burton, Conflicts 565). A large part of Ruiz de Burton's success in creating a "pleasant" tale that also manages to persuade is due in large part to her skillful adaptations of literary forms her audience would have been familiar with. Like The Grapes of Wrath (1939), perhaps the best-known California social protest novel, The Squatter and the Don borrows from [End Page 5] several different genres that are well suited to social protest, including verbatim legislation, the jeremiad, sentimental romance, and naturalism. Such combinations illustrate perfectly Mikhail Bahktin's theory of heteroglossia, which allows for a dialogic interplay of different voices that have not previously been heard. The novel is not merely a lament for a past way of life; as most reviews emphasize, it succeeded in showing that the problems faced by the Californios affected all Californians. In presenting her case, Ruiz de Burton works against popular portrayals of Californios, and she does so brilliantly, dismantling stereotypes and prejudice. The title page of Squatter describes it as "a novel descriptive of contemporary occurrences in California." The book depicts the Alamar family's struggles against a group of "ruffianly" squatters who settle on their land, kill Don Mariano's cattle with impunity, and eventually force the family to retreat from its ranch to San Francisco. In the second half of the novel, the Alamars join forces with other San Diegans to advocate for a much-needed railroad terminus in their city. They find their hopes for the wealth a terminus could bring dashed by government corruption and prejudice. Ruiz de Burton's own life attests to the currency of the Alamars' struggles: while she was writing the novel, she, like the Alamars, was entangled in legal battles over the title of her Jamul, California, ranch. Mariano Vallejo and numerous old Californio families were also struggling to retain their estates and wealth, and many died considerably poorer than they once were. This issue was not a fait accompli. While critics today often classify The Squatter and the Don as historical romance, to do so tacitly acknowledges that the question was already moot at the time of the novel's publication and robs it...

The will to heal: psychological recovery in the novels of Latina writers

The will to heal: psychological recovery in the novels of Latina writers

Creative Memories: Genre, Gender and Language in Latina Autobiographies

Autobiography has become a popular genre among Latina writers. In fact, the most successful Latina texts published during the last two decades such as Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street (1984), Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1992) and Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican (1993), explore identity politics within the autobiographical form. These works are coming- of-age stories which narrate the writers’ experiences as Latinas living and writing in the United States. The aim of this study is to elucidate the literary and geographical boundaries of the self as manifested in women’s works in which national identity and ethnicity impinge on women’s subjectivity. It addresses specifically the intersection between gender, ethnicity and language in Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood and Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican. These works blur the lines between fiction and non-fiction, lived experience and creative expression and engage in a series of boundary crossings: generic, linguistic and national which mirror the writers’ experiences as diasporic female subjects.

Acts of War, Acts of Memory: “Dead-Body Politics” In US Latina Novels of the Salvadoran Civil War

The violence and displacement of the Salvadoran civil war not only destroyed lives, but by dispersing the agents of collective memory it also threatened the foundations of community and identity. US Latina writers Demetria Martinez, Sandra Benitez, and Graciela Limon have begun to reconstruct the memory and history of El Salvador as a way to build a Latino/a community in the United States across national, cultural, and ethnic borders. They transform the Salvadoran body into a representation of the disappeared Salvadoran collective memory, an act of cultural restoration that illuminates the political meaning of the body in contemporary Latino/a literature. These novels point to an emerging intersection not only between art and war but between literature and human rights activism.

A Praxis of Parataxis:Epistemology and Dissonance in Lucha Corpi's Detective Fiction

Chicana novelist and poet Lucha Corpi has been ignored by much of academic literary establishment. She is rarely included in courses on literatures of United States or even in courses on contemporary women writers. Occasionally Corpi's work might appear in a course on multiethnic writers, although most frequently her texts are read in those rare courses focused specifically on Chicana or Latina writers. It is possible to locate some critical appraisals of her literary production, but, for a broader readership, Corpi has been made invisible. This is a loss to our students, our colleagues, and in what will surely sound like hyperbole to our society. In her novels Eulogy for a Brown Angel (hereafter cited as E)1 and Cactus Blood (CB), Corpi challenges conventional portrayals of the Her protagonist Gloria Damasco is not only a Chicano woman but also a middle-aged mother who, at beginning of this series, is employed as a speech therapist hardly a standard vocation, even for an amateur detective. Corpi also uses detective novel, a genre that purportedly has only entertainment value, to engage in serious social critique and to locate contemporary experiences of Chicanas/Chicanos squarely within U.S. society and history. Tim Libretti points out that Corpi joins other contemporary writers such as Sherman Alexie and Walter Mosley who have appropriated popular genre of detective fiction in order ... to forward

Humoring Resistance: Laughter and the Excessive Body in Contemporary Latin American Women's Fiction (review)

220 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies y los resultados del presente volumen, habrá que seguir con atención la expansión bibliográfica y cultural de esta colección y de las instituciones que la arropan. Carlos Javier GarcÃ-a Arizona State University Humoring Resistance: Laughter and the Excessive Body in Contemporary Latin American Women's Fiction SUNY Press, 2004 By Dianna C. Niebylski One ofthe most important documents in contemporary feminist cultural theory is Hélène Cixous's "The Laugh of the Medusa." In it Qxous develops rhe proposition that an effective écriture feminine is characterized by the in-your face defiant, resistance, indeed, repudiational laughter. Since it is held as a maxim of social grace never to laugh uproariously, a maxim adhered to in particular by a lady, Cixousian laughter is clearly uncivilized and unfeminine, in ways that it becomes necessary for feminism (or queer action) to endorse as a form of deconstructing social norms that regulate—and repress—inconvenient forms of social behavior. One recalls the cartoon in The New Yorker in the early days of feminism, in which a woman is flashed by the prototypic Man in a Raincoat. Rather than reacting in Freudian hysteria, the woman doubles over, laughing and pointing. The five Spanish American authors examined here—unfortunately, not really Latin American, since Brazil is excluded: Patricia Galváo, Clarice Lispector, Hilda Hilst could profitably have been included—are all notable as examples of women writers who have not only used laughter as an instrument of resisting patriarchal feminine civility as a way of challenging the restrictions of civilized behavior as that civility understands them, but who have also used bodily excess as a basis for provoking that laughter. It is an excess grounded in the display of the body—the ridiculization of the masculine norm and the underscoring of what that norm may find repulsive in the female body; the discovery of hitherto unheeded manifestations and use of the female body; the body as a sociopolitical ground; the body as a site of the grotesqueries deriving from historical forces. The five authors showcased, each with an in-depth chapter, are Laura Esquivel, Ana Lydia Vega, Luisa Valenzuela, ArmonÃ-a Sommers and Alicia Borinsky. Certainly one can think of many other candidates for inclusion (I particularly regretted the absence of Mayra Santos Febres and Ana Maria Shua; the latter is mentioned twice in passing). But what is valuable is precisely the decision not to construct a laundry list of the healthy array of possible inclusions, but rather, via the detailed analysis of judiciously chosen texts, to provide a model for work on other pertinent authors. Moreover, Niebylski opens with a solid introduction in which she surveys issues relating to laughter and the body and demonstrates a sensitivity for the need simply not to apply Cixous or American feminist theory uncritically to Latin American texts. There are few limitations to this intelligent study. I have already noted the absence of Brazilians despite the title; one could also suggest Latina writers; and some mention ofthe lesbian body and laughter suggests itself as useful (e.g., the Uruguayan Cristina Peri Rossi or the Colombian AlbalucÃ-a Angel, both mentioned once in passing). One final note: there has been some interest of late in referring in Latin American cultural studies to the Manual de urbanidad (1869, with many, many reprints) by Manuel Antonio Carrefio (died 1874). What he has to say on laughter, merriment, and similar topics is a necessary intertext for any Latin American cultural production on resistant laughter. David William Foster Arizona State University ...

Julia Alvarez and the Anxiety of Latina Representation

In this essay, I propose a meditation on the anxiety of representation caused by broken memories that intersect Julia Alvarez's national identity(ies) and self-presentation. I look at select moments in Alvarez's writing practice to ask: How does the Latina writer perform (that is, present, re-present, as well as exaggerate or underplay) individual and national memory and history through fiction and personal, reflective essays? How can the seams between fiction and history, and imagination and fact be examined? And, how do Alvarez's characters mediate this process? Alvarez's writing exposes her plight of identity, caught between assimilation into U.S. mainstream culture and contestation of the very mechanisms of assimilation into mainstream culture.1 Mediating the tension between these two poles, Alvarez undergoes a process of selfinvention through writing that situates her in the center of Latina literature and defines her as a Dominican and diaspora writer par excellence. I suggest that a novel such as How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) can be studied as a testimony of the complexity of memory. With this essay, I elaborate on the ways that migration, loss, and trauma are central themes that inform Alvarez's creative and personal process, exploring memory and recontextualizing history. My analysis reveals more than the dissonances experienced by children who migrate and are bicultural; specifically, it foregrounds the deep psychological problems that manifest themselves through memory, or lack of it, for those who are both challenged by bicultural and bilingual experiences and haunted by a silenced, and escaped, past of state repression.

Reading US Latina Writers: Remapping American Literature

Reading US Latina Writers: Remapping American Literature

Latino and Latina writers

Latino and Latina writers

Reading U.S. Latina writers: remapping American literature

Introduction A.E.Quintana Judith Ortiz Cofer's Silent Dancing F.Aparicio Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories B.Brinson-Curiel Montserrat Fontes' First Confession and/or Dreams of the Centaur N.Cantu Michelle Serror' Chicana Falsa L.Crisler Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera T.Delgadillo Cherrie Moraga's Loving in the War Years D.Espinoza Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies, R.L.Fregoso Julia Alvarez's Yo K.Gaffney Andrea Herrera's The Pearl of the Antilles L.Gil Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban A.Herrera Diana Garcia's When Living Was a Labor Camp J.F.Herrera Marisala Norte's Black Butterfly M.Habell-Pallan Latina dramatists: Irene Fornes Cherrie Moraga Migdalia Cruz T.A.Lopez Rosario Castellanos' The Eternal Feminine E.Marchant Alicia Gaspar de Alba's Mystery of Survival R.Morilla-Sanchez Esmeralda Santiago's Geographies of Home A.Quintana Nicholasa Mohr's A Matter of Pride & Other Stories L.Sanchez Ifeoma Nawanko L.Chambers

"Cold/Hot, English/Spanish": The Puerto Rican American Divide in Judith Ortiz Cofer's "Silent Dancing"

On more than one occasion Rican American writer Judith Ortiz Cofer has been questioned about her use of standard American English to express the bicultural experiences of the immigrant Ricans featured in her poetry and prose fiction. The suggestion that her linguistic selection renders suspect her ethnic identity as well as the authenticity of her literary accounts is never far from the surface of such inquiries. Ortiz Cofer's response, however, has been consistently unapologetic. In a recent interview conducted by Rafael Ocasio, she speaks forcefully about the varied and ever changing character of the Rican experience (Infinite Variety 735), asserting, want my work to be recognized as coming out of the Rican tradition, even though it (734). An earlier interview reports her theorizing even more plainly on the subject: There is not just one reality to being a Rican writer. I am putting together a different view (Ocasio, Puerto Rican Literature 45). Ortiz Cofer's response is significant not only because it rejects facile definitions of cultural identity, definitions based almost exclusively on linguistic proficiency, but more importantly, because it challenges writers and scholars to adopt a more nuanced approach in their investigation of Latin peoples. As Eliana Ortega and Nancy Saporta Sternbach argue in their essay on contemporary Latina literature, it is incumbent upon those in the field of Latin American studies to consider more carefully the ways in which race, class, gender, linguistic affinity, and other social and material circumstances contribute to a more complex, more diversified account of what it means to be a person of Latin origin (7-8). Such is the defining issue at stake not only in Ortiz Cofer's status as an English-dominant Latina writer, (1) but a defining issue at stake in much of her work as well, most notably in her cross-genre autobiography entitled Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Rican Childhood. In addition to being a text that affirms the cultural ethos of an author who sounds from her Spanish-speaking contemporaries, Silent Dancing breaks ground in Latino/a literature by speaking specifically about the bicultural experience of Rican Americans, and by demonstrating the way in which this experience is fundamentally distinct from that found in Chicano/a literature. The purpose of this paper is to chart the nature and source of these differences. In particular, I borrow from Gloria Anzaldua's theories of border identity to argue that the cultural reality encountered by the characters in Silent Dancing is neither random nor monolithically shared, but one that is shaped instead by the unique physical reality that divides these characters from their homeland. Unlike the US Texas-Mexican border which functions prominently in the formation of what Anzaldua calls the new mestiza of Mexican Americans, the Rican American border is not a land formation, and hence it has an entirely different psychic impact on those who traverse it. This notion is one of the most compelling insights of Ortiz Cofer's work. Silent Dancing thus not only troubles the indiscriminate application of Anzaldua's mestiza consciousness to all border culture Latino/as, but, in a much broader sense, it troubles the conclusions of any cultural analysis that would deny the infinite variety of the Latino/a experience. As complex as Silent Dancing is in its alternating combination of poetry and creative nonfiction essay, (2) the story itself is simple: Ortiz Cofer narrates the events of her childhood in a series of chronologically-ordered vignettes that detail her experience as a young girl shuttled back and forth between her grandmother's casa in a small Rican village and her family's American home in Paterson, New Jersey. Ortiz Cofer's father works in the Navy shipyards of Brooklyn Yard, a job that requires him to take leave of his family for months at a time. …