Ralph E. Rodriguez
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780823279234
- eISBN:
- 9780823281442
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823279234.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
Since the 1990s, there has been unparalleled growth in the literary output from an ever more diverse group of Latinx writers. The extant criticism, however, has yet to catch up with the diversity of ...
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Since the 1990s, there has been unparalleled growth in the literary output from an ever more diverse group of Latinx writers. The extant criticism, however, has yet to catch up with the diversity of writers we label Latinx and the range of themes about which they write. Little sustained scholarly attention has been paid, moreover, to the very category—Latinx—under which we group this literature. Latinx Literature Unbound, thus, begins with a fundamental question “What does it mean to label a work of literature or an entire corpus of literature Latinx?” From this question a host of others spin out: What does that grouping allow us to see, predispose us to see, and preclude us from seeing? If the grouping—which brings together a heterogeneous collection of people and groups under a seemingly homogeneous label—tells us something meaningful, is there a poetics we can develop that would facilitate our analysis of this literature? In answering these questions, Latinx Literature Unbound seeks to unbind Latinx literature from taken-for-granted critical assumptions about identity and theme. It argues that there may be more salubrious taxonomies than Latinx for organizing and analyzing this literature. Following a neo-formalist interpretive model that privileges reading as a temporal, meaning-making event, the book argues that genre may be a more durable category for analyzing this literature. Finally, Latinx Literature Unbound suggests some ways in which we might want to proceed as we move forward with future studies of the writing we have come to identify as Latinx.Less
Since the 1990s, there has been unparalleled growth in the literary output from an ever more diverse group of Latinx writers. The extant criticism, however, has yet to catch up with the diversity of writers we label Latinx and the range of themes about which they write. Little sustained scholarly attention has been paid, moreover, to the very category—Latinx—under which we group this literature. Latinx Literature Unbound, thus, begins with a fundamental question “What does it mean to label a work of literature or an entire corpus of literature Latinx?” From this question a host of others spin out: What does that grouping allow us to see, predispose us to see, and preclude us from seeing? If the grouping—which brings together a heterogeneous collection of people and groups under a seemingly homogeneous label—tells us something meaningful, is there a poetics we can develop that would facilitate our analysis of this literature? In answering these questions, Latinx Literature Unbound seeks to unbind Latinx literature from taken-for-granted critical assumptions about identity and theme. It argues that there may be more salubrious taxonomies than Latinx for organizing and analyzing this literature. Following a neo-formalist interpretive model that privileges reading as a temporal, meaning-making event, the book argues that genre may be a more durable category for analyzing this literature. Finally, Latinx Literature Unbound suggests some ways in which we might want to proceed as we move forward with future studies of the writing we have come to identify as Latinx.
Juan D. De Lara
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520289581
- eISBN:
- 9780520964181
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520289581.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
This book uses Southern California to explore a series of questions about the relationship between globalization, race, space, and class. It begins with an analysis of how growing consumer demand, ...
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This book uses Southern California to explore a series of questions about the relationship between globalization, race, space, and class. It begins with an analysis of how growing consumer demand, innovative retail business practices, and the infrastructure required to support global commodity chains made Southern California into the largest trade gateway in the United States. Warehouse work and the contentious spatial politics of inland Southern California’s logistic landscape provide the data to examine how the shifting ground of money and people intersected with local histories to reterritorialize race and capitalism at the turn of the twenty-first century. While global logistics innovations provided the impetus for capital and the state to transform Southern California’s economy, it also created pockets of resistance among labor, community, and environmental groups, who argued that commodity distribution exposed them to economic and environmental precarity. How people gave meaning to space and mobilized them to contest logistics space is at the crux of this project. The book is divided into three parts. The first part provides an introduction into the spatial politics of Southern California’s logistics regime by showing how the forces of global economic restructuring after the 1980s intersected with regional entrepreneurial actors to produce Los Angeles and inland Southern California as a space for logistics. I argue that logistics represents a major rearticulation of modern capitalist space. Part 2 examines how the flexible production and distribution systems that were critical to the expansion of global capitalism during the neoliberal age were responsible for creating social and economic precarity for logistics workers, many of whom were undocumented. The final part of the book shows how regional development policies and global restructuring combined with demographic change to reterritorialize Southern California’s geographies of race and class. The book concludes by showing how inland Southern California became a key site for the production of new Latinx geographies.Less
This book uses Southern California to explore a series of questions about the relationship between globalization, race, space, and class. It begins with an analysis of how growing consumer demand, innovative retail business practices, and the infrastructure required to support global commodity chains made Southern California into the largest trade gateway in the United States. Warehouse work and the contentious spatial politics of inland Southern California’s logistic landscape provide the data to examine how the shifting ground of money and people intersected with local histories to reterritorialize race and capitalism at the turn of the twenty-first century. While global logistics innovations provided the impetus for capital and the state to transform Southern California’s economy, it also created pockets of resistance among labor, community, and environmental groups, who argued that commodity distribution exposed them to economic and environmental precarity. How people gave meaning to space and mobilized them to contest logistics space is at the crux of this project. The book is divided into three parts. The first part provides an introduction into the spatial politics of Southern California’s logistics regime by showing how the forces of global economic restructuring after the 1980s intersected with regional entrepreneurial actors to produce Los Angeles and inland Southern California as a space for logistics. I argue that logistics represents a major rearticulation of modern capitalist space. Part 2 examines how the flexible production and distribution systems that were critical to the expansion of global capitalism during the neoliberal age were responsible for creating social and economic precarity for logistics workers, many of whom were undocumented. The final part of the book shows how regional development policies and global restructuring combined with demographic change to reterritorialize Southern California’s geographies of race and class. The book concludes by showing how inland Southern California became a key site for the production of new Latinx geographies.
Justin Torres
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780199377329
- eISBN:
- 9780199377350
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199377329.003.0010
- Subject:
- Music, Dance
This short essay, originally published in The Washington Post only days after the 2016 shooting in the Orlando gay club PULSE, highlights the range of lives and practices that find their space, find ...
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This short essay, originally published in The Washington Post only days after the 2016 shooting in the Orlando gay club PULSE, highlights the range of lives and practices that find their space, find their moment in the queer Latinx club. The essay mourns those lost in Orlando by celebrating all the ways people get to the club, share space in the club, and come home from the club. Torres’s writing opens a space not then only for mourning what is lost, but also to celebrate the many reasons queer Latinx people have found refuge and hope in the space of the club, while also acknowledging it is not a utopic space.Less
This short essay, originally published in The Washington Post only days after the 2016 shooting in the Orlando gay club PULSE, highlights the range of lives and practices that find their space, find their moment in the queer Latinx club. The essay mourns those lost in Orlando by celebrating all the ways people get to the club, share space in the club, and come home from the club. Torres’s writing opens a space not then only for mourning what is lost, but also to celebrate the many reasons queer Latinx people have found refuge and hope in the space of the club, while also acknowledging it is not a utopic space.
Ralph E. Rodriguez
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780823279234
- eISBN:
- 9780823281442
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823279234.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This chapter considers the rise of Latinx as an umbrella identity term and its attendant impact on organizing literary production. It reviews the criteria that have been used to define Latinx ...
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This chapter considers the rise of Latinx as an umbrella identity term and its attendant impact on organizing literary production. It reviews the criteria that have been used to define Latinx literature and suggests that these criteria have not been terribly illuminating. While Latinx may have great use as a strategically instrumental tool in the struggle for social justice, it proves limiting as rubric for careful cultural and aesthetic analysis. The chapter suggests that a socially and historically attuned neo-formalist approach has much to recommend it as a reading practice, and it proposes that genre may be a more durable taxonomy for evaluating this literature than the racial and ethnic marker Latinx.Less
This chapter considers the rise of Latinx as an umbrella identity term and its attendant impact on organizing literary production. It reviews the criteria that have been used to define Latinx literature and suggests that these criteria have not been terribly illuminating. While Latinx may have great use as a strategically instrumental tool in the struggle for social justice, it proves limiting as rubric for careful cultural and aesthetic analysis. The chapter suggests that a socially and historically attuned neo-formalist approach has much to recommend it as a reading practice, and it proposes that genre may be a more durable taxonomy for evaluating this literature than the racial and ethnic marker Latinx.
Ralph E. Rodriguez
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780823279234
- eISBN:
- 9780823281442
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823279234.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This chapter demonstrates the ways in which the two principal criteria for defining Latinx literature—identity and theme—are insufficient in making sense of this body of writing. It looks at three ...
More
This chapter demonstrates the ways in which the two principal criteria for defining Latinx literature—identity and theme—are insufficient in making sense of this body of writing. It looks at three representative cases to demonstrate conclusively that we need a better way to understand the literature we have heretofore labelled Latinx. It examines a white writer (Daniel James) who, under a Latinx name (Danny Santiago), penned in the 1980s a popular Chicano novel of the barrio. It shows how the author of the novel The Madonnas of Echo Park, Brando Skyhorse, further confounds our understanding of identity matters and Latinx literature. He was raised as Native American and only as a teenager discovered he had a Mexican biological father. He has since written a memoir, Take This Man, about his upbringing, race, and ancestry. Finally, the chapter turns to a readily recognizable Latino author, Eduardo Halfon. However, this particular author writes on themes that critics would not readily identify as Latinx.Less
This chapter demonstrates the ways in which the two principal criteria for defining Latinx literature—identity and theme—are insufficient in making sense of this body of writing. It looks at three representative cases to demonstrate conclusively that we need a better way to understand the literature we have heretofore labelled Latinx. It examines a white writer (Daniel James) who, under a Latinx name (Danny Santiago), penned in the 1980s a popular Chicano novel of the barrio. It shows how the author of the novel The Madonnas of Echo Park, Brando Skyhorse, further confounds our understanding of identity matters and Latinx literature. He was raised as Native American and only as a teenager discovered he had a Mexican biological father. He has since written a memoir, Take This Man, about his upbringing, race, and ancestry. Finally, the chapter turns to a readily recognizable Latino author, Eduardo Halfon. However, this particular author writes on themes that critics would not readily identify as Latinx.
Ralph E. Rodriguez
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780823279234
- eISBN:
- 9780823281442
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823279234.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This chapter considers the one-to-one correspondence between fiction and the world many readers of realist fiction expect and even desire. More specifically, this chapter examines Salvador ...
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This chapter considers the one-to-one correspondence between fiction and the world many readers of realist fiction expect and even desire. More specifically, this chapter examines Salvador Plascencia’s metafictional novel The People of Paper to show how it disrupts these desires for mimetic fidelity and emphasizes instead an interest in the very nature of fiction. It is, in short, a story about story in which the characters and the narrator are in a battle over omniscience and who gets to tell one’s story. Finally, the chapter analyzes how the production of Latino circulates in a novel that refuses to obey the properties of realism. In so doing, it forces readers out of mundane positions in evaluating whether a work of fiction accurately, positively, or authentically represents the community they might wish for it to represent.Less
This chapter considers the one-to-one correspondence between fiction and the world many readers of realist fiction expect and even desire. More specifically, this chapter examines Salvador Plascencia’s metafictional novel The People of Paper to show how it disrupts these desires for mimetic fidelity and emphasizes instead an interest in the very nature of fiction. It is, in short, a story about story in which the characters and the narrator are in a battle over omniscience and who gets to tell one’s story. Finally, the chapter analyzes how the production of Latino circulates in a novel that refuses to obey the properties of realism. In so doing, it forces readers out of mundane positions in evaluating whether a work of fiction accurately, positively, or authentically represents the community they might wish for it to represent.
Ralph E. Rodriguez
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780823279234
- eISBN:
- 9780823281442
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823279234.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
Latinx, especially Chicana/o and Nuyorican, poetry has long been known for its political leanings and its employment in numerous social movements, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. At the ...
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Latinx, especially Chicana/o and Nuyorican, poetry has long been known for its political leanings and its employment in numerous social movements, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. At the forefront of much of this poetry has been a narrative tradition. Less well known is the lyric and experimental tradition in Latinx poetry. This chapter focuses on poetry that cannot readily be paraphrased as having a message or making a political statement. It examines poems that do not easily accord with what we understand Latinx literature to be and that do not in some transparent way represent a Latinx worldview. The lyric poetry by Eduardo Corral, Rosa Alcalá, and Amanda Calderón analyzed in this chapter strikes a dissonant chord with the tradition of narrative-driven Latinx poetry.Less
Latinx, especially Chicana/o and Nuyorican, poetry has long been known for its political leanings and its employment in numerous social movements, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. At the forefront of much of this poetry has been a narrative tradition. Less well known is the lyric and experimental tradition in Latinx poetry. This chapter focuses on poetry that cannot readily be paraphrased as having a message or making a political statement. It examines poems that do not easily accord with what we understand Latinx literature to be and that do not in some transparent way represent a Latinx worldview. The lyric poetry by Eduardo Corral, Rosa Alcalá, and Amanda Calderón analyzed in this chapter strikes a dissonant chord with the tradition of narrative-driven Latinx poetry.
Ralph E. Rodriguez
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780823279234
- eISBN:
- 9780823281442
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823279234.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This chapter draws to a close the arguments in the preceding chapters to underscore why Latinx is wanting as a taxonomic rubric for understanding literature. It maintains that leaning less heavily on ...
More
This chapter draws to a close the arguments in the preceding chapters to underscore why Latinx is wanting as a taxonomic rubric for understanding literature. It maintains that leaning less heavily on the identity category in creating literary taxonomies and moving away from a unitary notion of Latinx identities would help us better understand the literary output of subjects identified and self-identified as Latinx and would open up broader avenues for writing about this literature. To that end, it proposes that we let our projects and arguments, not pre-constituted identity categories, drive the principle of selection for the texts we analyze.Less
This chapter draws to a close the arguments in the preceding chapters to underscore why Latinx is wanting as a taxonomic rubric for understanding literature. It maintains that leaning less heavily on the identity category in creating literary taxonomies and moving away from a unitary notion of Latinx identities would help us better understand the literary output of subjects identified and self-identified as Latinx and would open up broader avenues for writing about this literature. To that end, it proposes that we let our projects and arguments, not pre-constituted identity categories, drive the principle of selection for the texts we analyze.
Juan D. De Lara
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520289581
- eISBN:
- 9780520964181
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520289581.003.0008
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
The chapter begins by describing the landscape of the Inland Empire and by examining the role that it has played as a development region for metropolitan Los Angeles. It also shows how the Kaiser ...
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The chapter begins by describing the landscape of the Inland Empire and by examining the role that it has played as a development region for metropolitan Los Angeles. It also shows how the Kaiser mill contributed to the territorialization of new racial and class relations that shaped the region’s politics long after the mill had succumbed to global restructuring. Inland California provides an example of what happened to suburbs in the United States during the transition from a postwar Keynesian spatial order to one based on flexible accumulation. This includes a series of racial migrations, from white migrants during the postwar period to Latinx migrants during the 1990s and 2000s. Chapter 7 includes an account of the sometimes-violent tension that gripped the region’s politics during the transition from a mostly white to a mostly Latinx population.Less
The chapter begins by describing the landscape of the Inland Empire and by examining the role that it has played as a development region for metropolitan Los Angeles. It also shows how the Kaiser mill contributed to the territorialization of new racial and class relations that shaped the region’s politics long after the mill had succumbed to global restructuring. Inland California provides an example of what happened to suburbs in the United States during the transition from a postwar Keynesian spatial order to one based on flexible accumulation. This includes a series of racial migrations, from white migrants during the postwar period to Latinx migrants during the 1990s and 2000s. Chapter 7 includes an account of the sometimes-violent tension that gripped the region’s politics during the transition from a mostly white to a mostly Latinx population.
Juan D. De Lara
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520289581
- eISBN:
- 9780520964181
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520289581.003.0010
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
In the final chapter, the book considers how the region’s emerging Latinx majority has confronted and transformed inland California’s old geographies of race and class. It examines how key elected ...
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In the final chapter, the book considers how the region’s emerging Latinx majority has confronted and transformed inland California’s old geographies of race and class. It examines how key elected leaders tied the region’s growing Latinx population to the national discourse on border enforcement and undocumented immigration. One result is that the growing Latinx population was racialized as suspect citizens within the broader policy debate about the United States–Mexico border. The chapter concludes by showing how social-movement organizations mobilized to transform local institutions.Less
In the final chapter, the book considers how the region’s emerging Latinx majority has confronted and transformed inland California’s old geographies of race and class. It examines how key elected leaders tied the region’s growing Latinx population to the national discourse on border enforcement and undocumented immigration. One result is that the growing Latinx population was racialized as suspect citizens within the broader policy debate about the United States–Mexico border. The chapter concludes by showing how social-movement organizations mobilized to transform local institutions.
Samira K. Mehta
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781469636368
- eISBN:
- 9781469636382
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469636368.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, History of Religion
Interfaith families that are also interracial are less able to seamlessly fit into “mainstream” American Jewish life, which is dominated by Ashkenazi culture and racially coded as white. On the one ...
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Interfaith families that are also interracial are less able to seamlessly fit into “mainstream” American Jewish life, which is dominated by Ashkenazi culture and racially coded as white. On the one hand, this can make interactions in Jewish communities more challenging. On the other, these families are often given more freedom and flexibility for including traditions from the Christian side of the family than their white interfaith counterparts.Less
Interfaith families that are also interracial are less able to seamlessly fit into “mainstream” American Jewish life, which is dominated by Ashkenazi culture and racially coded as white. On the one hand, this can make interactions in Jewish communities more challenging. On the other, these families are often given more freedom and flexibility for including traditions from the Christian side of the family than their white interfaith counterparts.
