The Criticality of Latino/a

Fiction in the Twenty-First

Century
Theresa Delgadillo*

*Theresa Delgadillo is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies at Ohio

State University. Her work in comparative ethnic, gender, and American studies
has focused on spirituality/worldviews, African diaspora, and Latinidad and
Latino/as in the Midwest in literature and visual culture.
American Literary History, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 600 624
doi:10.1093/alh/ajr024
# The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com

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War spills across the pages of twenty-first-century Latino/a

fiction in unprecedented ways. This should not be surprising considering the history of war in the Americasoccupationist, interventionist, autonomist, and revolutionary; or the fact that Latino/as
became Latino/as through the Mexican American War of 1848 and
the Spanish American War of 1898; or the record of Latino/a
service in the US military throughout the twentieth century and
now in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Yet it is surprising because
most Latino/a fiction in the twentieth century did not take war as
its central theme or setting.1 One might argue that late-twentiethcentury Latino/a fiction addressed a different kind of war: the displacement of Latino/a communities by urban renewal, the degradation inflicted on Latino/a communities by the proliferation of
drugs and drug wars, and the economic vise grip on Latino/a
advancement. In the twenty-first century, however, it is increasingly impossible to write about Latino/a lives and to create Latino/
a characters who are not in some way involved in, linked to, or
touched by the horrors of war among national states or intranational war to secure power for either a ruling elite or an insurgent group. This transition in Latino/a literature to the new reality
of what seems like endless war also opens the conflicts, policies,
economies, and perspectives driving war to Latino/a critique.
Writing in the aftermath of multiple late-twentieth-century
wars in Latin America and with the lingering need to make sense
of earlier armed conflicts, Latino/a authors have launched the new
millennium with critical explorations of war in varied settings.

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Novels appear about the US-funded contra war against Nicaragua,

the civil war in El Salvador, the genocidal war in Guatemala, the
guerrilla/government war in Peru, the Holocaust, the enduring
effects on Latino/as and Latino/a communities of this countrys
war against Vietnam, and attempts to overthrow the Cuban government as well as the long shadow cast by the dictatorial Trujillo
regime on Dominicans and Dominican Americans. In this new
body of Latino/a fiction, set in cities, small towns, and rural areas
across the Americas, we encounter the social divisions and physical devastation that war creates in characters that suffer during
battle as well as long after the cessation of armed conflict. Such
fiction is also about love, greed, creativity, inequality, envy, sexuality, memory, and loyalty, among other things. That is, these
novels are not just about war, but about how it happens, why it
continues, what it does to those involvedmatters that underscore
that war is not an empty exercise of power or violence.
While Latino/a literature has always been marked by its
transnational interests, writers in this new millennium expand,
extend, and deepen this concern in new ways, frequently linking
the fates and destinies of Latin Americans and Latino/as, or of the
US and the places where it wages war. They continue in the tradition of a Latino/a literature that Rafael Perez-Torres identifies as
one that continually moves both through the gaps and across the
bridges between numerous cultural sites to explore the discontinuities of history and power (3, 12). The fact that Latino/a fiction
increasingly sets its stories beyond the borders of the US or imagines stories that unfold across multiple national borders reflects an
intensification of Latino/a fictions border-crossing identifications
as well the extension of a uniquely Latino/a critique throughout
the hemisphere. Often explicitly in conversation with Latin
American literatures and histories, as noted in the acknowledgments and notes sections as well as the very subjects of the novels
themselves, these fictions ask to be read in the transgeographical
terms that Jose David Saldvar suggests are most appropriate for
Latino/a fiction (19). In this light, new Latino/a literature about
Latin American wars puts up a mirror to the conditions by which
the Latino/a population of the US has grown and diversified while
remaining intimately linked to the rest of the Americas.
This literature, however, is not exclusively focused on
late-twentieth-century conflicts but also includes novels that
imagine the independence struggles, revolutions, and civil wars of
Latin America of earlier eras. These new Latino/a historical novels
also take up those conflicts and the historic figures involved.2 The
Latino/a perspective that emerges in these fictions criticizes exclusionary paradigms of race and ethnicity as well as normative

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gender and sexuality, thus confirming Ramon Saldvars

observation that Chicano/a, and I would add Latino/a, literature is
particularly attuned to cultural conflict.3 The frequency of Native
American, mestizo/a, and women characters who participate in
shaping history, rather than simply being the victims of it, represents an aspect of this Latino/a critique. Gender-bending lesbian
protagonists emerge in several novels, challenging both contemporary homophobia and the erasure of non-normative sexuality from
historys actors and events. Indeed, Latino/a fiction brings to this
new era a recognition that war, migration, and history can no
longer be imagined without considering the varied social locations,
ideological influences, material conditions, and historic identities
of the actors whom it touches. As historical fiction, therefore,
these new novels create multilayered histories of the Americas.
Latino/a writers also remain invested in the theme of migration as a significant topic of literature in this century, something
perhaps not unrelated to current controversies about Latino/as in
the US. In historical fictions that imagine characters interacting
through the many political, military, economic, social, and cultural
routes that cross this continent, this new literature illuminates
Latino/a migration and belonging in new ways. It also represents
the US as always and already connected to and active in the fates
of Latin Americans.
Yet migration itself remains a key theme in current Latino/a
literature in ways different from that of previous Latino/a novels. In
twentieth-century Latino/a literature, the tensions involved in
migration were largely centered on the adjustments, exclusions, and
exploitations that characters encountered post-migration as they
settled in this country. In the twenty-first century, this work more
often explores dangerous and harrowing border-crossings of Latin
Americans into the US, extreme violence and exploitation at the
border, isolation and poverty in communities left behind in Central
and South America and Mexico, and the personal and social transformationsnot always positivethat such journeys prompt.
Latino/a literature has now grown to include what some, until
now, have named the other Latino/as, that is, migrants or children of migrants from all over Latin America who have settled
here, including Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Nicaraguan, Peruvian,
and Colombian Americans, among others. In contrast to previous
decades wherein Latino/a literature was written primarily by
Mexican-American, Puerto Rican, Cuban-American, and, later,
Dominican-American authors, todays Latino/a literature distinguishes itself by representing a wider spectrum of Latinidad and
evinces even greater engagement with hemispheric over
exclusively US realities.

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603

1. Aesthetics and Style

2. Latino/as in War
It may be that the US governments two wars in only the first
decade of this new century, both massive operations that dominate
the media, the economy, and peoples livesever present, in
short, in every aspect of lifeprompt Latino/a fictions focus on
war. In the midst of these events, Latino/a writers turn their attention to the wars of the previous century (and earlier), exploring the
social and political conflicts, as well as the human costs, that war
entails. If this is, in part, an effort to make sense of contemporary
war, we are fortunate that Latino/a writers have gifts and instruments at their command that allow us to see both the past and the
present in new ways.
In three Latino/a novels that feature Vietnam veterans as
central characters, war brings new migrations and interconnections,
but it also shrouds everyone it touches in loss and violence. For
example, Names on a Map (2008) by Benjamin Alire Saenz, set in
El Paso, Texas, revolves around the Espejo family in the late
1960s as the Vietnam War intensifies and local young men are
either drafted or enlist for service. Both anti-war and patriotic

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Sandra Cisneross Caramelo (2002), Junot Dazs The Brief

Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), and Julia Alvarezs Saving
the World (2006) adopt overtly meta-fictional strategies in creating
the stories of characters who talk back to their narrator scribes, or
storytelling narrators who provide extensive footnotes on related
historical events and popular culture, or writer narrator/protagonists. In other Latino/a fictions of this decade, this critical selfreflexivity might unfold via multivoiced or polyvocal as well as
synchronous narratives, or it might take the form of a running dialogue with another text, such as a diary or recording, that a character negotiates, but a significant number follow a diachronic
chronology where we, as readers, typically begin at the beginning
and end at the end. At times, we begin at the end, and the novel
retrospectively tells us how we arrived at the end, as in Lost City
Radio (2007) by Daniel Alarcon or Calligraphy of the Witch
(2007) by Alicia Gaspar de Alba. But even in the seemingly linear
narrative arc, Latino/a fiction values digressions and interruptions,
backtracking and temporal shifts as characters recall past events
and other spaces that impinge on the novelistic present. In this
way, although Latino/a fiction might be more linear in the new
century, it is also less so.

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3. Imagining the Legacy of War in the Americas

Latino/a fictions exploration of earlier wars brings us a trove
of new historical fiction, much of it centered on hemispheric
movements or moments of critical consciousness through which
we see the Latino/a critique of traditional US history extended to
critique US involvement in Latin America.4 Here, the Latino/a
novel follows Carl Gutierrez-Joness suggestion that the focus is
not on recovering forgotten or obscured events or people, but
instead on rethink[ing] historiography and contesting canonical
interpretative practices (21). Latino/a historical fictions critique
here, as Gutierrez-Jones argues, lies in its attentiveness to how
specific groups are cultivated into dependent relationships
vis-a-vis the dominant social classes and castes (80).

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sentiments circulate in the community and within in the family,

leading to personal and familial divisions. In Stella Pope Duartes
Let Their Spirits Dance (2002), the family of the deceased soldier
Jesse Ramirez sets out to honor his memory by making a pilgrimage to the Vietnam Wall, a trip that turns into a community and
then national effort to honor all Chicano soldiers who died in
Vietnam.
The experience of war is more immediate in Alfredo Veas
novel, Gods Go Begging (1999), where protagonist Jesse
Pasadoble, a Vietnam veteran and a practicing criminal defense
attorney, deals with recurring nightmares of his tour of duty in
Vietnam. In an instance emblematic of the novels key concerns,
Jesse awakes to the recognition that he is forever tied to a spot near
the Laotian border: Last night his own living spirit had been kidnapped from this room and taken there, not for a reunion but for a
quick object lesson, a reminder that his soul would never leave that
hill, no matter where his body went. No bachelors degree, no law
degree, no jungle grasses could hope to cover the impossible fear
and anguish that still lingered there; no roots could ever leach from
that soil the grief and blood, and the sorrowful shouts that had been
sown there (216). Haunted by the war, and his part in it, nearly 20
years after the fact, Jesse succeeds, but not without some cost, at
keeping these demons under control. His intense personal memory
of Vietnam is one node in a constellation of relationships brought
into creation by the war that connects the violence of the war with
the violence against poor and working-class people in the US. The
violence of Vietnam, the novel reveals, has followed us home. In
this way, the novel explores a transnational nightmare that influences the collective fate of its characters.

American Literary History

For many years Id felt the terrible remoteness that came

from knowing too little. Having corrected it, I found the distance that once stretched out before me, an expanse of blankness, replaced by another. Id often imagined Naranjo, and
only knowing it revealed how completely Id failed to
approach it. There, in the place I came from, I felt as far as
possible from all I knew. Farther uphill slept houses full of
strangers. They were unknown to me, and they would remain
that way, and I was lost in a place where all the things Id
ever seen, thought, and imagined were lost with me. (275)
Secretive silence had been so much a part of Ntidos family
life that the few occasions on which the opportunity for further
knowledge presented itself were lost, as in this exchange he recalls
with his father: Finally I asked you, Have you ever been in a
balloon? You shook your head. You said, Ive only seen
someone fall like that once. From a helicopter. And I said, So
youve never been in a balloon. You looked at me and after a
moment you said, No, I havent (237). The boy Ntido, growing
up in the US, remains oblivious to his fathers allusion to people
falling from helicopters, a horrific scene the latter apparently
witnessed in Guatemala during the governments genocidal and
antiguerilla campaigns. Graphic scenes of violence are few in this

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Sylvia Sellers-Garcias 2007 novel about a GuatemalanAmerican young man who returns to Guatemala in the aftermath
of military action against the nations indigenous and rural peoples
examines the deep and often life-preserving secrecy and silence
among the population that also perpetuates fragmentation and isolation. When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep is set in the early
1990s and centers on Ntido Aman, the only son of Diego and Iris
Aman, Guatemalan migrants to California, as he returns to visit
the small hamlet where his parents lived in Guatemala. Against his
mothers unspoken wishes, Ntido makes the trip following his
fathers death. Carrying his fathers journals, a written record of
his silent fathers thoughts not available to him in remembered
conversations, Ntido meditates on family, memory, imagination,
and writing, as he finds himself enveloped in the post-traumatic
social silence afflicting the inhabitants of Guatemalas rural
hamlets.
Ntido recognizes the silence in Guatemala as a familiar one,
even a familial one since his parents never spoke to him of
Guatemala or of family in Guatemala. It was a place they had
seemingly left utterly and completely behind. But this absence,
rather than the familiarity with place, imprinted itself on Ntido:

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narrative; instead, references to the unspoken and imagined suffuse

the novel, haunting the townspeople and Ntido, and suggesting a
place gripped by dread and fear. The fathers reticence in this
exchange comes to represent the overwhelming silence over it all.
In one scene, Aurelio, the caretaker of the cemetery, explains
to Ntido that the town lost its priest following the shock of his
accidental involvement in a mans death, an unlikely pedestrian on
a rural road. Driving at night on a deserted road, the priest suddenly comes upon and hits a well-dressed man in a suit, obviously
but mysteriously left there, far from any town (125). The priest
never discovers the mans identity, despite dogged effort, a failure
that eats at him until he finally leaves the town and area. This lack
of resolution or comprehension and loss hover over the town and
its inhabitants, becoming a force that Ntido struggles to grasp,
manage, and confront in his Guatemalan journey. Sellers-Garcias
novel movingly represents the spiritual sickness that its characters
locate at the heart of war.
The narrator of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by
Junot Daz, the Watcher, suggests that his story is a counter-spell,
a piece of magic narrative to keep violence and suffering at bay
(7). What the Watcher initially suggests is unexplainablethe
fuku, or enduring curse upon the Cabral/de Leon familyturns out
to be a unique configuration of events created by historical circumstance, particularly the long reign of the Trujillo dictatorship over
the Dominican Republic and the brutality, corruption, exploitation,
and greed it both required and reproduced. Both Belicia Cabral
and her son Oscar de Leon are victims of this dictatorship and its
enduring influence, and both are nearly beaten to death by Trujillo
henchmen and their historical legatees, respectively. Belicias
wounds are described by the Watcher, who offers us an inventory
of her broken body: her clavicle, chicken-boned; her right
humerus, a triple fracture (she would never again have much
strength in that arm); five ribs, broken; left kidney, bruised; liver,
bruised; right lung, collapsed; front teeth, blown out. About 167
points of damage in total and it was only sheer accident that these
motherfuckers didnt eggshell her cranium, though her head did
swell to elephant-man proportions (147). When Belicias son
Oscar later falls victim to similar acts of violence, he fares no
better than his mother did.
The Watchers narrative moves back and forth between the
US (New Jersey and New York) and the Dominican Republic,
conveying a sense of the transnational identity which he and other
characters share as well as the way that events in one location
influence or impact events in the other location. Oscars isolation
in the US, driven not primarily by his Dominican difference from

American Literary History

I dont understand how you have not one photograph, not

one letter, not one document. For all I know I have been
raised in a liewhats to keep me from thinking you didnt
kidnap me, or even that youre not really my grandfather?
With this last, I knew I had pushed too hard, and fell silent.
After a long while, my grandfather said, You want documents, photographs. This is truth to you? I didnt answer.
I heard my grandfather shift in his chair, and then we were
quiet. When I turned to him, I saw that his hand shook where
he had brought it to his cheek. (6)
As the scene reveals, there is more to be known, though it
may not be known solely through an examination of documentary
evidence. Loving Che takes up a new Cuban-American generations unanswered questions about family and history and its
attempts to understand the significance of the Cuban revolution.
The novels focus on ideas and character, rather than folklore, and
its reflections on memory, history, love, madness, and

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mainstream society but by his social ineptitude among both

Dominican and mainstream groups, creates, according to the
Watcher, the fertile ground for tragic miscalculations of love and
power. The circumstances of that power and the limitations it
places on lovethe way a governments war on its own people
can twist and warp everything for a long time afterare always
present in the Watchers, and our, reading.
The intractability of wars influence on both people and
events surfaces less overtly, though compellingly, in Ana
Menendezs 2004 novel Loving Che. This story revolves around a
young woman, the narrator, in search of information about her
long-lost mother, an artist in love with Che Guevara who remains
in Cuba following the revolution while sending her daughter away
to the US with her departing father. The hint that Che may have
been her father becomes an opportunity to delve into events and
histories she has never been encouraged to explore, including the
infidelities of her parents and the idealism of the revolutionary
movement as well as the state of Cubas economy and society. Her
grandfather, however, maintains a brusque coldness toward the
island and the daughter who stayed there, warding off the narrators desire for greater connection with her mother. The angry confrontation eventually does arrive, when she will be put off no
longer, and the grandfather, ironically likening himself to the
islands leader he so despises, maintains that as the Russian
writers knew, a man cannot change his nature (6). His political
and personal reserve, his hopelessness, becomes her challenge:

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The Criticality of Latino/a Fiction in the Twenty-First Century

4. Transnational Imaginaries in Latino/a Fiction

The other part of that project emerges in several new Latino/
a fictions about historical events and personages of much earlier

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revolutionary commitment bring new perspective and awareness to

the question of Cuban-American links to Cuba.
Daniel Alarcons 2007 novel, Lost City Radio, needs to make
sense of another armed conflict, of a country where a police state
reigns, human rights do not exist, and a brutal military campaign to
eliminate a violent guerrilla army rages. Told from the perspectives
of a radio host whose show revolves around the lost and disappeared,
her activist and now absent, i.e. missing, husband/lover, and the
people of a small rural village where a mass murder has occurred,
Lost City Radio engages questions of truth and justice, dilemmas of
betrayal and honesty, and ultimately, responsibility. Alarcons novel
fits into the same groove as Sellers-Garcias work in that they both
share a very intense sense of quiet horror and feature protagonists
living amidst a violence or past violence that requires some level of
dissociation or suppression to ensure well-being. The novel pits the
secrecy with which a repressive regime shrouds its actions against
the secrecy of individuals and communities trying to survive. Like
When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep, Lost City Radio also seeks revelations, without which there can be no reconciliation.
These new Latino/a fictions about war are also historical fictions that imagine pivotal events for Latino/as. The US reliance on
Latino/a soldiers in the Vietnam War, and the consequences for
Latino/a men and women, and for the nation, have not received
much previous attention in fiction, though these have been
explored in scholarship. The wars in the Dominican Republic,
Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Peruall historic events
that contributed to Latin-American migration to the US, and
several that included this governments involvementimagined
through the eyes of those persecuted and hunted, become, in the
hands of these gifted Latino/a writers, powerful and moving narratives of the condition of humanity in the Americas as well as critiques of the imperial geographic imaginaries in which the rural
and indigenous peoples are always backwards and uncivilized,
and, therefore, consigned to violence and underdevelopment.
These novels form counterweights to histories too soon glossed
and forgotten, yet which continue to reverberate in our time. They
are one part of what appears to be Latino/a fictions new millennium project of reimagining an America and American history
with Latino/as in it.

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eras. The colonization of the Americas and the many struggles for
independence that make up the history of this continent feature
prominently in new Latino/a fiction, and share a distinguishing
feature: a focus on extraordinary, even heroic, female characters in
Latin American and Latino/a history. In some cases, these characters are based on actual historic figures; in others, they are entirely
fictions that, nonetheless, the novels seemingly assert, could have
or must have been there. The constraints on womens roles in colonial eras, and especially limitations on their participation in public
events, come under critique in the creation of assertive and independent female characters. State-sponsored violence appears in
this fiction as well, although it is itself less of character than it is
in the literature discussed above. Here, it lacks mystery, because
events are by now well-known, and provides context for an exploration of different eras and events.
The protagonists of two novels, The Divine Husband (2004)
by Francisco Goldman, and Our Lives Are the Rivers (2006) by
Jaime Manrique, are unique in that they reveal two new heroinesone fictional, the other historicalwho, working alongside
Jose Mart and Simon Bolvar, change history. In Goldmans
work, the central character is Maria de las Nieves, a pupil and
later friend of Jose Mart. A working-class mestiza woman born of
an Anglo father and an Indian woman, and raised in the household
of a wealthy criollo family whom she served, Maria de las Nieves
becomes embroiled in political and economic events and intrigue
that unfold in her newly independent nation. De las Nieves, seemingly a footnote to history, becomes instead a force in effecting the
kinds of cross-cultural encounter and hybrid identities that
uniquely characterize the Americas. Manriques work imaginatively recounts the life story of an extraordinary woman in history
who actively joined in the fight for independence from colonial
rule and Bolvars battle to unite Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and
Venezuela into one great nation: Manuela Saenz, the illegitimate
daughter of a wealthy criollo woman and her wealthy Spanish
married lover, who was Bolvars comrade in battle as well as his
mistress. Both novels join works such as Treasures in Heaven
(2000) by Kathleen Alcala, The Hummingbirds Daughter (2005)
by Luis Alberto Urrea, In The Name of Salome (2000) by Julia
Alvarez, Calligraphy of the Witch (2007) by Alicia Gaspar de
Alba, and Forgetting the Alamo, or, Blood Memory (2009) by
Emma Perez in portraying resilient female characters who frequently lead others in historical movements and moments, and in
representing the multiple races, ethnicities, and religions that comprise the borderlands and Latin America, illuminating the tensions
of colonial and independence movements. In these novels, the US

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appears as a partner to historical events on the border or in Latin

America, highlighting a truly inter-American history.
Caramelo (2002) by Sandra Cisneros also presents forceful
women characters but focuses on a family in history rather than on
historic events. The intergenerational dialogue that emerges here
between Grandmother Soledad and granddaughter narrator/scribe
Celaya subjects cultural practices of politeness to a withering
gender critique. Truly a family saga, Cisneross novel, playful linguistically, formally and in content, carefully locates her
Chicago Mexico transnational, fictional family in the history and
popular culture of the US and Mexico, revealing the cultural
exchanges, swaps, and influences moving in both directions that
this border-crossing family experiences. War appears even in
Caramelo, touching both the Father/Inocencio, who witnessed the
atrocities of a conquering US army, and the son, Toto, who has
drawn number 137 in the draft lottery during the Vietnam War.
Taken as a whole, the trend toward historical fiction among
Latino/a writers positions a hemispheric context at the center of
our contemporary period, creating for readers vivid and engrossing
narratives that allow us to imagine how our collective fates in the
Americas have long been linked.
Each of these fictions tells well-known stories, and joins the
literature on war by attending to the viewpoint of the colonized
and oppressed, but each, also, reveals something new. In
Forgetting the Alamo, or, Blood Memory (2009), Emma Perez
takes up events that have certainly been told and retold in a many
forms, but few, if any, have been told from this perspective. The
story of Texan independence glorified in the annals of US history
is nowhere present in this story of the brutality, avarice, and
racism with which Mexicans were dispossessed of their land and
rights. Set in 1836, the novels central character, Micaela Campos,
provides the perspective from which events are known. Micaela is
a young lesbian from a Mexican farming and ranching family
whose way of life, and life, faces attack by bands of Anglo settlers
amidst the war for the control of Texas. African Americans and
American Indians fare no better in the nascent Republic of Texas,
as Micaela discovers when forced from her home. Perezs vivid
and engaging prose creates characters as unforgettable as the
historic events that give rise to the first Latino/as, as it restores
queerness to the historical imagination. Repressed sexual love
between women hovers throughout Julia Alvarezs novel, In The
Name of Salome (2000), which moves between three different temporal periods in telling the life story of the famous national poet of
the Dominican Republic, Salome Urena Henrquez. This novel
reveals an Afro-Latino/a legacy as it chronicles thwarted

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Taken as a whole, the

trend toward historical
fiction among Latino/a
writers positions a
hemispheric context at
the center of our
contemporary period,
creating for readers vivid
and engrossing
narratives that allow us
to imagine how our
collective fates in the
Americas have long been
linked.

The Criticality of Latino/a Fiction in the Twenty-First Century

American Literary History

5. Spirituality in the New Millennium

The late-twentieth-century feminist critical engagement with
religious institutions and spiritual traditions continues to bloom in
the twenty-first century, in Latino/a literature that considers spiritual commitments and religious leadership.5 Today, these topics
are no longer only the purview of Latina writers. Indeed, these
topics surface in work by both male and female writers, among all
subgroups included in the pan-ethnic label Latino/a (including
Puerto Rican, Chicano, Dominican, Salvadoran, Cuban) and in
nearly all subject areas, i.e., in fictions about war, history, migration, queer sexualities, and others. There is, however, a new distinguishing feature to this literature: in the present century, we see a
heightened focus on the feminine divine and the female healer,
saint, shaman, clairvoyant, or visionary in Latino/a fiction, even in
those fictions that feature repeated references to scripture, and even
in those fictions created by male authors.6
This late-twentieth-century trend manifests in two ways: first,
there is a decline in the representation of male religious authority
or spiritual leaders in twenty-first-century Latino/a fictionfewer

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movements for independence and equality. Alvarez again employs

the strategy of moving between multiple temporal frames in
Saving the World (2006), which as the title suggests, explores
altruism and ambition. Treasures in Heaven (2000) by Kathleen
Alcala focuses on the character of Estela Quintanilla Carabajal, a
migrant to Mexico City from the countrys northern frontier where
the Mexican governments anti-Indian wars rage and morph into
anti-Semitic assaults as well against her Crypto-Jewish husband
and his family. The historical formation of feminist movement in
Mexico in this time period enters the novel when Estela becomes a
part of popular reform movements in the city, including its
budding feminist organizations. A paradoxical critique of romantic
notions about female historical figures emerges in Frida (2001) by
Barbara Mujica, a narrative of Frida Kahlo told by her sister, here
imagined as overlooked, envious, and troubled. The transnational
histories that these contemporary Latino/a novels address, and the
ways that they foreground female protagonists and heroines in
history do not, however, lead to triumphant and happy endings.
These stories are marked by loss, defeat, and failures. How could
they be otherwise and remain believable in the twenty-first century
that we live in? This historical veracity, however, does not overshadow the powerful modes of resilience that open up in each
novel for our contemporary reading pleasure.

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male shamans, priests, and curanderos appear here than in literature of previous three decades. Second, there is a proliferation of
female protagonists who are spiritual leaders and healers in
Latino/a fiction, especially in historical fiction, some based on
actual figures in history. Why this might be the case, and what
these fictions reveal about twenty-first-century spiritualties,
becomes evident upon closer examination of this work.

6. Latina Spiritual Heroines

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In Julia Alvarezs novel Saving the World, we meet Alma

Huebner, a prominent Latina author experiencing a life/writing
crisis. Huebners husband gets an assignment to assist a community health improvement project in the Dominican Republic while
she remains in the US to finish her novel about Dona Isabel, a
colonial-era Spanish rectoress of an orphanage who accompanies a
Royal sanctioned expedition to eliminate smallpox from the colonies, an effort that revolves around the use of orphan boys as carriers of the cowpox disease, which is then harvested as a vaccine
against smallpox, on their sea voyages. Based on an actual historical figure, the novel, which we read in chapters that alternate with
Huebners present-day life crisis and her husbands service, traces
the womans travels with the expedition through the Caribbean,
Mexico, to Philippines and then returns to settle in Mexico, in
ngeles, the City of the Angels (367).
Puebla de los A
Huebner and her character both emerge as skeptics of religion who also remain somewhat critical of the scientific project.
The writer creates an Isabel who compares the validity and method
of smallpox vaccination with the claims of miraculous healing by
pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela (34). Almas views emerge in
an exchange she has with her neighbor Helen: Unlike other religious people who can drive her nuts, when Helen mentions God,
Alma just does an instantaneous translation in her headGod as a
metaphor for the stunning, baffling, painful, beautiful spirit of the
universebypassing the whole thorny question of whether God
even exists, and instead dealing directly with the little quandaries
that really are the places people get stuck in for life (80).
Both characters wrestle with doubt about religious, scientific,
ethical, and imaginative projects in which they find themselves
enmeshed. The very working out of that doubt, of finding the
place from which one can act, of reconciling ones personal
desires with ones ethical obligations or imagined commitments,
floats through the both storylines, revealing passionate, thinking,
desiring, and spiritual subjects in moments of crisis both personal

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and social. Huebners questions about the imaginative project and

doubts about whether literature that can make a difference speak
to the tendency in Latino/a fiction to link spiritual re-evaluation
with social justice.
The ugliness and degradation of the present and the challenge
these present to religious belief and practice surface also in Still
Water Saints (2007) by Alex Espinoza, which revolves around
Perla Portillo, described on the opening page of the novel as a
Bruja. A Santa. A Divina. A Medium, Prophet, and Healer. Able
to pass through walls and read minds, to pull tumors from ailing
bodies, to uncross hexes and spells, to raise the dead, and to stop
time (3). Perla has been trained by Senor Dario, a traveling spiritual counselor and curandero raised in both Lucum/Santeria and
Catholic religious traditions. When we meet here, she is an older
woman and a widow, with a botanica in a strip mall on the decline
that mirrors her apparently diminishing powers. She is not allseeing, though incredibly intuitive and sensitive; she cannot heal
everything, but has wide knowledge of healing herbs and rituals.
In her practice, she confronts Rodrigo, a victim of human trafficking, whose suffering shakes her in ways that appear to require a
new approach to healing. The novel presents her as an important
figure in the community by showing her amidst people gathered at
the mural of the Virgen de Guadalupe painted on the side of her
shop moving through the crowd, reciting a prayer, touching their
hands and faces when the people gathered around her. They had
felt ache and disappointment and had borne witness to passing and
loss. This was just a moment, Perla told them. Death was always
stirring. It hid in the wind, in those palm trees, on the banks of the
Santa Ana Ro. But if you stood there long enough, if you stood
there and watched and listened, you could see what that river had
once been, and you could see so much life in the still waters that
remained (240).
Alicia Gaspar de Albas Calligraphy of the Witch (2007), a
sequel to her earlier novel Sor Juanas Second Dream (1999), features Sor Juanas servant Concepcion Benavidez, an illegitimate
mestiza daughter of a mixed-race (figured as Philippine, African,
indigenous, and Spanish) tavern keeper and Spanish nobleman in
New Spain. Having escaped with her dear friend Alendula, who is
black, from her indentured servitude and Alendulas enslaved state
in the Convent, and fleeing to join cimarron communities in
Veracruz, the two women are captured by pirates and shipped to
New England. Concepcions spirituality, which blends Catholicism
and particularly devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe, with an
understanding of the sacred natural world and knowledge of
healing horticulture, marks her as different in Puritan, colonial

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Boston, and she is soon targeted in the witch hunts and trials of
colonial New England, and jailed, along with Tituba, the now
well-known historical figure depicted by Maryse Conde in her
novel about the Salem witch trials. In this narrative, Concepcion
Benavidez endures horrific treatment in jail, public humiliation
and vilification, the loss of her daughter, who is taken from her as
well as the loss of a livelihood. This historical fiction about the
vilification of others in Puritan New England represents
Concepcion as the target of another characters machinations to
take Concepcions daughter and property for her own by using her
Spanish language, lack of fluency in English, and strange religion as pretexts for accusations of witchery.
Finally, Luis Urreas The Hummingbirds Daughter, also a
historical fiction, features another important female spiritual
leader: the well-known Teresa de Cabora, known as Santa Teresa
de Cabora, of northern Mexico. The Hummingbirds Daughter
imagines Teresas life chronologically, from her childhood in the
shacks of hacienda workers as an illegitimate daughter of the
hacienda owner, through her adoption by Huila, the curandera and
household manager of the hacienda house (the house of Teresas
father), to the emergence of her gifts as a healer amidst the
Mexican Armys war against the Yaqui and Mayo peoples in
northern Mexico (making it safe for investment and development),
and the following that develops around her. She becomes a leader
of the people in their struggles to hold onto their land and lives,
and also, therefore, becomes a target of the Mexican Army. Like
both Alvarezs and Gaspar de Albas novels, this one is based on
historical research, yet it still falls to the novelist to invent and
create a Teresa with personality and character, or to imagine what
kind of personality, character, and spiritual calling might be necessary in the circumstances in which she lives.
A challenge to traditional gender dichotomies emerges in
Urreas Teresa de Cabora, as in the scene where she is taken by
Huila to a learned curandero, Manuelito, for further instruction. In
the exchange between Teresa and Manuelito, she begins to learn
the depth of the knowledge required for a life as a curandera, and
she is introduced both to her masculine side and an indigenous
society that values both masculine and feminine as essential to spiritual leadership. Her training with Manuelito is only the beginning of her healing work, which develops in extraordinary
directions to include miraculous healings, and her own resurrection
from the dead. The qualities that Manuelito proposes as essential
to curandera life include strength, knowledge, wildness, honoring
women, and fierceness in battle. In many ways, Teresas story is
one of undoing the colonial and patriarchal genealogies by which

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615

the descendants of Indian women are dispossessed and forever

marginalized. Her coming to power provides a beacon to the struggles of Yaqui and Mayo.

7. Hagiography Provides Clues

8. Dangerous Crossings, New Migrations

Migration looms large as a concern of this eras literature,
including in genres other than fiction. This work, like literature
about war and historical fiction, both depicts and critiques on multiple levels. As I noted earlier, the horrific conditions of bordercrossing, violence, and exploitation, drug cultures, class conflicts,
human trafficking, and the challenges these pose not only to
democracy and sustainability but also to humanity, ethics, spirit,
and moral being proliferate in this work. Migration within the US,
as in the migrant farm worker circuit, is rarely the subject of this

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Like the hagiographies that date back to early Christianity,

which combine history and biography with an overt interest in providing guides for human behavior, contemporary Latino/a fictions
preponderant representation of strong female spiritual leaders, its
overarching desire to imagine the significance of gender in religious community and movement may be a kind of call for our
time.7 In their focus on female spiritual heroines, the above fictions appear to embrace shifting conceptions of gender, new roles
for women, dynamic spiritual formations, and particular qualities
of character. We often see in these novels women freed from traditional gender constraints to act both womanly and manly,
emphasizing a departure from the superficialities of gender appearance in favor of an investment in androgyny. The several figures
of imagined female healers, curanderas, and everyday heroines
present women as spiritual leaders to a contemporary audience,
and valorize local spaces as sites of ministry and healing. The
engagements with Christian, Indigenous, and African Diasporic
beliefs, practices, and discourses that these novels mediate highlight ongoing processes of hybrid spiritual formation. Finally,
whereas early Christian hagiographies upheld piousness, chastity,
sacrifice, and bodily mortification, twenty-first-century Latino/a
novels appear to value in their heroines and protagonists self-love
in the face of vilification, unwavering determination against degradation and injustice, self-reflection, compassion for others, and
faith in ones own powers and abilities.

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fiction, although a notable exception is Rigoberto Gonzalezs

Crossing Vines (2003), which focuses on grape pickers in
California. In contrast to its well-known predecessors, this novels
contemporary farm workers share both a collective existence as
exploited workers, which they collectively attempt to remedy, and
deep fissures driven, in part, by gender and sexuality. More than
an exploration of a common fate, Crossing Vines examines the
ruptures and differences among farm workers, particularly those
that call into question old patriarchal models of family and community. The overwhelming focus in twenty-first-century Latino/a
literature about migrants, however, is on the inter-American crisis
of migration, the circumstances that prompt border-crossing, the
trauma of crossing, and the permanent afflictions that trauma
creates.
Ana Castillos The Guardians (2007) presents the border
crisis as war. Set in a small, rural New Mexican town not far from
Juarez, the novel revolves around the search for Rafael, brother to
Regina and father of Gabriel, who has gone missing in crossing
from Mexico to the US. No longer simply a marker between
nations, the border exists as a battlefield where, as the character
Miguel observes, a series of dirty wars involving drugs, guns,
and human trafficking play out, spreading out in concentric circles
from the border to visit death and brutality upon migrants, border
inhabitants, and people on both sides of the border. In casting the
missing Rafael as a progressive idealist from another era, reader of
Marx and follower of Comandante Marcos, who, though a veteran
of desert crossings must now, like everyone, pay to cross because
the coyotes and narcos own the desert now (4), the narrative
appears to underwrite Miguels observations. Gabriel and his aunt
Regina harbor individual desires to combat the social disease
around them through religious vocation and community improvement, respectively; their seeds of hope form important counterpoints to the world around them. The distinct voices and
perspectives of Gabriel, Regina, and Miguel alternate in interrelated chapters as each moves the action, and search, forward.
Gabriels chapters take the form of prayers while Reginas and
Miguels chapters reveal how their own perspectives on effecting
social change at the border drive their lives and actions in this circumstance. In this novel, migrants are warned at the border that
the search for the American Dream could be your worst nightmare (115); in this sense, Miguels question hovers over the
entire narrative: how long can the United States contain what its
vices and counterproductive prohibitions have wrought? (151).
The dilemma of whether or not to leave, along with the
poverty that prompts the journey and the doubts about loss and

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9. Latino/a Change in the US

The neighborhood, the home, the city, the steel mill, the
club, the artist studio, the bus, the office, the restaurant, the fields,
that is, the ordinary and everyday sites of life unfolding for people
of varied races, classes, genders, and sexualities continue as

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betrayal hanging over such a decision, emerges in varying degrees

of seriousness in this centurys Latino/a fiction. Ruins (2009) by
Achy Obejas pictures a decaying and poor Cuba beyond the brink
of repair where even a cautious decision to maintain the status quo
becomes impossible and despair sets in, fueling migrations by sea
rafts. The wrenching sense of abandoning oneself that thoughts of
this migration provoke for the protagonist of Ruins also manifests
for the central character of Across a Hundred Mountains (2006) by
Reyna Grande. In the latter novel, a young woman decides that she
can only save her mother and family from the depredations of
others and economic ruin by leaving her pueblo to find the father
who disappeared from their lives upon making the journey north
to the US. Whatever success becomes possible in the US is always
haunted by that loss and by the constant search for the missing
parent. In both Benjamin Alire Saenzs In Perfect Light (2005)
and Still Water Saints (2007) by Alex Espinoza, human trafficking
across borders emerges as a new and terrifying reality. In In
Perfect Light, two orphaned children become victims of human
traffickers when, led by their misguided older siblings, they cross
the border from El Paso to live in Juarez. In Still Water Saints, a
boy from southern Mexico attempting to cross to the US can only
migrate when he is sold into sexual slavery as the property of a
sadistic Anglo-American character.
A lighter, more playful take on migration, and the hemispheric economic crisis known as globalization, appears in Into
the Beautiful North (2009) by Luis Alberto Urrea. Here, the
women of the small town of Tres Camarones (state of Mazatlan),
Mexico, take over the municipal government, an empowering shift
that only occurs because so many of the towns men have left for
the north, no longer able to earn a decent living in their own
country. But when drug lords move in looking to take over the
town, a group of young women, inspired by a local screening of
The Magnificent Seven, set out to bring back their magnificent
seven, the men of Tres Camarones living and working in the US.
With picaresque flavor, the novel represents its merry band of
young people as they make their way across the border and across
the country to Kankakee, Illinois, in search of the towns men.

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featured settings in current Latino/a novels and short fiction. It

may be that sites of working-class labor and working-class characters predominate in this fiction, as they have tended to in the past.
But even here, in the area of Latino/a literature with strictly US
settings, new perspectives emerge about the Latino/a experience
and new literary trends take shape. Denise Chavezs Loving Pedro
Infante (2001) explores the seduction of movies in the lives of its
small town women characters. Their Dogs Came With Them
(2007) by Helena Viramontes and Music of the Mill (2005) by
Luis J. Rodriguez are two examples of domestically oriented
Latino/a fiction that depict the consequences of urban renewal for
Latino/as and the affirmative action era entry of Latino/as, finally,
into unionized industries in significant numbers. These settings
also predominate in this centurys Latino/a short fiction, a form
that remains important for new and experienced writers, though
one that requires a fuller discussion than can be offered in the
space of this essay.8 Working-class characters and settings are a
staple in the work of Latino/a graphic fiction writer Jaime
Hernandez, whose serials have gained greater attention with the
growing popularity of graphic novels. The Education of Hopey
Glass (2008) and Dicks and Deedees (2003) combine several separate serials into one collection, providing uninterrupted storylines.
New graphic fiction writer Jessica Abels 2006 graphic novel La
Perdida, also a republication of previously separate serials, tells
the story of a Latina transplant to Mexico City with romantic
notions about reconnecting to her Latino/a roots. A cautionary tale
about privileging ethnicity above all else, Abels work joins
Hernandezs in expanding the forms of Latino/a literature. Urban
Chicago figures centrally in Ana Castillos Watercolor Women
Opaque Men (2005), a novel in verse that blends the narrative and
the lyrical, reveling in a two-spirited ethos through which it tells
the story of two women, a working-class Latina woman and a
mother/writer, seeking sexual and social freedom.
Latino/a novels of this century set in the US expand the
definition of Latino/a by presenting characters from backgrounds
other than Mexican or Puerto Rican or younger contemporary
characters, often of mixed Latino/a and non-Latino/a backgrounds,
who represent a new generation. When the younger Chino, in
Bodega Dreams (2000) by Ernesto Quinones, tells the Willie,
older Puerto Rican gangster who runs things in El Barrio, that
Im only half Rican, my father is from Ecuador, he represents a
newer generation of Latino/as with a changing ethnic and demographic profile who, nonetheless, become/remain Latino/a, as
Willie asserts when he responds, So what? You Spanish, this is
your neighborhood. You grew up here, got beat up here, and I

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hope beat someone up too (36). The Latino/a novels What Night
Brings (2003) by Carla Trujillo, Drift (2003) by Manuel Luis
Martinez, In Perfect Light (2005) by Benjamin Alire Saenz, and
The Buddha Book (2001) by Abraham Rodriguez also focus on
conflicts between younger and older Latino/as, offering, in many
ways, a generational critique of Latino/a politics, cultures, and
norms. With the exception of What Night Brings, these works take
as their settings gritty urban environments, feature mostly
working-class characters, and take on intra-Latino/a conflicts such
as domestic violence; social forms of violence in drug use, prostitution, human and child trafficking; homophobia and violence
against gays, lesbians, and trans-identified characters. As such,
they turn the Latino/a creative and critical gaze in new and important directions.
Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties (2003) and Like Son
(2007), both by Felicia Luna Lemus, and Crossing Vines by
Rigoberto Gonzalez join What Night Brings and In Perfect Light
in presenting protagonists and secondary characters with nonnormative sexualities. Acceptance of their sexuality among family
and friends as well as society generally becomes a key tension in
each of these works, but in very different ways. Luna Lemus and
Trujillo explore the anxieties, fears, and rejections around publicly
acknowledging lesbian identities among Latino/a families and
friends. For Trujillos principal character, Marci, such an admission runs the risk of bringing even more violence down on her
from an already abusive father, yet she does not stop trying to
answer her own questions about her sexuality and finds support in
seemingly unlikely places. Saenzs In Perfect Light critiques the
socially sanctioned exile of Latino/a transvestites to Ciudad Juarez,
and the forced prostitution of men and women there, as it locates
heroism, courage, and compassion in a Chicano transvestite character. Lemuss work, in particular, forms part of a growing area of
work by Latino/a writers exploring varied facets of lesbian and
gay sexualities. Writing beyond the question of coming out and
intra-Latino/a tensions around homosexuality, this newer work
addresses roles, norms, and violence among queer communities
and individuals; presents lesbian and gay love and relationship
stories; and imagines queer antecedents in Latino/a folklore,
culture, or history, as in Lemuss versions of La Llorona, or the
mysterious modernist figure Nahui Olin. Another character in this
vein is Emma Perezs Tejana, Micaela Campos, discussed earlier.
The publication and circulation of fiction featuring gay and lesbian
characters in different regions, at different ages, and in different
historical periods represent a key development in Latino/a literature of the past decade.

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The Criticality of Latino/a Fiction in the Twenty-First Century

10. Conclusion

Appendix: Twenty-First Century Latino/a Fiction

Novels
Abel, Jessica. La Perdida. New York: Pantheon, 2006.
Alarcon, Daniel. Lost City Radio. New York: Harper, 2007.
Alcala, Kathleen. Treasures in Heaven. San Francisco: Chronicle,
2000.
Allende, Isabel. Portrait in Sepia. New York: Perennial/Harper,
2001.
Alvarez, Julia. In the Name of Salome. Chapel Hill: Algonquin,
2000.
Alvarez, Julia. Saving the World. Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 2006.
Anaya, Rudolfo. Alburquerque: A Novel. Albuquerque: U of New
Mexico P, 2006.
Carrillo, H. G. Loosing My Espanish. New York: Random/
Pantheon, 2004.
Castillo, Ana. Watercolor Women, Opaque Men: A Novel in Verse.
Willimantic: Curbstone, 2005.
Castillo, Ana. The Guardians. New York: Random, 2007.
Chavez, Denise. Loving Pedro Infante. New York: Farrar, 2001.
Cisneros, Sandra. Caramelo. New York: Knopf, 2002.
Daz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York:
Riverhead, 2007.

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The unique Latino/a critique, one informed by a long history

of exclusion as well as organized social and political movement,
extends outward in this century to imagine global and hemispheric
events and stories. To its great credit, Latino/a fiction critically
remembers the violence of previous decades and earlier eras at a
time when we are everywhere surrounded by violence, when
national resources are devoured by the imperative to violence
whether in Afghanistan or in the US Mexico borderand when
the consequences of prior US involvements in war in our hemisphere are routinely papered over. Latino/a fictions investment in
this century in representing characters impacted by migration
matches its long-standing interrogation of mobilities imposed and
embraced in the Americas. That so many of its narrators and protagonists in this era are imagined as determined and resilient
women, young men with heart, and fearless lesbian and gay men
suggests that Latino/a mettle is a much prized quality in our times.

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Duarte, Stella Pope. Let Their Spirits Dance. New York: Harper,
2002.
Espinoza, Alex. Still Water Saints. New York: Random, 2007.
Garcia, Cristina. Monkey Hunting. New York: Ballantine, 2004.
Garcia, Cristina. A Handbook to Luck. New York: Knopf, 2007.
Gaspar de Alba, Alicia. Sor Juanas Second Dream. Albuquerque:
U of New Mexico P, 1999.
Gaspar de Alba, Alicia. Calligraphy of the Witch. New York:
St. Martins, 2007.
Goldman, Francisco. The Divine Husband. New York: Grove,
2004.
Gonzalez, Rigoberto. Crossing Vines. Norman: U of Oklahoma P,
2003.
Grande, Reyna. Across A Hundred Mountains. New York: Atria,
2006.
Hijuelos, Oscar. A Simple Habana Melody. New York: Harper,
2002.
Hijuelos, Oscar. Beautiful Mara of My Soul. New York:
Hyperion, 2010.
Lemus, Felicia Luna. Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties.
New York: Farrar, 2003.
Lemus, Felicia Luna. Like Son. New York: Akashic, 2007.
Manrique, Jaime. Our Lives Are the Rivers. New York: Harper,
2006.
Martinez, Manuel Luis. Drift. New York: Picador, 2003.
Martinez, Manual Luis. Day of the Dead. Mountain View:
Floricanto, 2009.
Menendez, Ana. Loving Che. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2004.
Mujica, Barbara. Frida. Woodstock: Overlook, 2001.
Murray, Yxta Maya. The Conquest. New York: Harper, 2002.
Obejas, Achy. Ruins. New York: Akashic, 2009.
Perez, Emma. Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory. Austin:
U of Texas P, 2009.
Quinonez, Ernesto. Bodega Dreams. New York: Vintage/Random,
2000.
Ramos, Manuel. The King of the Chicanos. San Antonio: Wings,
2010.
Rodriguez, Abraham. The Buddha Book. New York: Picador,
2001.
Rodriguez, Luis J. Music of the Mill. New York: Rayo, 2005.
Rosario, Nelly. Song of the Water Saints. New York: Vintage,
2003.
Sellers-Garca, Sylvia. When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep.
New York: Riverhead/Penguin, 2007.

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The Criticality of Latino/a Fiction in the Twenty-First Century

Short Fiction
Alarcon, Daniel. War by Candlelight. New York: Harper, 2005.
Baca, Jimmy Santiago. The Importance of a Piece of Paper.
New York: Grove, 2004.
Casares, Oscar. Brownsville. New York: Back Bay/Little, 2003.
Gomez, Hector and Hugo Camacho. The Legacy: Valley of Tears
1. Lulu.com, 2010.
Henrquez, Cristina. Come Together, Fall Apart: A Novella and
Stories. New York: Riverhead/Penguin, 2006.
Hernandez, Jaime. Dicks and Deedees. Seattle: Fantagraphics,
2003.
Hernandez, Jaime. The Education of Hopey Glass. Seattle:
Fantagraphics, 2008.
Menendez, Ana. In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd. New York:
Grove, 2001.
Rodriguez, Luis J. The Republic of East L. A. New York: Harper,
2002.
Shapard, Robert, James Thomas, and Ray Gonzalez, eds. Sudden
Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States
and Latin America. New York: Norton, 2009.
Urrea, Luis Alberto. Six Kinds of Sky: A Collection of Short
Fiction. El Paso: Cinco Puntos, 2002.
Yanez, Richard. El Paso del Norte: Stories on the Border. Reno:
U of Nevada P, 2003.

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Sirias, Silvio. Bernardo and the Virgin. Evanston: Northwestern

UP/Latino Voices, 2005.
Sirias, Silvio. Meet Me Under the Ceiba. Houston: Arte Publico,
2009.
Tobar, Hector. The Tattooed Soldier. 1998. New York: Penguin,
2000.
Trujillo, Carla. What Night Brings. Willimantic: Curbstone, 2003.
Urrea, Luis Alberto. The Hummingbirds Daughter. New York:
Back Bay/Little, 2005.
Urrea, Luis Alberto. Into the Beautiful North. New York: Little,
2009.
Valdes-Rodriguez, Alisa. The Dirty Girls Social Club. 2003.
New York: St. Martins, 2004.
Vea, Alfredo. Gods Go Begging. 1999. New York: Plume, 2000.
Viramontes, Helena Mara. Their Dogs Came With Them. 2007.
New York: Washington Square, 2008.

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623

Notes
1. There are, of course, exceptions to this general observationfor example,
Demetria Martnezs Mother Tongue (1994) and Graciela Limons In Search of
Bernabe (1993), both of which revolve around the war in El Salvador, or Hector
Tobars The Tattooed Solider (1998), which focused on Guatemalan migrants traumatized by war in that country, or Americo Paredess George Washington Gomez (1990),
which opens with a war at the border and ends with the eruption of World War II.

3. See Ramon Saldivar, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference

(1990), 73.
4. One exception to this is Oscar Hijueloss A Simple Habana Melody (2002)
about a prominent Cuban Jewish composer caught in Europe during
World War II.
5. Another aspect of this appears in work such as Julia Alvarezs Saving the
World, which addresses the ethical and emotional quandries of first world participation in third world social justice work.
6. In my earlier work, I address Chicana novels and documentary films where
religion surfaces as a key concern. Narratives that frequently address Latino/a
marginalization and exploitation in dominant culture and intra-Latino/a sexism
and misogyny, these stories of Latina lives, including lives different than those
historically accorded to Latinas in the US, imaginatively confront religious discourse and specific religious traditions. This Chicana literature imagines female
characters awakening to a different kind of spiritual consciousness and shaping
contemporary religiosity, offering a critique of religion as it works to recover
female and feminist spiritual power. This work often includes curanderas as secondary characters whose indigenous healing represents alternative world views,
but focuses on female characters engaged in creating new spiritualities. See my
forthcoming work from Duke University Press, Spiritual Mestizaje: Religion,
Gender, Race and Nation in Contemporary Chicana Narrative, which takes up
Demetria Martnezs Mother Tongue, Judith Gleason and Feminist Collective of
Xalapas Flowers for Guadalupe, Lourdes Portillos Senorita Extraviada, Norma
Cantus Cancula, Face of an Angel by Denise Chavez, Spirits of the Ordinary,
Treasures in Heaven, and Flower in the Skull by Kathleen Alcala.
7. See Jodi Bilinkoff, Introduction, Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in
the Americas (2003), ed. Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff, xiii xiv.
8. A new trend of note is the late-twentieth-century emergence of sudden
fiction, which, in the twenty-first century, also became Latino/a, as represented
by the publication of Sudden Fiction Latino (2009). This volume melds together
the work of Latino/a and Latin American writers working in this genre, one
perhaps most reflective of the digital age where the expression and enjoyment of

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2. Simon Bolivar, Manuela Saenz, Jose Mart, Salome Urena, and Santa Teresa
de Cabora appear as protagonists of Latino/a fiction, and events such as the
Anglo conquest of Tejas and the Mexican-American War; the Mexican wars
against Yaqui and other Native Americans; the colonization of the Americas and
the Salem witch trials become the contexts for imaginative storytelling

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The Criticality of Latino/a Fiction in the Twenty-First Century

literary puzzles and riddles, the clever paradox, the enduring irony, and the
sacred moment bloom. See the appendix for titles of volumes of short fiction published between 2000 and 2010.

Works Cited
Against Margins. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1995.

Castillo, Ana. The Guardians.

New York: Random, 2007.

Quinonez, Ernesto. Bodega Dreams.

New York: Vintage/Random, 2000.

Daz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of

Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead, 2007.

Saldivar, Jose David. The Dialectics

of Our America: Genealogy,
Cultural Critique, and Literary
History. Durham: Duke UP,
1991.

Gutierrez-Jones, Carl. Rethinking the

Borderlands: Between Chicano
Culture and Legal Discourse.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.
Menendez, Ana. Loving Che.
New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2004.

Sellers-Garca, Sylvia. When the

Ground Turns in Its Sleep.
New York: Riverhead/Penguin,
2007.

Perez-Torres, Rafael. Movements in

Chicano Poetry: Against Myths,

Vea, Alfredo. Gods Go Begging. 1999.

New York: Plume, 2000.

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Alvarez, Julia. Saving the World.

Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 2006.