Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-First Century: The Politics of Gender, Race, and Migrations (review)

The prolific production of Latina self-writing, especially since the 1980s, has been accompanied by an equally extensive body of critical work that analyzes the numerous ways Latina authors narrate their experiences, whether as deterritorialized (in situ) and colonized subjects—as in the case of Mexicans after the 1848 War and Puerto Ricans after 1898—or/and as migrant and displaced subjects, be it for economic or political reasons. Their writing, as contestatory discourse, constitutes a literary phenomenon, both a poetics and a politics that has been registering the shifting cultural realities of a Latino demographic in the United States and the new historical subjectivities that these writers symbolically write into the social fabric. Juanita Heredia’s Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-First Century: The Politics of Gender, Race, and Migrations is a contribution to the vital scholarship that studies this ongoing production. Latina authors, defined by their bi-cultural background, inevitably reference the geographies of their origins as well as those of their destinations, but Heredia’s analysis of five autobiographical fictions published in the twenty-first century posits these texts as new transnational narratives that capture the increased circuits of communication that are taking place as Latin American diasporas form cultural communities in the United States that maintain strong cultural, emotional, or physical ties to their homelands.

The five authors selected, and the works studied in each chapter, are representative of different generations and heritage communities: Denise Chávez (b. 1948), Loving Pedro Infante (2001); Sandra Cisneros (b. 1954), Caramelo (2002); Marta Moreno Vega (b. 1942), When the Spirits Dance Mambo: Growing Up Nuyorican in the Barrio (2004); Angie Cruz (b. 1972), Let It Rain Coffee (2005); and Marie Arana (b. 1949), American Chica (2001). The readings demonstrate the diversity of the Latina experience while also identifying the common ground that places the protagonists in analogous projects as they redefine ways of belonging to the nation—straddling two cultures, two nations, and two languages while in the process of constructing a self amid gender, class, and ethnic discrimination on both sides of the divide. Their responses to patriarchy, colonization, and racism differ, as Heredia shows, eliciting distinct rhetorical strategies from historically and geographically situated communities and women. She acknowledges that their literary interventions—positing a Latino imaginary—destabilize any homogenous definition of an “American” United States national literary canon and the official nationalist discourses it constructs, as they make visible those marginalized and excluded from the discourses of the body politic.

These self-writings, whether coming-of-age stories, memoirs, or tales of migration and displacement, refuse a straightforward or seemingly transparent narrative of the authors’ lives, choosing the complexity of literary form as they recover past histories or ground a genealogy. Heredia takes on the challenge of engaging the history and politics of both the United States and the countries of origin represented in the stories—Mexico in Chávez and Cisneros; Puerto Rico in Moreno Vega; the Dominican Republic in Cruz; and Peru in Arana—as crucial to an interpretation that is also cognizant of their poetic composition and place in the narratives of globalization. Heredia provides the reader, especially one unfamiliar with Latin America, with critical information for an enlightened reading of “other” worlds and literary practices by contextualizing the literary references: Mexican popular film culture in Loving Pedro Infante; five hundred years of Mexican history in Caramelo; Afro-Caribbean Yoruba practices in When the Spirits Dance Mambo; the horrors of dictatorship in Let it Rain Coffee; and Peruvian ethnic politics in American Chica.

I see the chapters on less studied authors such as Morena Vega and Cruz as a meaningful contribution to the field; on the other hand, given the authors’ generational range spans from 1942 to 1972, a critical analysis addressing the experiences and worldviews of the five authors was missing and could have provided a valuable framework historicizing the comparative analysis...