Editor’s Introduction: New Perspectives on Puerto Rican, Latina/o, Chicana/o, and Caribbean American Literatures

The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.

This quotation, in various permutations, is attributed on the Internet to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Albert Einstein, three traditional great white males from the dominant culture. But, as these lines and their vexed lineage suggest, the source is a red herring. We cannot really determine an idea’s point of origin, nor can we return to it, even if we wanted to—which, according to the contents of this issue, we would not. Will the Capitol in Washington, DC—or indeed the US government—ever look the same to you now that you have experienced the image by Arnaldo Roche that graces our cover for this issue? Both our cover and the essays within truly provide “New Perspectives on Puerto Rican, Latina/o, Chicana/o, and Caribbean American Literatures.” And we must not forget that the very notion of these literatures opened new canonical vistas only a few decades ago.

All the contributors to this issue, “New Perspectives on Puerto Rican, Latina/o, Chicana/o, and Caribbean American Literatures,” present us with new ideas, as well as authors new to some of us, that will stretch our minds with riches of scholarship and interpretive brio. Even a canonical modernist like William Carlos Williams, as one of this issue’s articles demonstrates, has cultural dimensions that we must reevaluate and appreciate in the context of ethnic literature. As the canon expands, so do our minds. Why would we ever want to return to the narrow dimensions of the past, with its limited perspective?

Our first three articles make problematic any fixity of canon, place of origin, or ideas of home through the paradoxical notion of a fixed abode in the fluidity of motion, particularly walking, in which such mundane local forms of travel become globally suggestive. In “ ‘Little Things Are Big’: Race and the Politics of Print Community in the Writings of Jesús Colón,” Adalaine Holton stretches our sense of canon and provides new perspectives as she attempts to illuminate “a blind spot when it comes to the role of Afro-Latina/os in twentieth-century black radicalism in the United States . . . by examining the published writings of the black Puerto Rican communist Jesús Colón,” arguing that none of these identities are “mutually exclusive.” Holton examines Colón’s use of the crónica, “a blend of literary and journalistic discourse,” in order “to focus on the everyday experiences of labor, public transportation, social engagement, and cultural activity,” as Colón’s persona moves about the city. As she considers the resulting newspaper columns, such as “Little Things Are Big,” Holton shows how Colón changes his readers’ perspectives by “jumping scale” between the local and the global and thus “enables individuals to see the possibilities for projecting their political agency.”

A different kind of “jumping scale” is considered in Alicia Muñoz’s “Articulating a Geography of Pain: Metaphor, Memory, and Movement in Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them,” as Viramontes’s protagonists confront the differing perspectives of driving the freeways and walking the streets of East Los Angeles. Muñoz shows how imagery, memory, and movement can present three alternate routes to new and complex points of view:

Viramontes’s storyline, like the spatial organization of Los Angeles, consists of multiple foci. However, it is not just the narrative structure that reflects the plurality of LA. Numerous intersecting and concurrent articulations of the city are central to apprehending this space and are manifest in the novel by layered expression encompassing metaphor, memory, and movement . . . facilitating comprehension of the history and experience of urban Chicana/os.

Such insight will indicate “ways the Latino community can resist the erasive consequences of race and class by forming independent spatial meaning.”

Motion provides further novel perspectives in Ilka Kressner’s “ ‘I will walk away on my own, phantom-footed’: Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Invocation of the Constant Move.” As in Holton’s and Muñoz’s...