The Latino Generation: Voices of the New America by Mario T. García (review)

The Latino Generation offers a vivid image of the saga that some Latin Americans experienced while migrating to the United States. The book contains interviews with thirteen Latino college students (ten women and three men) that Mario T. Garcia collected at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) from the years 2002 to 2010; almost all of the interviewees were students of the author. Garcia's narrators are second-generation children of immigrants; most of them have Mexican backgrounds, but some have parents from other Latin American countries, including Honduras, El Salvador, and Ecuador. Garcia used an open-ended interview methodology, asking general questions in order to allow the students to develop their personal stories in their own way. He then had the interviews transcribed, composing them into first-person autobiographical stories. After undertaking some revision of the drafts himself, Garcia sent them back to the students for fact-checking and edits, which resulted in the final versions used in his book. At the end of each testimony, Garcia provides a brief remark about the interviewee, letting the reader know what has happened in the narrator's life since the oral history. All of these testimonies truly help the reader understand and empathize with a segment of the US population that is increasing both in size and in influence.

The introduction to The Latino Generation provides historical background and context that come to life with the integration of the students' first-person testimonies. Although Garcia summarizes the history of Latinos in the United States and makes some remarks about ethnicity and race in this chapter, he does not clearly define the terms Latino, Chicano, or Hispanic, which are used throughout the book. Providing a lens through which to see, and therefore understand, the intersections and differences among these ethnic categories, these concepts, would have helped inestimably. After the introduction comes the heart of the book, the testimonies, or testimonios, all of which follow a traditional chronological order and basically have the same structure. Each testimonio begins with the narrator explaining her or his parents' background; narrators then go on to talk about their childhood, education, and neighborhood, the racial atmosphere of the place in which they grew up, and the reason they decided to go to college. A clear objective of the book, then, is for the reader to get an idea of the acculturation/transculturation of the students; Garcia asked several questions about each student's life at home, the culture of the home, and individual and familial cultural preferences. Even though the fixed form and structure of the presentation of the testimonies could have felt a bit repetitive, the richness and uniqueness of each story keep the book alive and engaging. The Latino Generation is not composed of one story told thirteen times, but thirteen histories, thirteen autobiographies of people who have different personalities, life experiences, and perspectives on life, politics, race, and gender.

One of the main themes—whether implicit or explicit—in the testimonies is that of identity, either racial or ethnic. The narrators grew up in environments where race and ethnicity were not homogenous; many of them were raised in neighborhoods that were predominantly Hispanic. As time passed and the interviewees aged, the racial/ethnic diversity in the world around them only increased; high school introduced them to a wider racial and ethnic spectrum, and matriculating at UCSB brought them into a predominantly white racial environment with which they were completely unfamiliar. Coming face to face with such diversity made the interviewees become much more aware of the identity that society imposed on them, and caused many of them to question that identity. Though Garcia emphasizes that all of the interviewees share a common identity, that of "Pan-Latino," each interviewee had a different view about how to identify herself or himself—as Latino, Hispanic, Chicano, Mexican American, or some other.

As rich as this text is generally...