Life on the Hyphen or Bolívar's Undying Promise

What does a successful America look like? Is it national? Is it regional? Is it trans- or subcultural? Is it caramel, white, or brown? Is it stability? Is it fluctuation? Is it a success that stands alone? Is it an equality that belies difference?

Pertinent as they are, these questions are not new ones. In "Carta de Jamaica" of 1815, Simón Bolívar hypothesized the birth of a region that would inherit humanity, proffering antidotes to these very criteria. Borrowing from Adam Smith, and preceding G. W. F. Hegel and Marx, Bolívar was among the first of many pan-American theorists to claim that the rising tide of prosperity would raise all ships. The inevitability of the Western Hemisphere would blur all borders and bandage all wounds.

Why then, at "Carta de Jamaica's" bicentenary, is identity politics and its cultural canon in expanse?

The article in this collection, "Transnational US Latino/a Literature: From the 1960s to the Twenty-First Century," offers a catalogue and review of a recently booming corpus of work that proves Bolívar wrong. Ranging from recent criticism on gang and cartel Central America to Spanish speaking US literature, the uniting factor in an otherwise disparate group of writers is that it presupposes an underdog-ness that "derives from a hybrid background."

The article sets aside a cultural block and highlights that the growing body of work, siphoned off from other literary studies, is successful in its own right. This is what unites Junot Díaz with transnational Latinas and Sandra Cisneros with Central American nomads. This analysis has been necessary for what critical theorists would call the dialectical positioning and projecting of future hope through culture, what decolonial theorists would refer to as the unearthing of the analectic, or pure underlying self, and what the layperson might simply refer to as a desire to feel represented authentically.

Is it trauma? Is it triumph?

Many world literary theorists would argue that the real moment of empowerment would come when this snapshot of framed culture is woven into the whole and shown to hold up to, if not exceed, the rigor of wider comparisons and criticism. If what is at stake is an attempt to come to terms with a tension that originates elsewhere, retreating to particularisms has its limits. Walt Whitman, William Faulkner, and Flannery O'Conner were influential for prominent Latin American writers throughout the twentieth century. The argument would hold, then, can one not presume that the writers highlighted in this article can be important to American(o/a)s of all backgrounds and still have an acute resonance?

Is it mutual understanding? Is it narcissism?

The current moment presents a discord not out of line with that of the beginning of the nineteenth century. Geographical borders may have worn away, but cultural mores and their differences, be they performative or ontological, shine as bright as they ever have. These borders that social critics as differing in opinion as Samuel Huntington and Gloria Anzaldúa have viewed as a wound, one can only hope, will become more a cardinal point to guide Americanos to understanding what has been, until now, a violent twenty first century.

For Bolívar, American success comprises a citizenry that would be "ni indio ni europeo." He is not right two hundred years later. Will he be right two hundred years from now?