Buenas Noches, American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night

PREFACE

r e c t o ฀ r u n n i n g h e a d ฀ • ฀ 9 A word on the organization of Buenas Noches, American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night. This study concentrates on Latina/o literature and some film and photography from the 1940s to the present, focusing chiefly on Latina/o cultural production during the last three decades. Though the study flows more or less chronologically within its individual parts, it also follows a spatial logic that arcs and spirals across the United States and between the Americas, exploring the groupings within and the sheer variety of “Latina/o” culture(s) as well as historical and contemporary connections among identities and locations. Chapter 1, on Chicana/o cultural production, is mostly situated in California and the Southwestern borderlands. Chapter 2, on continental U.S.-based Puerto Rican and Cuban American poets, concerns itself with the Hispanic Caribbean in relation to New York, New England, and the Midwest. Via the writings it examines, chapter 3 journeys to Central America, Guatemala, and Panama but also to New York, Los Angeles, and the Washington , DC, area as well as to Nicaragua and El Salvador. Chapter 4, on the transcultural night work of U.S.-based South American writers and one photographer , moves among the United States, South America, Spain, and Eastern Europe. Some segments of the arcs and spirals may be familiar to readers, and others surprising, disorienting, or vertiginous. Such were the mappings that unfolded before those tenuous instruments, my eyes, as they contemplated tropes of night in Latina/o cultural production.1 As for temporality, within the framework of the contemporary period this book shuttles back and forth not only between postmodernism and modernism but, via the works themselves and sometimes in the blink of an eye, between a pre-Columbian era and the twenty-third century (2280 ad, to be precise). Simultaneously, this study takes PreFace ฀ 1 0 ฀ • ฀ v e r s o ฀ r u n n i n g h e a d its time. The introduction shades into its subject matter through various deepening degrees to arrive at Latina/o aesthetics of night. Such is the fluidity of time—movements made simultaneously at very different speeds—under the auspices of night. ฀ x ฀ • ฀ P r e Fa c e ...