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6 Dirty Girls, German Shepherds, and Puerto Rican Independentistas “The Latino Imaginary” and the Case of Cuba As we have seen in the previous chapter, the implicit assumption that Latino/a identity as a whole is characterized by a resistant, oppositional stance has historically permeated much of Latino studies. The notion of latinidad, David Román and Alberto Sandoval have observed, often “circulates as a critical shorthand valorizing seemingly authentic cultural practices that challenge both colonial and imperialist U.S. ideologies in North and South America” (558). In 1990 Ramón Saldívar’s groundbreaking Chicano Narrative took up just such an argument with regard to Chicano literature in particular;1 Saldívar’s contention that Chicano narratives are “resistant ideological forces in their own right” (7) has influenced a wave of subsequent criticism on Latino literature more generally, such that, if the assumption that Latino/a writing is always resistant is not always explicitly stated, nevertheless, critics show no interest in discussing texts which may not fit this paradigm.2 For example, in Postmodern Cross-Culturalism and Politicization in U.S. Latina Literature, Mujčinović groups texts which “engage in oppositional forms of enunciation, contesting and deconstructing dominant social discourses in order to ensure a progressive transfiguration and emancipation of the individual and the communal” (4). In Reading U.S. Latina Writers, Quintana describes the emergence of “an alternative Latina vision, which in essence synthesized issues relevant to both civil rights and women’s liberation,” and offers her collection of essays as an effort “to help fulfill U.S. Latina writers’ visions of telling stories that will help liberate those who have been left behind” (1–2). (Less-liberating stories need not apply.) In Dance between Two Cultures Luis writes that Latinos “articulate a differentiated discourse; that is, an antidiscourse to the discourse of power, similar to that of blacks and slaves” (285). In a call for papers, the journal Works and Days invited submissions for a special issue on “Asian American, African American, and Latino/a American Cultural Criticisms,” which once again reveals the continuing presumption that Latino/a cultural production will inevitably be “counter-hegemonic,” “challenge the mainstream,” and en- 162 On Latinidad gage in “criticisms of whiteness, racialization, American Empire, imperialism, neo-colonialism, global capitalism, and so forth” (“Call for Papers”). In a more sophisticated vein, Allatson, in Latino Dreams, rightly notes the continuing assumption within Latino studies that “all Latinos can be placed under the subaltern rubric” (42) and declares his intent “to avoid the tendency to regard Latino narratives as invariably oppositional to majoritarian imaginations [and to celebrate] cultural heterogeneity as cultural resistance or counter -hegemonic success” (45). Yet Allatson’s main lines of inquiry continue to be centered on “the resistant capacities of cultural production”: “What narrative tactics are mobilized against the U.S.A. and its dominant myths [. . . ?] What is at stake for Latino cultural politics in the narration of alternatives to (or mobilities against) the ‘American’ Dream?” (13). In Allatson’s more nuanced approach, “Latino counter-discursive ambitions” (21) can be thwarted by “moments of hegemonic complicity” (53), but the ambitions are still more or less taken for granted. Anthologies, which inevitably serve the function of presenting critical constructs of the field for a general audience, have on more than one occasion reified the paradigm of the oppositionality of Latino literature.3 In his introduction to Currents from the Dancing River, for example, Ray Gonzalez asserts that, “[A]lthough cultural differences remain between Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans in the United States, and Cuban Americans, Latino writers are coming together in a cohesive [. . .] whole” which is characterized by (among other things) a “timeless struggle for social justice” (xiii–xiv; emphasis added). And Nicolás Kanellos introduces Hispanic American Literature (1995) by affirming that writers such as Tomás Rivera and Rolando Hinojosa “led the way in creating a working-class identity and aesthetic for all Hispanic writers in the United States” (4; emphasis added).4 In his discussion of U.S. Latino literature in From Bomba to Hip-Hop, Juan Flores skirts the pitfalls of some of these critical commentaries because he insists that “[t]he adequacy of the embattled ‘Latino’ or Hispanic’ concept hinges on its inclusiveness toward the full range of social experiences and identities” (164; emphasis added). Flores, instead, details two different trajectories of Latino literary canon formation:5 “The difference, I would suggest, [. . .] lies in the differential positioning of the varied Latino groups in the prevailing structures of...

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