Nuevo Texto Crítico is an academic publication sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Center of Latin American Studies at Stanford University. Since its foundation in 1988 Nuevo Texto Crítico has been recognized as a leading journal in the fields of analysis and criticism of Latin American literature and film. One of its main objectives has always been to bring both to the educated and the general reader the best critical materials at the highest level of research, as a means of understanding how modern culture develops in every Latin American country in national and trans-national ways.

This is the first book to address head-on the question of how Latino/a literature wrestles with the pan-ethnic and trans-racial implications of the "Latino" label.

Refusing to take latinidad (Latino-ness) for granted, Marta Caminero-Santangelo lays the groundwork for a sophisticated understanding of the various manifestations of "Latino" identity. She examines texts by prominent Chicano/a, Dominican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American writers--including Julia Alvarez, Cristina García, Achy Obejas, Piri Thomas, and Ana Castillo--and concludes that a pre-existing "group" does not exist. The author instead argues that much recent Latino/a literature presents a vision of tentative, forged solidarities in the service of particular and sometimes even local struggles. She shows that even magical realism can figure as a threat to collectivity, rather than as a signifier of it, because magical connections--to nature, between characters, and to Latin American origins--can undermine efforts at solidarity and empowerment.

In the author's close reading of both fictional and cultural narratives, she suggests the possibility that Latino identity may be even more elastic than the authors under question recognize.

"Appearing for the first time in English, these stories express the anguish and courage of women from their different classes and regions as they recognize their common restlessness and forge a new consciousness."  -- Booklist

"... provocative... Although not all the pieces are outwardly political, there is a political edge to the book; the tone of the stories is bleak as they tell of Brazilian women's struggles with government, society, men and their own private demons. Sadlier's able translations retain a distinctive voice and style for each writer." -- Publishers Weekly

"Sadlier... has done a service to students of Comparative Literature and Women's Studies as well as to general readers who sincerely want to know what literature of quality is being written in that all-too-rarely studied Portuguese language of Brazil."  -- Revista de Estudios Hispanicos

"The pieces... convey... the evolution in the consciousness of the writers, their sense of themselves, and their place in society as well as the changes affecting Brazil's political climate and society at large during this century."  -- Review of Contemporary Fiction

"A superb addition to the increasing number of anthologies dedicated to Brazilian literature." -- Choice

"A must for any modern literary collection." -- WLW Journal

Women writers have revolutionized Brazilian literature, and this impressive collection will provide English readers with a window on this revolution. These twenty previously untranslated selections by some of Brazil's most important writers illustrate the remarkable power of women's voices and the important contributions they have made to twentieth-century literature.

Evan Ward's compelling study provides analytical insight into the evolution of today's principal tourism destinations in the Spanish Caribbean. Packaged Vacations examines the political and economic forces that led to the creation of resorts in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, as well as the impact tourism has had on local environments, economies, and cultures.

By comparing and contrasting a number of case studies, Ward reveals how historical, political, architectural, planning, and environmental factors led to the unique identities of resorts throughout the region. He also demonstrates that the growth of tourism in the region into a major economic force is driven as much by local and European interests as by those of American corporations.

Women have always been the muses who inspire the creativity of men, but how do women become the creators of art themselves? This was the challenge faced by Latin American women who aspired to write in the 1920s and 1930s. Though women's roles were opening up during this time, women writers were not automatically welcomed by the Latin American literary avant-gardes, whose male members viewed women's participation in tertulias (literary gatherings) and publications as uncommon and even forbidding. How did Latin American women writers, celebrated by male writers as the “New Eve” but distrusted as fellow creators, find their intellectual homes and fashion their artistic missions? In this innovative book, Vicky Unruh explores how women writers of the vanguard period often gained access to literary life as public performers. Using a novel, interdisciplinary synthesis of performance theory, she shows how Latin American women's work in theatre, poetry declamation, song, dance, oration, witty display, and bold journalistic self-portraiture helped them craft their public personas as writers and shaped their singular forms of analytical thought, cultural critique, and literary style. Concentrating on eleven writers from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela, Unruh demonstrates that, as these women identified themselves as instigators of change rather than as passive muses, they unleashed penetrating critiques of projects for social and artistic modernization in Latin America.

Michael Iarocci traces the ways in which Spain went from being central to European history and identity during the early modern period to being marginalized and displaced by England, France, and Germany during the Romantic period. He points out that it has long been an unspoken assumption tainting much of literary criticism that Spain did not have a strong Romantic movement even though Spain itself had come to be viewed by the "new" Europe as the location of all that was romantic. Through a close study of Cadalso, Saavedra, and Larra, Iarocci argues that Spanish writers were intensely concerned with the same issues taken up by more famous Romantics and that the ways in which they address these issues provides us with a richer notion, not only of Spain, but of all of Europe.

In the wake of independence from Spain in 1898, Cuba's intellectual avant-garde struggled to cast their country as a modern nation. They grappled with the challenges presented by the postcolonial situation in general and with the location of blackness within a narrative of Cuban-ness in particular.

In this breakthrough study, Emily Maguire examines how a cadre of writers reimagined the nation and re-valorized Afro-Cuban culture through a textual production that incorporated elements of the ethnographic with the literary. Singling out the work of Lydia Cabrera as emblematic of the experimentation with genre that characterized the age, Maguire constructs a series of counterpoints that place Cabrera's work in dialogue with that of her Cuban contemporaries--including Fernando Ortiz, Nicolas Guillen, and Alejo Carpentier. An illuminating final chapter on Cabrera and Zora Neale Hurston widens the scope to contextualize Cuban texts within a hemispheric movement to represent black culture.

In Rewriting Womanhood, Nancy LaGreca explores the subversive refigurings of womanhood in three novels by women writers: La hija del bandido (1887) by Refugio Barragán de Toscano (Mexico; 1846–1916), Blanca Sol (1888) by Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera (Peru; 1845–1909), and Luz y sombra (1903) by Ana Roqué (Puerto Rico; 1853–1933). While these women were both acclaimed and critiqued in their day, they have been largely overlooked by contemporary mainstream criticism. Detailed enough for experts yet accessible to undergraduates, graduate students, and the general reader, Rewriting Womanhood provides ample historical context for understanding the key women’s issues of nineteenth-century Mexico, Peru, and Puerto Rico; clear definitions of the psychoanalytic theories used to unearth the rewriting of the female self; and in-depth literary analyses of the feminine agency that Barragán, Cabello, and Roqué highlight in their fiction. Rewriting Womanhood reaffirms the value of three women novelists who wished to broaden the ruling-class definition of woman as mother and wife to include woman as individual for a modern era. As such, it is an important contribution to women’s studies, nineteenth-century Hispanic studies, and sexuality and gender studies.

In the late nineteenth century, the Brazilian army staged several campaigns against the settlement of Canudos in northeastern Brazil. The colony’s residents followed a man known as Antonio Conselheiro (“the Counselor”), who promoted a communal existence free of taxes and oppression. To the fledgling republic of Brazil, the settlement represented a threat to its system of government. Estimates of the death toll range from fifteen thousand to thirty thousand. Sentencing Canudos presents an original perspective on the hegemonic intellectual discourse surrounding this monumental event in Brazilian history. Adriana Michele Campos Johnson offers a close examination of nation building and the silencing of other voices through the reinvisioning of history. Looking primarily to Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões, which has become the defining—and nearly exclusive—account of the conflict, she maintains that the events and people of Canudos have been sentenced to history by this work. Johnson investigates other accounts of Canudos such as local oral histories, letters, newspaper articles, and the writings of Cunha’s contemporaries in order to strip away political agendas.