Buenas noches, American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night by, María DeGuzmá (review)

Buenas noches, American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night further solidifies María DeGuzmán’s already solid reputation as a rigorous, well-read scholar of depth and import in the growing field of Latina/o literary and cultural studies. While presenting new readings of “old” favorites (including Américo Paredes, Gloria Anzaldúa, Rafael Campo, Miguel Algarín, and many others) but also elucidating lesser known authors and texts (such as Mariana Romo-Carmona, Hector Tobar, and Rane Arroyo, to name but a few), DeGuzmán’s latest volume is a scholarly tour de force.

Buenas noches begins with an excellent introductory chapter, “Critically Inhabiting the Night,” which examines the prevalence of the trope of night and darkness in Latina/o culture and literature past and present, asserting that “Latina/o figurations of night have constituted an aesthetics of self-representation as well as a form of resistance to compulsory state-sanctioned definitions of Latina/o identities and conditions for exclusion from or inclusion in the body politic of the United States” (2). DeGuzmán successfully argues that the recurrence of night and darkness in Latina/o cultural artifacts has not only aesthetic but also political implications that deserve critical attention. As she describes her own methodology, the chapters that follow present a “comparatist approach” by considering Latina/o cultural texts in dialogue not only with each other but also with the U.S. literary tradition more broadly, as well as Latin American literature, a type of transcultural undertaking not very common in either camp.

Despite this innovative approach, the four main chapters of the book are divided rather traditionally into geographic areas of origin although they do expand the “canon” and move beyond the traditional Cuban, Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Chicano/a groups to include so-called other Latina/os. There is one chapter each on Chicana/o, Caribbean, Central American, and finally, South American texts. DeGuzmán’s analysis thus challenges dominant, narrow definitions of latinidad; this is a strength of DeGuzmán’s work and one way in which it clearly contributes to the ever-growing field of Latina/o studies.

In each chapter, DeGuzmán discusses an astounding breadth of works, including short fiction, poetry, novels, essays, films, and even photographs, primarily from the 20th and 21st centuries. In addition, DeGuzmán deftly handles a tremendous corpus of literary theory and history, while also providing insightful, close readings of specific texts. Yet despite the seemingly unwieldy bodies of work that DeGumán handles, which in less capable hands could overwhelm the reader and the argument itself, she never loses sight of her central premise, that the stunning recurrence of what she calls “night work” in Latina/o culture is no accident but, rather, that night and its related imagery is a politicized trope, the deployment of which “is a way for Latina/os to represent and talk about [. . . ] their/our simultaneous ‘invisibilization’ and ‘hyper-visibility’ in all kinds of genres and media” (250). Though DeGuzmán analyzes many authors and works with which a general reader may not be familiar, she carefully provides enough plot summary and background that the analyses are still engaging and comprehensible. In fact, while reading DeGuzmán’s book, I kept a list of authors and works that I now want to read as a result of her discussion.

The overall strength of DeGuzmán’s careful and thorough study is its acknowledgement and constant engagement with multiplicity: positing latinidad itself as encompassing a tremendous variety of peoples and experiences, employing a wide range of cultural and theoretical frameworks, and engaging with an impressive number of authors and texts. What holds the study together is the dark blanket of night itself which, although also cloaked in multiple meanings as DeGuzmán shows, is more than a question of aesthetics, despite the book’s subtitle. Night, darkness, shadows, and the like both describe and challenge the position of Latina/os in...