On Latinidad: U. S. Latino Literature and the Construction of Ethnicity (review)

As its title suggests, Marta Caminero-Santangelo's important new work of literary and cultural criticism, On Latinidad: U.S. Latino Literature and the Construction of Ethnicity, wants to affirm the category of "Latino" as a collective rubric, while still acknowledging its controversial status. Especially in the informed and penetrating introduction, Caminero-Santangelo exposes the profound tenuousness of the notion of a "Latino" person or people, or what might constitute a shared array of characteristics known as latinidad. Most damning are her reports from social science research that acknowledge how few persons or communities in the U.S. choose "Latino" as their primary identity, or even the extent to which it is perceived as a salient category for political or economic organizing and agency. On Latinidad bravely opens with an initial interrogation of its very terms of analysis, and one of the book's most significant contributions is how it traces for its readers the troubling epistemological genesis of the concept of latinidad, or "Latinoness," as knowledge about a collectivity, presumed to be unified, that is imposed on a disparate array of communities and histories. Of particular note is how the academic field of Latino studies has itself been a part of this epistemology, though Caminero-Santangelo ultimately defends the project of bringing together various groups in the U.S. who hale—at some point in their history—from a wide variety of Latin American and Caribbean nations in order to produce more comprehensive and nuanced knowledge about those groups and about the U.S.

Beginning with the concerns that are raised by the term itself, Caminero-Santangelo rehearses key arguments from a well-conceived archive of social science research and theory, both from within Latino/a studies and more general discussions of community formation, nationalism, and identity. Among the most troubling controversies, Caminero-Santangelo focuses on the homogenizing impact of "Latino" as an umbrella term that too often works to erase and conflate very distinct collectivities and histories into a presumed stereotype of shared or similar histories and public cultures (so that Mexicans and Puerto Ricans are understood as mysteriously but fundamentally "the same"). In addition to its falsely homogenizing impact, the fictions of latinidad include a universalizing and idealizing political valence that Caminero-Santangelo also criticizes. That is, the a priori definition of "Latinos" as counter-hegemonic and revolutionary is one that this book consistently exposes as a "collective fiction"1 that presumes an essential political interest and identity shared across a range of national, race, class, and other historical differences.

This point about the essentializing rhetoric sometimes invoked to corral the social, political, and artistic power of a collective latinidad threads through On Latinidad in subtle and insightful readings of literary works that generate a critical study that is both penetrating and very accessible. It turns out that, indeed, another of Caminero-Santangelo's key analytical contributions is the book's ability to link its close readings of various, mostly well-known Latino novels from recent years to uncover often covert and subterranean presumptions about what constitutes the boundaries of the category "Latino."

Importantly, then, Caminero-Santangelo foregrounds the compelling work of literary texts and their centrality to larger theoretical and social questions. For example, she examines the response of identification across cultural, national, historical lines of "Hey, that's MY story" that so often brings students, critics, and other readers to these works and to the field of Latino/a studies (p. 13). Thus, another penetrating analysis developed in this book is its explications of how latinidad is produced in the act of reading: "Ethnicity, like nation, is narration," she explains (p. 21). However, in the field of literary studies, Caminero-Santangelo also notes that the national segregation of "Latino" groups (especially Mexican-American/ Chicano, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican) has persisted in the organization and focus of most books of "Latino literary criticism," even when that criticism promotes itself as inclusively...