- The Criticality of Latino/a Fiction in the Twenty-First Century
War spills across the pages of twenty-first-century Latino/a fiction in unprecedented ways. This should not be surprising considering the history of war in the Americas—occupationist, interventionist, autonomist, and revolutionary; or the fact that Latino/as became Latino/as through the Mexican American War of 1848 and the Spanish American War of 1898; or the record of Latino/a service in the US military throughout the twentieth century and now in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Yet it is surprising because most Latino/a fiction in the twentieth century did not take war as its central theme or setting.1 One might argue that late-twentieth-century Latino/a fiction addressed a different kind of war: the displacement of Latino/a communities by “urban renewal,” the degradation inflicted on Latino/a communities by the proliferation of drugs and drug wars, and the economic vise grip on Latino/a advancement. In the twenty-first century, however, it is increasingly impossible to write about Latino/a lives and to create Latino/a characters who are not in some way involved in, linked to, or touched by the horrors of war among national states or intranational war to secure power for either a ruling elite or an insurgent group. This transition in Latino/a literature to the new reality of what seems like endless war also opens the conflicts, policies, economies, and perspectives driving war to Latino/a critique.
Writing in the aftermath of multiple late-twentieth-century wars in Latin America and with the lingering need to make sense of earlier armed conflicts, Latino/a authors have launched the new millennium with critical explorations of war in varied settings. [End Page 600] Novels appear about the US-funded contra war against Nicaragua, the civil war in El Salvador, the genocidal war in Guatemala, the guerrilla/government war in Peru, the Holocaust, the enduring effects on Latino/as and Latino/a communities of this country’s war against Vietnam, and attempts to overthrow the Cuban government as well as the long shadow cast by the dictatorial Trujillo regime on Dominicans and Dominican Americans. In this new body of Latino/a fiction, set in cities, small towns, and rural areas across the Americas, we encounter the social divisions and physical devastation that war creates in characters that suffer during battle as well as long after the cessation of armed conflict. Such fiction is also about love, greed, creativity, inequality, envy, sexuality, memory, and loyalty, among other things. That is, these novels are not just about war, but about how it happens, why it continues, what it does to those involved—matters that underscore that war is not an empty exercise of power or violence.
While Latino/a literature has always been marked by its transnational interests, writers in this new millennium expand, extend, and deepen this concern in new ways, frequently linking the fates and destinies of Latin Americans and Latino/as, or of the US and the places where it wages war. They continue in the tradition of a Latino/a literature that Rafael Pérez-Torres identifies as one that continually “moves both through the gaps and across the bridges between numerous cultural sites” to explore the “discontinuities of history and power” (3, 12). The fact that Latino/a fiction increasingly sets its stories beyond the borders of the US or imagines stories that unfold across multiple national borders reflects an intensification of Latino/a fiction’s border-crossing identifications as well the extension of a uniquely Latino/a critique throughout the hemisphere. Often explicitly in conversation with Latin American literatures and histories, as noted in the acknowledgments and notes sections as well as the very subjects of the novels themselves, these fictions ask to be read in the “transgeographical terms” that José David Saldívar suggests are most appropriate for Latino/a fiction (19). In this light, new Latino/a literature about Latin American wars puts up a mirror to the conditions by which the Latino/a population of the US has grown and diversified while remaining intimately linked to the rest of the...