Troubling Nationhood in U.S. Latina Literature: Explorations of Place and Belonging by Maya Socolovsky (review)

Maya Socolovsky’s, Troubling Nationhood in U.S. Latina Literature: Explorations of Place and Belonging is an analysis of ten novels written by U.S. Latina writers published between 1989 and 2004. The main purpose of Socolovsky’s work is to demonstrate how a selected group of literary narratives remaps Latin America as part of the United States through a bi-directional process of belonging and unbelonging to the nation. Central to her argument are the characters’ personal blended narratives through which they reimagine themselves as being part of the U.S. national identity as well as retain their own Latin American cultural heritage. These new identities disrupt the general perceptions of nationhood, generating a process of categorizing these new Latinos as the “other.” Furthermore, Socolovsky argues that racialized notions of citizenship have recently changed to cultural racism, which emphasizes cultural differences as threatening the national identity of the United States.

The introduction provides an overview of the text’s principal argument; explaining how recent literary works question the cultural and political hegemony of the United States, which began with the historical expansion of its territory, and reflected through the mentality of Manifest Destiny. The text builds on the research of prominent scholars including Edward Soja, Mary Pat Brady, Juan Flores, José David Saldívar, and Ilan Stavans. Socolovsky cites their research to help the reader understand the framework and analysis of her own work, a needed contextualization of the historical and political background of the selected literary works. Utilizing Denise Chavez’s novels The Last of the Menu Girls (2004) and Face of an Angel (1994) the analysis of the first chapter focuses on the geographic landscape of the borderlands “as a space of dislocation, unease, and disease” (29). According to Socolovsky, the realities and experiences lived by the characters in a complex environment triggers “symptoms of disease that can only be healed through the imaginary blurring and conjoining of Mexico and the United States’ nation-spaces” (29). While the first chapter establishes the borderlands as a continuous contested space of belonging and unbelonging, the second chapter turns the lens to the literary work of Ana Castillo’s Sopogonia (1994) and Sandra Cisneros’ Caramelo (2002). In both novels, the analysis centers on the concept of mestizaje as a way to challenge the geographic conceptions of nationhood and challenging representations of citizenship in the heartland of the United States.

The third and fourth chapters cogently examine Judith Ortiz Cofer’s and Esmeralda Santiago’s narrative voices as critical expressions of transgression and disruption on both the island of Puerto Rico and the United States. Utilizing Michel Foucault’s influential theory on transgression together with the findings of Juan Flores, Socolovsky interprets the creative production of both writers as a collective act of resistance, challenging the “narratives of colonial superiority” (98) of the United States and contesting “the grounding framework held in place by the island’s institutional systems” (136). In both chapters, the author reminds the reader of the dialectical process of cultural belonging and unbelonging that the main characters go through on both the island and the mainland, reimagining an interpenetration of both geographical spaces as a transnational landscape that points towards decolonization. Moreover, both chapters should be read as part of a collective of narrative voices that could unsettle the cultural and geopolitical hegemony of the United States and consequently reframe the relationship of both countries.

In chapter five, the author applies the same theoretical framework to the novel Princess Papaya (2004), written by the Cuban American Himilce Novas, and arrives at somewhat similar conclusions. Nevertheless, Socolovsky points out that Novas’ fictional narrative “represents a model of syncretism and collectivity” (159) that is becoming intrinsically woven into the social and cultural tapestry of the United States, a positive shift that reimagines a consciousness of ethnic minority citizens as healthy contributors to the cultural landscape of the United States. In the final...