Continental Shifts: Migration, Representation, and the Struggle for Justice in Latin(o) America by John D. "Rio" Riofrio (review)

Riofrio¹ won the College of William & Mary's Thomas Jefferson Teaching Award the same year his book was released, and after reading his book, I can see why. His four-chapter cultural studies work analyzes Latina/o and Latin American texts that are highly engaging, relevant, and understandable for a large audience that includes undergraduates. He clearly has a point of view that conveys a sense of righteous frustration with contemporary U.S. politics. Students, cultural studies scholars, and politically engaged scholars from a variety of disciplines will be interested in this book.

The introduction is an extended analysis of the documentary The Ballad of Esequiel [sic] Hernández, which reports the killing of an eighteen-year-old Mexican American adolescent in a Texas border town on May 20, 1997. Camouflaged U.S. Marines, sent to fight the "War on Drugs," shot the unsuspecting boy (Hernández) in the back. The book is an homage to Hernández that unravels the cultural and political processes that led to his killing (8). Riofrio shows how Latino identity and politics are constructed by individuals in dialogue with outside forces, such as historical (neo)colonialism and racism, neoliberalism, mass media, digital media, and electoral politics.

"Continental shifts" refers to a shift away from limiting Latino/a identity to U.S. territory: "The story I aim to tell about the social consequences of Latino representation is connected to widespread perceptions of reality: it is a story that is not simply about what the rest of U.S. society thinks about Latinos, but also about what they believe the enormous cultural presence of Latinos means for 'America'" (11). Riofrio continues: "[recent U.S.] rhetoric of immigration tends to suggest a one-way dynamic from Latin America to the United States that simply fails to accurately represent the depth and complexity of migration. Instead, Continental Shifts envisions the two hemispheres as sliding toward each other on unseen tectonic plates [. . .] such that what was once considered separate and distinct has been forced to mutual acknowledgement" (12).

Today, he shows, Latino/as are dehumanized as permanently less than "American" (15), much like the "Third World" African Americans of the Ninth Ward when Katrina hit (20). The exclusion and oppression of un-American others goes beyond U.S. borders. The "shifting mediascape" he describes bolsters his argument for a "hemispheric Latinidad" that seamlessly weaves together not only Mexican American authors but also the Chilean and, in the case of Edmundo Paz Soldán, Bolivian, each writers of the McOndo generation (25). Chapter one opens with the Bogotá Capital Mundial del Libro 2007, where Latino writers like Junot Díaz were included among the greatest Latin American writers.

Riofrio notes the blurring of monolingual literary traditions to one of the Americas. This chapter builds upon a curious shift that both "focuses on the novels Paraíso Travel, by the Colombian writer Jorge Franco, and Películas de mi vida, by the Chilean Alberto Fuguet, to show that it doesn't make sense to suppose that Latino identities 'begin' when one crosses the northern shore of the Río Grande . . . [they] are thus simultaneously American and 'American'" (36). As shown by the novel by Franco, due to U.S. mass media, the "American Dream" of consumerism and upward mobility often begins in the immigrants' countries of origin, where low-paid laborers and members of the middle-class alike come seeking this dream (30). The flow continues by sending remittances, monetary and cultural, to their countries of origin (30). However, this section leaves out Fuguet's U.S.-set narrative, Missing (2009), which also depicts transnationalism.

Chapter two shows the importance of YouTube's contribution to globalization through enabling mass participation (popular production and consumption of information), and by creating a forum that promulgates the dehumanization of Latina/os through...