The Politics of Latinx Literature Today

When Jane Gloriana Villanueva becomes a “published freaking author” on the award-winning telenovela spoof Jane the Virgin,¹ the fictional character’s debut romance novel, Snow Falling, became available for purchase in real bookstores across the United States (“Chapter Seventy”).² That the work of a fictional Latina from a fringe television network—even the characters mock The CW’s obscurity in one of the show’s many meta moments—can appear on the pages of a book by a major New York publishing house³ speaks to what critics have deemed the “mainstreaming” of Latinx literature in the US literary market. Jane’s literary coming of age on the show further emphasizes the mainstream quality of her character’s intellectual development. In one montage, she passes from childhood to expectant mother devouring popular Latinx and Latin American authors on the floor of a community bookstore. Guided by the apparition of Isabel Allende, commercially successful Latin American literature personified,⁴ Jane reads Latin American narrative in translation and post-60s Latinx fiction that falls loosely under the magical realist mode. Fictions (1944), Pedro Páramo (1955), One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), The House of the Spirits (1982), and Like Water for Chocolate (1989) fly like butterflies off the shelf and into Jane’s arms, where they form part of the same corpus as The House on Mango Street (1984) and Dreaming in Cuban (1992). Snow Falling, then, emerges as a continuation of the hemispherically American corpus that Jane consumes, and as a mass-market literary genre with a lusty cover featuring the author’s multisyllabic, bilingual name, it claims its place in the mainstream in a most obtrusive fashion.

Such a foregrounding of works that critics and publishing houses alike have depoliticized may appear to reaffirm a sacrificing of politics in exchange for market appeal in Jane’s canon. Yet Jane the Virgin introduces this issue on literature and politics because this story of the journey of a young Latina reader and writer on her way to literary recognition in fact asserts its politics in conspicuous ways. Jane, a second-generation Miamian of Venezuelan and Mexican heritage, moves through a network of immigrant families whose daily realities involve navigating multiple languages, cultural practices, and expectations. Her son’s biological father is from an Italian family, and another member of her complex, blended family was born in the Czech Republic. Even Jane’s husband, Michael, the seeming gringo par excellence, bears an unmistakably Spanish last name: Cordero. This world where migration is normalized nevertheless comes into contact with the world where it is criminalized, catalyzing the characters’ political consciousness, as when a hospitalization outs Jane’s grandmother’s undocumented status and threatens her with deportation. Jane takes up her abuela’s cause, but her political activism does not end there, nor does it stop at the diegetic level. Show creator Jennie Snyder Urman has expressed a feeling of “responsibility to react to this presidency,” and the show has used its narrative structure and expository intertitle asides to educate viewers about immigration reform, reproductive justice, queer sexuality, and voting rights (qtd. in Nguyen).

Furthermore, Jane’s education involves continuous battles against racial inequalities that characterize the mainstream. She reads on her own with an imagined literary godmother presumably because the kind of Latinx education she seeks, though commercially recognized, is not available in her public Florida school. Combined with the fact that her graduate advisor, a commercially unsuccessful white feminist scholar, initially rejects Jane’s desire to write romance novels with an unapologetic, one-word dismissal—“Barf”—Jane begins to craft a narrative about the obstacles that US educational institutions present to Latinx students seeking to define and express their voices (“Chapter Thirty-Seven”). In graduate school, Jane confronts what John Beverley has called the problem of “how to make the state and the state ideological apparatuses more like the (real) [multicultural] nation/s” (232). One solution appears to be pedagogical. Though the advisor will eventually become Jane’s trusted and supportive mentor, Jane’s fight for a place...