Latinx Writing Los Angeles: Nonfiction Dispatches from a Decolonial Rebellion ed. by Ignacio López-Calvo and Victor Valle (review)

This selection of writings from sixteen outstanding contributors presents a refreshing view of the Latinx experience in Los Angeles, the capital of Mexamérica, as Joel Garreau has put it in his book The Nine Nations of North America (1981). This is an important book at par with collections such as Nicolás Kanellos's project of recovering the Hispanic heritage. It is quite relevant in the current political climate, with blatant attacks by President Donald J. Trump against immigrant communities, particularly Latino ones, who will become the leading majority when, in ten years, one out of every three Americans will be of Latino heritage. I quote from the introduction: "Donald Trump's unrelenting campaign to racialize the Hispanic immigrant, above all Mexicans, as inherently criminal predators now provides the humanities a unique opportunity to examine the literary technologies that structure its marginalization of Latina/o nonfiction" (31).

The book has two informative introductions by Victor Valle and Ignacio López-Calvo that offer a context of the California chronotope and of LA's demographic and cultural transformation, as well as the city's transnational exchanges. Valle discusses the Los Angeles literary anthology that reinforces governmental demographic definitions and generalizations, mentioning early anthologies such as A Literary History of Southern California (1950) by Franklin Walker and Libros Californianos (1931) by Phil Townsend Hanna. Each of the selections in López-Calvo and Valle's book has a presentation about the importance of the text and a brief bio-bibliographic note to set the writer in context. The selections begin with an excerpt from Breve relación de la nueva entrada al sur (1721) by Ignacio María Nápoli, S.J., which elucidates the first contacts with indigenous populations and the descriptions of their culinary habits (lizards, mice, snakes). He writes: "Their body was well proportioned, fat, and very white and red, and particularly the children looked like Englishmen or Flemish, being so white and red" (53). The anthology then moves to the nineteenth century with the work of Francisco P. Ramírez, where he calls for an alliance of Latin American nations against US imperialism and influence; for Ramírez, as for Martí, the interest of the United States is to exploit the natural resources of the South. The third selection corresponds to Ricardo Flores Magón's denouncement of the lynching of Hispanics in the United States, who were sometimes used for target practice. The fourth selection includes Blanca de Moncaleano, a Colombian journalist and supporter of women's rights; in her "To Woman Kind, a Manifesto," she calls for the destruction of structures that make woman "submissive slaves" and calls to destroy tyrants, jails, garrisons, churches to build a city of harmony, a "City of Anarchy." The fifth selection includes an unpublished memoir by Alfredo Cobos, Victor Valle's grandfather, where he reminisces about the Mexican Revolution and the relationship between Villistas and landowning families.

Anaïs Nin, the daughter of Catalan-Cuban parents, in the sixth selection, recovers a text from when she lived in Los Angeles. This is a seminal piece re-evaluating her as a Latina writer and an important feminist precursor who was raised in Spain and Cuba and travelled frequently to Mexico. The seventh selection by Jesús Mena is "Bert's Corona: Struggle is the Ultimate Teacher," which talks about a prominent member of the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee. Mena was a founding member of the Los Angeles Latino Writers Workshop and Corona's cronista. In his account, he mentions the UFW's technique of dealing with undocumented scabs in the 1968 Coachella grape strike, where they rented airplanes and would yell through loudspeakers "Hay (sic) viene la migra!" (121). In the eighth selection, "Beach Blanket Baja" by María Helena Viramontes, the author of Under the Feet of Jesus (1995), she recalls her...