Troubling Nationhood in U.S. Latina Literature: Explorations of Place and Belonging

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Gourmet, June 2009, 14. 2. Ibid., 64. 3. Ibid., 67. 4. Gourmet, August 2009, 14. 5. As Ruiz notes, “Martí’s ‘Nuestra América’ has become emblematic of a truly transnational, hemispheric interdisciplinary discourse” (“Nuestra América,” 663). 6. Stavans, “Introduction,” lxv. 7. In this imaginary of a hemispheric Americas, the United States has to “understand itself as a territory within the Americas” (Sandín and Perez, “Introduction,” 10). Sandín and Perez’s introduction to their edited collection, which explores practices of Latino/a literary theory, argues that U.S. Latinos/as are reimagining what constitutes the United States. The idea of viewing the United States as part of the Americas is more often expressed in critical work on the history of U.S.–Latin American cultural, political , and economic relations than in any literary critical material. 8. For example, in the Mexican American texts analyzed in chapters 1 and 2, “place” refers most obviously to physical location and geography, while also symbolizing more figuratively the social and cultural dynamics of that nation. In the analyses in the chapters that follow on U.S. Puerto Rican and Cuban American literature “place” is sometimes evidently physical (urban and natural landscapes, dwellings, and so forth) but also indicates cultural and/or bodily experiences that allow one to belong (or not belong) to that physical location, and also to an imagined community (a nation-space, a collective of some sort) and a narrative experience. 9. Bammer argues that displacement is a formative experience of the twentieth century (“Introduction”), and other human geographers variously note that place, with its multiple metaphorical meanings and identities, is often assumed to be natural , and thus remains relatively unexplored. There is general agreement among critics both that place needs to be understood as socially constructed and that among social 196 / notes to pages 6–8 constructions, history has been privileged over geography. See Massey, “Double Articulation ”; Abramson, “Mythical Land”; Olwig, “Recovering”; Tuan, “Place”; Harvey, Justice; Lefebvre, Production of Space; Soja, Postmodern Geographies; Soja and Hooper, “Spaces That Difference Makes”; and Hayden, “Urban Landscape History.” 10. Soja and Hooper nevertheless note that there is a recent “renewed interest in the relatively neglected, “undertheorized” dimension of space” (“Spaces That Difference Makes,” 183). 11. See Comer (Landscapes of the New West) for a fascinating reading of Gloria Anzaldúa’s respatialization of the borderlands area, and Villa (Barrio-Logos), who argues that the “spatial practice” of American rules of the land affects Chicano social identity in the United States. Martha Cutter also notes that ethnic and immigrant texts written since at least the early twentieth century (if not before) often put into question the idea of a firm national boundary “demarcating America” (“Editor’s Introduction,” 5). 12. Brady, Extinct Lands, 7. 13. Juan Flores, in “The Latino Imaginary,” argues that there are three ways in which Latinos have been interpellated: demographic (an instrumental, homogenizing method that produces alarming popular truisms about the numbers of Latinos in the United States, for example); analytic (tabulates the diversity of Latino groups and experiences; depends on socially constructed statistical evidence); and imaginary. The “imaginary” rendition of Latinos—one that I believe the literature I look at performs, to an extent—consists of an aggregate of lived experiences and historical memory, and foregrounds the origin-nation’s history and presence. The Latino imaginary produces Latino identity as a productive and positive thing, and creates, ultimately, a new map of the Americas (ibid., 613). 14. Rebolledo, “Tradition and Mythology.” For further discussion of southwestern Chicana writing, see chapter 1. Given my reading of place above, where land is never just land but also a site of cultural (un)belonging, it should become evident why I explore women writers in particular. Although I am not implying that male writers do not produce literary texts that also invoke a strong connection between geography, natural/urban landscape, and cultural belonging (Rudolfo Anaya’s seminal Bless Me, Última, Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets, and Oscar Hijuelos’s Our House in the Last World are just some examples), my interest lies in the ways that contemporary Latina writers, in their reclamation of the literary word, are also performing a reclamation of the nation through cultural, geographical, and political spaces. 15. Brennan, “National Longing for Form,” 49. See also Bhabha, who writes that “counter-narratives of the nation . . . continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries ” and “disturb those ideological manoeuvres through which ‘imagined communities ’ are given essentialist...