Latinx and Latin American Profiles

This is the first book-length study of one of the most prominent and prolific Latino academics, Ilan Stavans. He has written extensively on Latino culture, Jewish culture, dictionaries, immigration, language, Spanglish, soccer, translation, travel, selfies, and God. The Restless Ilan Stavans surveys his interests, achievements, and flaws while he is still in the midst of an extraordinarily productive career. A native of Mexico who became a U.S. citizen, he is an outsider to both the Chicano community that often resents him as an interloper and the American Jewish community that he, who grew up speaking Yiddish in Mexico City, often chides. The book examines his unlikely rise to prominence within the context of the spread of multiculturalism as a seminal principle within American culture. A self-proclaimed cosmopolitan who rejects borders, Stavans is both insider and outsider to the myriad of subjects he approaches.

Winner, 2016 ALA-Choice Outstanding Academic Title In Chica Lit: Popular Latina Fiction and Americanization in the Twenty-First Century, Tace Hedrick illuminates how discourses of Americanization, ethnicity, gender, class, and commodification shape the genre of "chica lit," popular fiction written by Latina authors with Latina characters. She argues that chica lit is produced and marketed in the same ways as contemporary romance and chick lit fiction, and aimed at an audience of twenty- to thirty-something upwardly mobile Latina readers. Its stories about young women's ethnic class mobility and gendered romantic success tend to celebrate twenty-first century neoliberal narratives about Americanization, hard work, and individual success. However, Hedrick emphasizes, its focus on Latina characters necessarily inflects this celebratory mode: the elusiveness of meaning in its use of the very term "Latina" empties out the differences among and between Latina/o and Chicano/a groups in the United States. Of necessity, chica lit also struggles with questions about the actual social and economic "place" of Latinas and Chicanas in this same neoliberal landscape; these questions unsettle its reliance on the tried-and-true formulas of chick lit and romance writing. Looking at chica lit's market-driven representations of difference, poverty, and Americanization, Hedrick shows how this writing functions within the larger arena of struggles over popular representation of Latinas and Chicanas.

Using an interdisciplinary approach, Healing Memories analyzes the ways that Puerto Rican women authors use their literary works to challenge historical methodologies that have silenced the historical experiences of Puerto Rican women in the United States. Following Aurora Levins Morales's alternative historical methodology she calls "curandera history," this work analyzes the literary work of authors, including Aurora Levins Morales, Nicholasa Mohr, Esmeralda Santiago, and Judith Ortiz Cofer, and the ways they create medicinal histories that not only document the experiences of migrant women but also heal the trauma of their erasure from mainstream national history. Each analytical chapter focuses on the various methods used by each author including using the literary space as an archive, reclaiming memory, and (re)writing cultural history, all through a feminist lens that centers the voices and experiences of Puerto Rican women.