Rates of exchange: team-teaching a Latino/a literature course from two theoretical views.

Within the United States, Latinos--peoples of Puerto Rican, Chicano/Chicana, Dominican-American, Cuban-American, and others of the Latin American diaspora--are defined against the dominant culture as distinct because they share a common language, and certain groupings of nations enjoy similar foods, music, and other cultural sensibilities. Yet, Latinos/Latinas comprise members of different ethnic, racial, class, sexuality, and religious groups. Many Chicano/Chicanas understand themselves as an indigenous group expelled from the U.S.; numerous Puerto Ricans, particularly activists, understand themselves as Africans colonized by the U.S.; and still other groups--from the Caribbean and the Latin American diaspora--identify themselves as immigrants with differing degrees of acculturation to the U.S. At the same time, however, these same subsets of the larger "Latino" group share intersections of a common history, language, and similar cultural traits.

LaGuardia Community College, as part of the City University of New York, is an institution diverse in races, ethnicities, nationalities, religions, genders, economic classes, and sexual orientations. Currently, the Latino/a student population is 35% of the overall student body; these students identify as Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican, Ecuadorian, Colombian, Salvadorian, Uruguayan, and others. Consequently, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to create a semester-long Latino/a literature course that would not exclude any of the representative nationalities within our college. How do we best serve our students in making text selections amid this diverse student body with different and sometimes conflicting cultural, class, and political interests? How can a course address the significant cultural, economic, racial, and other divides while also purporting to address a unified ethnic identity within the U.S. that addresses common issues and concerns? For radicals interested in moving beyond the ease of multiculturalism toward larger questions of social and political equity, the very notion of a "Latino Literature Course" presents a radical as well as a practical problem. This was not a course in reading literature and eating tacos or platanos.

When we came together at the Ford Foundation/Vassar College Exploring Transfer Program, we were given the opportunity to create a team-taught syllabus to bring back to our local college. The seminar was designed to bring community college professors from across disciplines together to observe and then recreate the team-teaching pedagogies used by joint community college and Vassar faculty teams in their summer program for students to prepare to transfer. While other teams in our two-week seminar were interdisciplinary, we faced the challenge of coming from the same field with radically different perspectives; Carlos had a more Marxist-ethnic perspective on the field, while Liz had a materialist-feminist approach. While we both agree on the importance of class as an identity marker, particularly within a Hyper-Capitalistic society such as the United States, Carlos further believes that race should supercede discussions of gender while Liz privileges gender in her courses and scholarship. The challenge was to identify our biases and to compromise to create a better syllabus that would allow us to show students our different perspectives.

In the beginning, we assumed that our task would be easier than that of the other teams. With our joint experience in Latino/a literature, we anticipated an unproblematic encounter in creating our syllabus. However, our task was complicated even before we started working on the syllabus in ways we hadn't anticipated. While we knew one another's theoretical stances, we didn't realize that in our individual iterations of the same course, Carlos taught primarily Caribbean-Latino texts, while Liz focused on Chicano/Chicana texts. The central point of intellectual disagreement then moved from race and gender to our divergent understanding of what we meant when we spoke of Latino/a literature.

The word "Latino" has come to indicate within the United States one's country of origin, one's language, one's gastronomical and musical sensibility, as well as one's process of acculturation and assimilation to the United States. Within literary studies and U.S. society in general, assumptions and characteristics are assigned to Latinos as a group, and monolithic assumptions are made with little understanding and appreciation of the nuanced distinctions within the group.

Cherrie Moraga echoes this idea, commenting that within the United States the groups of people to whom this distinction is applied is also growing exponentially to include the large numbers of immigrants in the 1980s from war-torn Latin American countries:

   Ironically, the United States' gradual
   consumption of Latin America
   and the Caribbean is bringing the
   people of the Americas together.
   What was once largely a
   chicano/mexicano population in
   California is now Guatemalteco,
   Salvadoreno, Nicaraguense. What
   was largely a Puerto Rican and
   Dominican "Spanish Harlem" of
   New York is now populated with
   Mexicanos playing rancheras and
   drinking cerveza. This mass emigration
   is evident from throughout
   the Third World. Every place the
   United States has been involved
   militarily has brought its offspring,
   its orphans, its homeless and its
   casualties to this country. (1)

The differences--ideological, historical, and cultural--between Salavadorenos and Mexican immigrants, then, become even more difficult to combine into an amalgamated identity as "Latino." In particular, the political circumstances between these groups is significant. Yet, as the group "Latino" grows and shifts, expanding to incorporate the experiences of all of the different immigrants and descendants of immigrants who have roots in different Spanish-speaking countries, academic and national constructions have not expanded to accomodate these changes. And, within our own complicated understandings of identity, we found our challenge in creating a syllabus.

With the rise of multicultural literary studies within English departments beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s came the Latino/Latina literary boom of the 1980s. Despite the differences, however, in the respective countries of origin of Latinos and Latinas, authors whose cultural roots lie in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Cuba, and Latin America, are studied as Latino or Latina without significant consideration to the cultural, historic, geographic, social, or class markers that separate them and their writings. While African American literary studies have changed from "Black Literature" to "African American Literature" to "Afro-Caribbean Literature" to, more recently, "African Diaspora Literature," all reflecting a diversity within traditional notions of blackness, Latino literary studies have not modulated in a similar way, remaining simplistically understood as Puerto Rican and Chicano. Latino/a identity is an "other" that is as rich, complicated, and diverse as the U.S. has traditionally seen itself. In some ways, this resistance to exploring complicated notions of identity comes from a need to create an orderly and easily categorized understanding of this new "other" altering the country's geographical and cultural makeup. The classroom and courses in Latino/a studies offer a site for understanding this alteration politically; yet courses in Latino literature often stay within the boundaries of either a simplistic definition of "Latino" or a celebration of the "exotic" differences found in the voices and experiences of its authors.

ENTERING THE CLASSROOM

Teaching an introductory Latino/a literature course, given the very complexities of the term "Latino," presents demographic, political, social, and linguistic challenges. The first practical issue we had to deal with was what texts to assign during the semester; the texts we chose would reflect the conceptual framework for the course. When it comes to teaching the literature of traditionally marginalized groups, questions of identity are key. For example, the construction of "Latino/a" literature is a large and amorphous term, claiming to represent many different groups. We had to ask one another why we taught the texts we did. Was it a response to the demographics of the community? Was there a pedagogical reason? We realized that most instructors, ourselves included, whether consciously or unconsciously, select texts based on their own experiences with Latinos/Latinas. In other words, teaching Latino/a literature in New Mexico might necessitate privileging Chicano/a texts, while teaching Latino/a literature in New York City might necessitate privileging Puerto Rican and Dominican texts. This shifting definition of "Latino/a" literature underscores a lack of agreement in establishing a Latino/a literary canon.

Carlos understood the importance of Latino/a literature in the United States as stemming from its ability to portray a different perspective on race. The Latin American approach to race centers on a color spectrum that encompasses a wide and nuanced variety of skin tones and colors. Latino-Caribbean nations, as well as some South American countries like Brazil, have developed an understanding of race that radically questions and challenges the traditional bipolar, US view on race that defines anyone with traceable African ancestry as black regardless of actual racial phenotypes. For this reason, Carlos privileged Dominican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Brazilian writings in his conceptualization of Latino/Latina literature. Chicano/ Chicana literature generally holds to the dominant motif of Mexican culture as resulting from the exclusive mixture of European and Natives, while ignoring the presence of Africans in Mexico through Spanish slavery. Therefore, the popular Chicano/Chicana conceptualization of Mexico as a mixture of indigenous and European elements is one that, though still based on the Latin American advocacy of racial confluence, can be and to some extent has been readily subsumed by the U.S. conceptualization of race. For example, no one in the United States challenges the whiteness of a person who claims Irish, Dutch, and Cherokee ancestry. Yet, the Caribbean Latino conceptualization of race that allows a character to claim whiteness as his/her racial term despite evident African ancestors is one that is alien and challenging to the traditional U.S. notion that "one drop" of African ancestry marks an individual as "black" regardless of racial phenotypes.

Carlos has been interested in this kind of cross-racial, cross-national undercurrent in Latin-American history, specifically as it has been critically evoked in the best of contemporary Latino/a works. Authors like Piri Thomas and Julia Alvarez question the more utopian burdens placed on the concept of Latino as they represent in their works social, class, and gender distinctions within their respective cultures of origin while they also present moments of Latino/Latin-American kinship. For example, Thomas's Down These Mean Streets presents scenes of Mexican-American and Puerto Rican camaraderie in the segregationist south. Meanwhile, Alvarez's In the Name of Salome has a principal character, a US college professor of Dominican heritage, who leaves her comfortable life in the United States and moves to Cuba (like some Latin Americans actually did in the early sixties) to support the fledgling revolution.

Moving to LaGuardia, however, Carlos found a student body made in large part of very recent immigrants from the Latin American diaspora who were more interested in maintaining a cultural connection to their respective countries than in immediately engaging in an oppositional comparison and contrast between their shared cultural background and the culture of their new, adopted country. Therefore, his approach was broadened to include texts by authors from cultural backgrounds that he had once found unnecessary to his understanding of Latino/Latina literature, such as Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera, Sandra Cisneros's My Wicked, Wicked Ways, Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima, among others. He still believes that the conceptualization of a broad racial spectrum found in varied versions throughout Latino/a and Latin American literary (and non-literary) works should be re-affirmed to Latinos/Latinas and other non-white and non-black students who may feel pressure from the mass media and their environment to choose sides of the black and white divide. The possibility of an alternative to an exclusively black or white identity can also serve those students who come from groups that have historically chosen a polarized identity, and who wish to learn how to better coexist with others in a truly multi-colored, multi-cultural, unified present and future United States.

Before moving to New York City to teach at LaGuardia, Liz focused almost exclusively on Chicano/a literature. Stemming from her study of traditional Latin American literature such as Borges, Poniatowska, Castellanos, and Garcia-Marquez, Liz is interested in the ways in which Chicano/a texts--particularly written by Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico-based authors--function as an extension of a larger Latin American literature, providing for an understanding of a related, yet disparate, transnational literature with key moments of agreement and dissonance particular to the unique and shared moments of cultural history within Latin America and the United States. Chicano/a literature, particularly with its connection to the political literature of the La Raza movement for Chicano/a autonomy beginning in the 1970s and to the increasing awareness of cultural diversity, provides a way to discuss different theoretical constructions of literature outside of the usually apolitical American context.

Liz was also firmly wedded to the history of Latino/a literature in the U.S. as a useful framework for discussing literature. She argued that there has always been a Latino literature, although not always distinguished by that name separately from other literary texts. In a course on Latino/Latina literature, she asked, why not include writings from as early as the colonization of Mexico and Latin America by the Spanish. Writing in what is now known as the borderlands, or the space of intersection between Mexico and the United States, dates back to even earlier than 1610 when Gaspar Perez de Villagra's The History of New Mexico was written. Within American literary studies, some Latino authors have been widely recognized for decades--Jose Marti and Panchin Marin in the nineteenth century and Josephina Niggli, Julia de Burgos, and Americo Paredes during the first half of the twentieth century--while others, such as William Carlos Williams and Arthur A. Schomburg, have had their "otherness" erased, loosely understood as part of the more traditional, "white" or "black" canon.

Liz's study of Chicano/a literature was further informed by feminism. One of the most immediate and continuing ramifications of the Chicano movement on modes of literary production was the establishment of a strong, separate movement by Chicana and other Latina writers who associate themselves and their writing not as part of the larger Chicano and subsequent Latino literary movements, but, instead, as part of the third world feminist movement. Bryce Milligan writes, "Chicanas no longer saw themselves as simply the feminist extension of the Chicano movement, but as an integral part of Third World Feminism. At the same time, Latina writers of non-Mexican heritage began to publish in the United States--women with roots in Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and South and Central America--each bringing with them elements of their own national literary traditions." (2) While many of these writers address similar issues in their texts, the Latina writers see themselves also responding to the considerable machismo and the role of women within Latino society. This role is something Liz often privileged in her courses, reading primarily feminist texts.

In coming to New York, however, Liz found that the Chicano/a texts she had used at Binghamton University didn't hold the same resonance for LaGuardia's student body comprised of many recent immigrants from the Caribbean. Her choice of largely feminist texts often failed to connect with her many male students who perceived the Chicanisma as a direct attack on them. Accordingly, the LaGuardia classroom provided a good opportunity to explore the changing nature of Latino/a literature, a growing dialogue between feminist and male writers, and a historical view of Latino/a literature all in the larger context of immigrant and multicultural narratives.

TEXTUAL SELECTIONS:

We decided to begin the course with Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima and Thomas's Down These Mean Streets as these textual selections reflect the history of Latino publishing in the U.S. Literary production was an essential part of the Chicano movement, working to give voice to the political struggle in an accessible way for all of the brothers and sisters of la raza. Marc Zimmerman summarizes the foundational texts like Rudolfo Gonzalez's I am Joaquin/Yo Soy Joaquin, Raymond Barrio's The Plum Pickers, Piri Thomas's Down These Mean Streets, Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima, Oscar Acosta's Revolt of the Cockroach People, Pedro Pietri's Puerto Rican Obituary, and Luis Valdez's Zoot Suit in the following way:

   Characterized by nostalgia for a fading
   past, by a critique of racial
   oppression and negative acculturation
   experiences in the fields, in the
   city neighborhoods, the schools, factories
   and homes, by bilingualisms,
   schizophrenic goal conflicts and sex
   role confusions, by cultural tensions,
   affirmations and anger, and by calls
   for reform, rebellion, revolution or
   other forms of opposition, the emergent
   Latino literatures of the 1960s
   attempted to serve as laboratories for
   the expression and then reconstruction
   of transformed Latin American
   and U.S. Southwest Hispano-Indian
   peoples into "Mexican-Americans"
   or "Chicanos," into "Nuyoricans" or
   other Ricans, and ultimately, into
   the problematic and questionable
   aggregate we know today as
   "Hispanics" or "Latinos." (3)

We chose these two texts because we wanted to foreground the "Chicano" and "Nuyorican" experience within the United States. These works demonstrate the aggregate of experiences developed from living in the United States by authors with roots in a Spanish speaking country. These texts experimented with form, with calls for political action, and with characterizing what it meant to be "Latino" in the early 1970s. Importantly to the theoretical constructions of our course, these two texts also allow us to immediately enter a discussion of what "Latino" means, with Anaya as a prominent Chicano writer and Thomas as a leading Puerto Rican author. Further, these texts both present interesting challenges for teaching about race, gender, and sexuality.

Our selection of Thomas, however, also represented the first of many compromises in creating our syllabus. While Carlos's scholarly work relies heavily on Thomas as an important figure in discussing constructions of blackness in Latino texts, Liz was challenged by the sexual content of the book, imagining difficulties in presenting a useful and engaged feminist response to the book without undermining the points that Carlos wanted to make.

Similarly, Carlos was concerned about the inclusion of Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera and Sandra Cisneros's Loose Woman. While he recognized the importance of the formation of a Chicanisma identity, he also felt that the forcefulness of the feminist argument might prove troubling to our students. In the end, we decided that Anzaldua's use of "la frontera" as a space for cultural mediation would prove useful to our students, regardless of their cultural, racial, and ethnic backgrounds, because as Latinos/Latinas within the US they are living among different cultures.

We also compromised in our selection of Isabel Allende's Of Love and Shadows and Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies. While we were interested in representing the Latin American diaspora, we were also concerned about the class issues inherent in representing the diaspora through the texts of two very privileged writers.

In order to address our concerns and our compromises, we selected theoretical readings from feminist, Marxist, and race theory perspectives to accompany each text. If, for example, the primary text was focusing on constructions of racial identity, the accompanying theoretical reading focused on a feminist reading of the same text. We felt that these pairings would help the students in creating multiple ways of reading the same texts. Many community college English programs stray away from the use of theory, while students at universities and four-year colleges regularly read theory as part of their course work. Given our own theoretical work, we believed that this class and these readings would provide a unique opportunity to facilitate students' understandings of critical theory in a supportive environment. Furthermore, since most of our students go on to four-year colleges the theoretical works in our course would provide useful grounding for the type of work being done in literature and other Humanities courses by students in four-year colleges.

Finally, these texts also speak to the contemporary Latino/a experience. Given that we live and teach in New York City, we were interested in texts that might provide good opportunities for field trips and fieldwork, bringing the cacophony of the city into the classroom by visiting sites such as El Museo del Barrio, the Nuyorican Poets' Cufe, and the Schomberg Center.

DIVIDED LOYALTIES/ KALEIDESCOPIC CLASSROOMS

Writing in 1993, Virgil Suarez, in "Out of the Triangle of Solitude & into the American Heartland/Mainstream or We Are Not a Minority! Or Thoughts on Latino Writing," echoes the early aims of the Chicano movement, a move toward incorporating the varying experiences of Chicanos into a dominant, political entity. Suarez calls for the same unity among "Latino" writers, saying "we dance to the same rhythms; we feel the same beat. This is, to cut to the chase, what our Literature with the capital L, be it Poetry or Fiction, needs to do, which is bringing all the different groups together. It is necessary if we are ever to break this so called triangle of solitude and enter the American mainstream/heartland--whatever that is." (4) Contemporary Latino texts, then, in many ways continue the project begun by the Chicano movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s by working to incorporate the voices of Latinos into a specific, recognizable literary movement.

At times, however, as the "Latino" literary movement grows, it becomes more difficult to generalize the body of literature, something represented in our difficulty in choosing texts and theoretical approaches for this course. While the current literary movement of "Latino" literature works to continue to respond to calls for an establishment of la raza as separate from an "American" identity, there are also writers who break from this tradition, instead writing about the need to assimilate to the United States. For example, in The Hunger of Memory, Richard Rodriguez writes of needing to learn English to fully assimilate into US society. While this text caused ripples within the Chicano literary establishment, this 1980s text was a precursor to other, less overtly "political" texts of the late 1980s and 1990s.

Many other writers, however, continue to grapple with issues of identity in the United States, extending the conversations begun in the 1960s. These writers want their experiences to be recognized; they write of the tension between living in the United States as an "American" and being "Latino." As the Latino literary movement expands to incorporate many voices beyond just the Chicanos, the literature speaks even more of the acculturation process and the struggle between the American dream and the US reality.

Rodriguez is an excellent example of the fact that as the body of Latino/ Latina literature grows, there exists both divergence and dialogue between the foundational texts of the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the contemporary texts of the Latino/ Latina movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Cherrie Moraga, in "Art in America con Acento," speaks about the difficulties of creating a body of literature and art based on ethnic identity:

   Latinos in the United States do not
   represent a homogenous group.
   Some of us are native born, whose
   ancestors precede not only the
   arrival of the Anglo-American but
   also of the Spaniard. Most of us are
   immigrants, economic refugees
   coming to the United States in
   search of work. Some of us are
   political refugees, fleeing death
   squads and imprisonment; others
   come fleeing revolution and the
   loss of wealth. Finally, some have
   simply landed here very tired of
   war. And in all cases, our children
   had no choice in the matter. U.S.
   Latinos represent the whole spectrum
   of color and class and political
   position, including those who
   firmly believe they can integrate
   into the mainstream of North
   American life. The more European
   the heritage and the higher the class
   status, the more closely Latinos
   identify with the powers that be. (5)

Here, though generalizing a connection among European phenotypes, class status, and hegemonic views (witness Fidel Castro, Salvador Allende Gossen, and Ernesto "Che" Guevara as exceptions in her claim), Moraga more specifically refers to a demonstration that she attended where the Latinos were largely supporting Ronald Reagan and his intervention in Nicaragua while she, and a group of white college students, were protesting that intervention. She found herself at odds with her own community and lacking a basis from which to theorize the distinctions.

With the use of a term like Latino, a homogeneity is implied that does not reveal itself in the lived experience. The term itself is restrictive--within the Spanish language, an "o" at the end of a word denotes the masculine; the feminine is subsumed under the masculine in the term "Latino" unless it is changed to "Latina." In mainstream US media representations of Latinos/ Latinas, little consideration is given to the class status that separates individuals within the rubric "Latino." No consideration is given to historic grievances and tensions between groups coming from different countries--Puerto Ricans and Cubans, for example. Instead, "Latino" is often used indiscriminately. A quick look within the academy suggests that sociologists look at Latino lifestyles; political scientists at Latino lobbies, voting patterns, and participation in the democratic process; and, of course, English departments at Latino literature.

Guillermo Gomez-Pena, in "The Multi-Cultural Paradigm: An Open Letter to the National Arts Community," calls for a new vocabulary in thinking about Latino/Latina literary studies. He comments on the limitations of the process of naming:

   In order to describe the trans-,
   inter-, and multicultural processes
   that are at the core of our contemporary
   border experience as Latino
   artists in the United States, we
   need to find a new terminology, a
   new iconography, and a new set of
   categories and definitions. We
   need to re-baptize the word in our
   own terms. The language of postmodernism
   is ethnocentric and
   insufficient. And so is the existing
   language of cultural institutions
   and funding agencies. Terms like
   Hispanic, Latino, ethnic, minority;
   marginal, alternative, and Third
   World, among others, are inaccurate
   and loaded with ideological
   implications. They create categories
   and hierarchies that promote
   political dependence and
   cultural underestimation. In the
   absence of a more enlightened terminology,
   we have no choice but
   to utilize them with extreme care. (6)

Gomez-Pena, like many postmodern academics, despite his own criticism of postmodernity, states the problem and the need for a solution, but fails to broach one of his own. Perhaps he stops short of offering a new terminology of his own because no term could possibly capture the essence of a thing or an idea without political and ideological shortcomings. In the absence of the difficult process of starting to create a new terminology, he offers the abstract advice that we use current terms such as Latinos with "extreme care."

Until the current historical population shift of the United States slows to a pace that allows for greater recognition and reflection needed to employ new terms and/or refashion old ones precisely, we think our course allows for a nuanced and careful exploration of different implications in the term Latino/Latina. This syllabus attempts to look through multiple critical lenses--Chicano/a and Caribbean--in constructing a more cohesive representation of Latino/a literature. Through the prism of race and gender, we were further able to construct a course that benefited from both the Chicano/a and Caribbean portrayals of these issues. The Mexican conceptualization of miscegenation, though overlooking its historical African element, does embrace the idea of racial confluence that is found in the Caribbean in a primarily African and European context. Meanwhile, both Caribbean and Chicano/a cultural texts offer a useful opportunity for exploring gender issues in Latino/a cultures.

We are ending our article with the syllabus we designed at Vassar. Despite our attempts to publicize the course--with posters, announcements to faculty, and visits to classes and student clubs to recruit students the course was cancelled due to lack of enrollment. We've speculated as to why, when our African-American literature courses run each semester, our Latino/a course didn't fill. Some students gave us personal insights into why they didn't take the course. One suggested to us that she would have taken the course if we looked at Latin American authors, something that is the province of our colleagues in the Humanities Department. Another told us: "I've already read those authors. Why should I take this course?" But these two small anecdotes do not really provide a full window into student life and the college and the reasons guiding students' decisions about their course selection. It is more likely that the course didn't fill because, unlike our current African-American literature offering that is a requirement for the Teacher Education Program at Queens College and other four-year institutions, our Latino/Latina Literature course only serves for general elective credits. We are currently working on making the course part of a new Writing and Literature Option at LaGuardia. We expect that once the new option is approved, students enrolled in it will readily take the course. In the meantime, we hope that our work may prove useful to other instructors.

THE SYLLABUS

Latino/Latina Literature of the United States

DIVIDED LOYALTIES: IS THERE A FUNDAMENTAL TENSION BETWEEN A LATINA FEMINIST CONSCIOUSNESS AND LATINA/LATINO ETHNIC PRIDE?

Course description (from the college catalog):

This course examines the contributions to American literature made by Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans and other Latino/Latina writers in the United States over the last thirty years. It surveys the variety of Latino/Latina writing and explores the ways in which these writers represent community, class, race, gender, culture, nation, and ethnicity in their works.

In so doing, we hope to raise important questions about the interconnections of race, gender, and sexuality in Latino/a literature. For example, can a Latino/a literature that attempts to be true to its cultural heritage portray the specific hopes and struggles of Latinas? Is it productive for a minority ethnic group such as Latinos to publicly discuss the class, racial, and gender divisions found within the community? While we do not expect to arrive at definitive answers to such complex inquiries in a single semester, we hope you will develop the ability to think critically about the ways class, gender, and race interact within the progressive textual representations we will study together this semester.

A SPECIAL OPPORTUNITY:

This course will be team taught by Dr. J. Elizabeth Clark and Dr. Carlos Hiraldo. Both of your professors will read and grade your papers and will facilitate class discussion. Your professors recognize the importance of this emerging literary field in the context of the American literary canon; however, each brings their particular critical lens to this field. In this course, we will focus on Marxist, feminist, and post-colonial interpretations (specifically racial) of each text.

REQUIRED COURSE MATERIALS:

Allende, Isabel. Of Love and Shadows.

Meyer, Doris. "Exile and the Female Condition in Isabel Allende's 'De amor y de sombra'" International-Fiction-Review. 1988 Summer; 15(2): 151-157.

Alvarez, Julia. In the Time of the Butterflies.

Hiraldo, Carlos. "Identity Against the Grain: Latino Authors of African-European Heritage and Their Encounters with the Racial Ideology of the United States." Segregated Miscegenation: On the Treatment of Racial Hybridity in the US and Latin American Literary Traditions. New York: Routlege, 2002.

Anaya, Rudolfo. Bless Me, Ultima. (handout)

Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera.

Cisneros, Sandra. Loose Woman.

Cisneros, Sandra. "Cactus Flowers: In Search of Tejana Feminist Poetry." Third-Woman. 1986; 3(1-2): 73-80.

Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. "Chicana Literature from a Chicana Feminist Perspective." Herrera-Sobek, Maria and Viramontes, Helena Maria, Eds. Chicana Creativity and Criticism: Charting New Frontiers in American Literature. Houston: Arte Publico, 1988: 139-145.

Diaz, Junot. Drown. (handout)

Maritza Perez, Loida. Geographies of Home.

Retamar, Roberto Fernandez. "Caliban."

Ashctaft, Catherine. "Naming Knowledge: A Language for Reconstructing Domestic Violence and Systemic Gender Inequity." Women and Language. 2000 Spring; 23(1): 3-10.

Thomas, Piri. Down These Mean Streets.

Sanchez, Marta. "La Malinche at the Intersection: Race and Gender in Down These Streets," PMLA (January 1998): 117-128.

All of the materials for this course, except for the handouts, can be found in the basement of the M building in the campus bookstore.

YOUR WORK

In addition to doing the reading for each class session, you will be expected to write 4 essays of 1,000 words each and keep a journal. We will provide you with a handout detailing each assignment after our class discussion about these papers and projects. Please refer to both the assignment explanation (provided to you as a handout) and the grading rubric (provided to you as a handout) as you write each assignment. Your final grade will be configured based on the percentages below:

A Researched Essay (30%)

An Analytical Essay (20%)

A Critical Thinking Journal (10%)

Mid-term Exam (20%)

Final Exam (20%)

SUGGESTED RESEARCH INFORMATION:

The following suggested texts may prove useful as you write your research papers. We have placed these texts on reserve for you in the library and we encourage you to include them in your discussions of Latino/a literature.

Candelaria, Cordelia Chavez. "The 'Wild Zone' Thesis as Gloss in Chicana Literary Study." Warhol, Robyn R. and Herndl, Diane Price, Eds. Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1997: 248-56.

Carbonell, Ana Maria. "From Llorona to Gritona: Coatlicue in Feminist Tales by Viramontes and Cisneros." MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. 1999 Summer; 24(2): 53-74.

Castillo, Asia. Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisrna. Albuquerque University of New Mexico Press, 1994.

Davis-Undiano, Robert. "The Emergence of New World Studies: Anaya, Aztlan, and the New Chicana." Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture. 1999 Spring-Summer; 32(1-2): 115-40.

Herrera-Sobek, Maria and Helena Maria Viramontes. Chicana Creativity and Criticism: Charting New Frontiers in American Literature. Irvine: Mexico/Chicano Program, U of California, 1988.

Hiraldo, Carlos. Segregated Miscegenation: On the Treatment of Racial Hybridity in the US and Latin American Literary Traditions. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Jackson, Richard L. The Black Image in Latin American Literature. Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press, 1976.

Knox, Robert. The Races of Men: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Influence of Race Over the Destinies of Nations (1850). 2nd ed. London: Henry Renshaw, 1862.

Lee, Robert A. "Chicanismo as Memory: The Fictions of Rudolfo Anaya, Nash Candelaria, Sandra Cisneros, and Ron Arias." Singh, Amritjit and Joseph Skerrett and Robert Hogan, Eds. Memory and Cultural Politics: New Approaches to American Ethnic Literatures. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1996: 320-39.

Luis, William. Dance between Two Cultures: Latino Caribbean Literature Written in the United States. Vanderbilt University Press, 1997.

Munoz, Jose Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Perez-Firmat, Gustavo. Life on the Hyphens: the Cuban-American Way. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.

Restuccia, Frances L. "Literary Representations of Battered Women: Spectacular Domestic Punishment." Foster, Thomas and Carol Siegel and Ellen Berry Eds. Bodies of Writing Bodies in Performance. New York, NY: New York UP, 1996: 42-71.

Rodriguez, Richard. Brown: The Last Discovery of America. New York: Viking Penguin, 2002.

Shipman, Pat. The Evolution of Racism. 1994. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Vasconsuleos, Jose The Cosmic Race: a bilingual edition. Trans. Didier T. Jaen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Vazquez, Francisco H. Latino/a Thought: Culture, Politics, and Society. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.

NOTES

(1) Cherrie Moraga, "Art in America con Acento," Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality and Theatricality in Latino America, eds. Diana Taylor and Juan Villegas (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1994) 31-32.

(2) Bryce Milligan, "Introduction," Floricanto Si! eds. Bryce Milligan, Mary Guerrero Milligan and Angela de Hoyos (New York: Penguin, 1998) xxi.

(3) Marc Zimmerman, U.S. Latino Literature: An Essay and Annotated Bibliography, 2nd ed., (Chicago, Illinois: March/Abrazo Press, 1992) 9-10.

(4) Virgil Suarez, "Out of the Triangle of Solitude & into the American Heartland/Mainstream or We Are Not a Minority! Or Thoughts on Latino Writing," The Americas Review: A Review of Hispanic Literature and Art of the USA 21: 3-4 (1993): 124.

(5) Cherrie Moraga, "Art in America con Acento," Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality and Theatricality in Latino America, eds. Diana Taylor and Juan Villegas (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1994) 32.

(6) Guillermo Gomez-Pena, "The Multi-Cultural Paradigm: An Open Letter to the National Arts Community," Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality and Theatricality in Latino America, eds. Diana Taylor and Juan Villegas (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1994) 18.