Language, Literature, and Culture

Esmeralda Santiago in the marketplace of identity politics

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Esmeralda Santiago's América's Dream, with its ahistorical subjectivism and idealization of an agrarian past, offers a "Latino" docile Puerto Rican as the novel's central protagonist. This article explores the following: the marketability of Latinos, Puerto Rican literary history, and identity formation. Santiago's nostalgia positions her ideologically within 1930s-1950s Puerto Rican writing. Santiago's "terruño" presents a narrative model (exclusively working class characters, binary gender roles, an agrarian setting, a disconnection from contemporary culture) that reinvents the stereotype of the docile Puerto Rican. América's Dream offers no interplay of hybridity - one of the defining characteristics of Latino, and Puerto Rican identities.

Publication Title

Centro Journal

Publication Date

3-2006

Volume

18

Issue

1

First Page

171

Last Page

187

ISSN

1538-6279

Keywords

authenticity, docility, Latino identities, market politics, stereotypes

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