Michael Dowdy | September 2017

NOTES

A “must-read” list that abridges Latino literature to a tweet-able ten books will surely raise some eyebrows. “Must read” for whom? “Must read” according to whom? But ours is an era of “listicles.” And our Poet Laureate, the Chicano conjurer Juan Felipe Herrera, has long favored list poems, like the diabolically brilliant “187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border.”¹ So I offer in these pages my “ten must-read Latino books,” with caution thrown to the Santa Ana Winds.²

This list proceeds from two propositions. First, for writers and teachers of writing, there is value in reading from different cultural perspectives—of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, geography, and so on. Second, there is equal value in reading books by Latinos and other persons of color wherein exemplary writing, with aesthetic dexterity and innovative craft, evinces little explicit interest in identity. To put this second claim differently, readers who have only passing familiarity with Latino writing might approach this list not as reparations or their telescopic cousin—the sociological frame that views books as representations of the Other’s experience or as subliterary cultural critique—but in magnanimous spirit. Only then may “tolerance” for difference cede to the celebration of excellence. 

After all, Latinos have been writing great books for a long time, but these books have rarely (and only recently) been accorded the status of Literature with a capital L, with its attendant awards and prizes.³ And yet. Now is also a critical historical moment that demands attention to Latino writers, as Latinos, in part because it is a paradoxical time: a president and his “big, beautiful” wall on the one hand, the recent Poet Laureate on the other. Or put differently, Trump and Herrera represent two sides of the coin of the American realm—for Latinos scorn, ostracization, and crude utility in the Republic of Stereotypes; ascendance and arrival in the Republic of Letters. 

In selecting books rather than writers, my list favors exemplary moments over outstanding careers. This approach therefore omits books by writers such as Ana Castillo and Sandra Cisneros. I have also chosen certain types of books, according to four loose criteria: books that readers might not encounter otherwise (thus Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao does not feature);⁴ books that are challenging or difficult, often in form, language, or style; books that fail in compelling ways, often by stretching the limits of genre; and books that might not be recognizably (stereotypically) “Latino,” with doting abuelas (grandmothers) and the like.⁵

A few words must be said about language before unveiling the list. Although many Latinos write solely in English, and some largely in Spanish, taken together they trouble the English-Only model of US education and the corollary monolingual model of writing programs.⁶ In short, language remains central to Latino writing; it is a social and political question as much as a literary one. 

Without further ado, then, here are my ten must-read Latino books, organized chronologically by year of initial publication. Each thumbnail sketch attempts to highlight the book’s unique qualities and literary contexts. 

William Carlos Williams, Spring and All (1923)⁷

Originally published by Contact Press in Dijon, France, this classic of vernacular American modernism was republished in 2011. Featuring a bracing introduction by C.D. Wright, New Directions restored the idiosyncratic original version of Spring and All, with its slew of errata and other typographic and orthographic high jinks. Wait a second, the reader interjects, Williams isn’t Latino, he’s from New Jersey. This opening salvo is thus equal parts provocation and historical correction. Raised in a bilingual household, Williams was Puerto Rican and a favorite son of Paterson. Books by the poet-critics Julio Marzán and Urayoán Noel have made cases for Williams as a proto-Latino and proto-Nuyorican (New York Puerto Rican) poet.⁸ One of the latter, Victor Hernández Cruz, has described Williams’s writing as “a dance on the page,” an apt description of Spring and All.⁹

John Rechy, City of Night (1963)¹⁰

When I was a graduate student, Rechy’s novel was a revelation. It remains so today. This narrative of an unnamed “youngman,” a hustler, hipster, and searcher who crisscrosses the country, has much in common thematically and structurally with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.¹¹ As one of the first gay novels of this scope, this book by an El Paso Chicano stands out for its audacity, lyrical narration, and capacious geographic imaginary. 

Tomás Rivera, …y no se lo tragó la tierra / …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (1970)¹²

Now published in a bilingual edition, Rivera’s novella documents a South Texas migrant community’s working, educational, domestic, social, imaginary, and psychic lives, which constantly verge on disaster. With episodic, fragmentary forms and unnamed narrators interrupting the stream-of-consciousness meditations of a teenage boy, the book recalls both Winesburg, Ohio and Pedro Páramo.¹³ The book’s lyrical, impressionistic vignettes, moreover, summon comparisons to Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time.¹⁴ But Rivera’s subject—migrant families and communities whose lives are always provisional, ostracized, and in danger, from heat exhaustion and psychic alienation alike—underscores the beauty of the novella’s narrative form for depicting what the scholar Alicia Schmidt Camacho calls “migrant imaginaries.”¹⁵

Lorna Dee Cervantes, Emplumada (1981)¹⁶

For numerous reasons, Emplumada holds a hallowed place in the canons of Chicano and Latino writing. On this occasion, one stands out. The collection’s nimble lyric subjectivity maintains the incisive, if more oblique, political imagination of the earlier Chicano Movement poetry. Published in the Pitt Poetry Series, the book’s title, which combines the Spanish words for “feathered” and “pen flourish,” launches Cervantes’s search for an aesthetic that is capable of enduring various forms of alienation—from language, history, family, herself—and thriving as a Chicana in the hostile world of men. In this way, the title highlights the embodied act of documenting with a language that is simultaneously delicate and strong, mobile and rooted. For a poet assembling her first book, Emplumada offers a lesson in how to organize a decade of work. Cervantes exercises restraint and values the unsaid, creating a thematically coherent collection that is both complex and accessible.¹⁷      

Juan Felipe Herrera, Exiles of Desire (1985)¹⁸

Herrera once wrote—provocatively, a bit tongue-in-cheek—that the poet of color has a stark choice between “craft” and “sabotage,” the one cold and polished clean, the other a fiery, subversive experiment.¹⁹ (Put another way: the workshop or the street, the reading or the protest.) Exiles of Desire touches these wires and makes them spark, jumpstarting Herrera’s unique style—colloquial, bombastic, restless, propulsive, surreal, accretive, sui generis. And any list such would be incomplete without Herrera. Arguably, no contemporary poet writes better (or more) list poems. In Exiles of Desire, Herrera’s energetic anaphora emerge in chrysalis form in “Your Name Is X” and “Are You Doing That New Amerikan Thing?” 

Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987)²⁰

Similarly, no list of “must-read” Latino books would be complete without Borderlands, Anzaldúa’s seminal work of border writing. Yet its multilingual, interdisciplinary, and genre- and gender-crossing qualities pose some tricky questions. In monolingual writing programs organized around strict generic distinctions, where and how can one teach Anzaldúa? Under pedagogies of modeling and imitating, how can one emulate Anzaldúa? I would suggest instead another line of questions. How can one inhabit Anzaldúa’s world? How can one think like Anzaldúa? Taking this tact emphasizes how skillfully and honestly Anzaldúa writes from personal experience—as a Chicana, a lesbian, a speaker of multiple languages, and a child of the US-Mexico border—to shape an imaginative language that is learned, generous yet commanding, vulnerable yet confident, and philosophically visionary.²¹

Helena María Viramontes, Their Dogs Came With Them (2007)²²

Departing from the sun-scorched fields and pesticide-sluiced canals of her first novel, Under the Feet of Jesus, Viramontes’s second novel is set in East Los Angeles in the 1960s. The title and spine-tingling epigraph are drawn from The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico.²³ The epigraph introduces a prevailing mood of impending doom, a mise en scène of spit-and-blood dehumanization. In addition to this overarching, if ultimately amorphous context, the novel employs two historically astute structuring devices. The first is the freeway projects that uprooted East LA’s ethnic communities, thereby extending the earlier internment camps for Japanese citizens to which the novel also alludes. From 1953 to 1972, seven freeways and one massive interchange were built in East LA. Second is a fictionalized allegory of the “public safety” curfews that were passed during the Chicano Moratorium protests from 1969 to 1971. In the novel, the “Quarantine Authority” (“QA”) is charged with protecting residents from rabid dogs, but it effectively creates a surveillance state that, like the freeways, displaces families and communities.²⁴ The kaleidoscopic novel follows half a dozen main characters, whose lives, like flyways and overpasses, intersect in irreversible ways.

Luis Negrón, Mundo Cruel (2010)²⁵

Originally published in Spanish, Mundo Cruel is a slim volume of nine stories set in Santurce, a neighborhood in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The first story, “The Chosen One,” announces from a Pentecostal church in buoyant, evocative voice the collection’s intent to eschew respectability politics, to find wild joy and creative possibility in taboo sex and in abjection. Negrón’s transgressive narrative forms queer the story cycle. Here the reader finds a mock confession, a series of unanswered and increasingly desperate letters, a phone call of which only one side is heard, and a cringe worthy conversation conducted across a house fence. And complex characters (i.e., hapless hustlers) and their burdens: a taxidermied pet dog, a corpse in a bathtub, a bottle of bleach, self-hatred and homophobia, addiction and transcendence, and AIDS. Although Negrón’s stories celebrate impiety, impropriety, and absurdity, they leverage them against moments of tenderness, dignity, and revelation.  

Rosa Alcalá, Undocumentaries (2010)²⁶ 

Like Williams, Alcalá is a native of Paterson, New Jersey, though she is of Spanish descent. And like Williams, her writing mines the possibilities and probes the limits of the lyric poem. Alcalá’s first full-length collection, Undocumentaries, finds innovative ways to combine “craft” and “sabotage,” beginning with the title. The double meaning combines an investigation into the limits of representation (the documentary mode) and an allusion to the plight of living without papers (undocumented persons). Undocumentaries also offers an entrée into the vibrant field of contemporary Latina poetry, where subversive imaginaries (“sabotage”) trouble the detached, putatively objective acumen of “craft.”²⁷

Daniel Alarcón, At Night We Walk in Circles (2013)²⁸

Like his superb first novel Lost City Radio,²⁹ At Night We Walk in Circles takes place in an unnamed country in the aftermath of civil war. Whether this troubled state is or is not the writer’s native Peru or a globalized allegory of the neoliberal nation-state (or both) matters less than the power and portability of the narrative. Alarcón possesses an unsurpassed gift for unfolding, in nested, self-reflexive fashion, narratives that are at once intricate and lucid, strange and familiar. Like Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Bolaño, Alarcón delivers surprises that never feel cheap, in part because their ramifications remain unresolved, spiraling outward into complex metaphysical questions. At Night We Walk in Circles offers readers many such startling twists. The narrator, a reporter who withholds his identity and stake in the story until late in the book, unravels the mystery of Nelson, a young actor in a small traveling theater troupe. The company stages a revival of The Idiot President, a play written by one of its members, a washed-up playwright famous more for his earlier imprisonment than for his art. As in Their Dogs Came With Them, the characters’ lives (and the characters’ lives they play) merge, blurring lines between fiction and reality, performance and representation. The novel asks, How do we perform the roles into which we are conscripted, tempted, misled? Drawn from Alarcón’s reporting on Lima’s prisons, which first appeared in Harper’s, the fictional Collectors prison stages a chilling apotheosis. 

Readers of Latino literature will now no doubt voice objections. First of all, six of ten spots are filled by Chicano writers. While those of Mexican descent remain the majority of U.S. Latinos in similar proportion, this balance obscures a demographic shift toward Central American diasporas. Second, many terrific books, some of which are mentioned in the endnotes, have been omitted. Such books underscore an underlying characteristic of Chicano writing and Latino literature broadly. In its many instantiations Latino writing has emphasized experiment, transgressing the boundaries of genre, the divides between art and activism, and the myriad prohibitions against Spanish and multilingualism (excepting Pound and Eliot, of course). In short, many great Latino books may prove challenging to integrate into creative writing classrooms. Perhaps that is yet one more reason why they should be. 

Some of these great books blur the line between print and performance, page and stage. Consider the Nuyorican tradition, analyzed beautifully by Urayoán Noel in his In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam.³⁰ To take but one example, Pedro Pietri’s long-awaited Selected Poetry surely belongs on this list, in part because his raucous, messy poems scandalize the craft workshop’s principles.³¹ His poems are tantalizingly “unfinished,” with misspellings, “bad” lines, “simple” rhymes, and a Dadaesque stance antagonistic to Poetry, with a capital P. So, I am hedging my bets, which Pietri, who owned his outsider practice and working-class status, never did.

Others of these books introduce lineages, histories, and traditions that trouble the political mythologies of the US. These little known (or disavowed) traditions (many of them Latin American) and histories (often of US imperialism in Latin America) make it so important, in these times, to read Latino writers. Especially salient in this regard are Ariel Dorfman and Daniel Borzutzky, both of whom are of Chilean and Eastern European Jewish descent. Although three decades apart in age, each bares the indelible scars of the Pinochet coup of September 11, 1973, and its aftermath of torture and exile. Dorfman’s novels, plays, and memoirs are likely well known to many readers. Prior to his National Book Award for The Performance of Becoming Human in 2016, Borzutzky’s fabulist narrative poems were not. Courageous, obsessive, grotesque, and luminous, collections such as In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy are unmatched in the North American literary scene.³²

Borzutzky’s poetry exemplifies and intensifies the urgency of so much Latino writing. For him, writing is “a form of prayer and code-breaking at the same time,” a haunting, disquieting call “to understand the broken voices that will never leave you alone.”³³ I hope that this list introduces the breadth and depth of Latino writing. From my experience, I trust that once you begin reading them Latino voices will indeed never leave you alone.

Thank you to Mauricio Kilwein Guevara for his incisive comments on this list.

 

Michael Dowdy is the author of the poetry collection Urbilly, winner of the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award (forthcoming, late 2017), a poetry chapbook, and two books of poetry criticism. Recent publications on Latinx poetry include an essay in The American Poetry Review and a critical study published by the University of Arizona Press, Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization. He is associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina.

 

Notes

1. Juan Felipe Herrera, 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border: Undocuments 1971–2007 (San Francisco: City Lights, 2007), pp. 29-35.
2. This is the terminology note obligatory in writing about Latino literature. To simplify typography, I use “Latino” to identify writers of Latin American descent in the US. “Latina/o,” “Latin@,” and “Latinx” have offered a series of correctives for the binary exclusions in the gendered language of “Latino.” “Hispanic,” a Census term, has assimilationist connotations. 
3. Recent awards—the Pulitzer and MacArthur for Junot Díaz, the Yale Younger Poets Prize for Eduardo C. Corral, and the Poet Laureateship for Herrera—have cracked this particular ceiling.
4. Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (New York: Riverhead, 2007). Rigoberto González calls Díaz’s virtuosic book “the Great Américas Novel.” “Rigoberto González’s Great Américas Novel: ‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’ by Junot Díaz,” Los Angeles Times, 30 June 2016.
5. These categories respectively include additional books such as Jovita González’s Caballero: A Historical Novel (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1996); Margarita Cota-Cárdenas’s Puppet, translated by Barbara D. Riess and Trino Sandoval (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000; originally 1985); Oscar Zeta Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People (New York: Vintage, 1989; originally 1973); and Sandy Florian’s Boxing the Compass (Las Cruces, NM: Noemi Press, 2013). I often teach these books in Latino literature classes for these very reasons.
6. One exception is the bilingual Creative Writing of the Americas program at the University of Texas at El Paso.
7. William Carlos Williams, Spring and All (New York: New Directions, 2011; originally 1923).
8. Julio Marzán, The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994). Urayoán Noel, In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014).
9. Victor Hernández Cruz, performance of “An Essay on William Carlos Williams,” Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania, 6 April 1999 (Pennsound, Web, 7 January 2015). In the spirit of recuperating the long history of Latino writing in the US, read the Puerto Rican poets Julia de Burgos and Clemente Soto Vélez and the Cuban writer José Martí. Martí’s crónicas (chronicles), many of which he wrote during his long exile in New York City, serve as superb models for students of memoir and creative nonfiction. 
10. John Rechy, City of Night (New York: Grove Press, 1963). 
11. Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Penguin, 1999; originally 1957). Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1995; originally 1952).
12. Tomás Rivera, …y no se lo tragó la tierra / …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, translated by Evangelina Vigil Piñón (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2015; originally 1970). 
13. Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1995; originally 1919). Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden (New York: Grove Press, 1994; originally 1955). 
14. Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (New York: Scribner, 1996; originally 1925).
15. Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New York: New York University Press, 2008). .…And the Earth Did Not Devour Him laid the groundwork for Helena María Viramontes’s harrowing novel Under the Feet of Jesus (New York: Penguin, 1995). Employing a lyric variation on free indirect discourse, Under the Feet of Jesus tells the story of twelve-year Estrella and her family of piscadores (fruit pickers). Like Rivera’s novella, Viramontes’s novel ends on a note of fortitude laced with ambiguity. 
16. Lorna Dee Cervantes, Emplumada (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981).
17. A corollary lesson on the book-length narrative poem is Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Martín & Meditations on the South Valley (New York: New Directions, 1987), which is introduced by Denise Levertov.
18. Juan Felipe Herrera, Exiles of Desire (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1985).
19. Juan Felipe Herrera, Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002), p. 104.  
20. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987).
21. In this final sense, Borderlands offers a theoretical backbone for works on the US-Mexico border in recent years. Notable among these many books are Each and Her, by the Latina poet Valerie Martínez (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010); The Devil’s Highway, by the Latino poet-novelist-journalist Luis Alberto Urrea (New York: Little, Brown, 2004); The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail, by the Salvadoran reporter Óscar Martínez (New York: Verso, 2014; originally 2010; translated by Daniela Maria Ugaz and John Washington); and Signs Preceding the End of the World, by the Mexican novelist Yuri Herrera (Bucks, England: And Other Stories, 2015; translated by Lisa Dillman).
22. Helena María Viramontes, Their Dogs Came With Them (New York: Washington Square Press, 2007).
23. Miguel León-Portilla, The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico, translated by Lysander Kemp (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006).
24. Appropriately, “rabies” is derived from the Sanskrit rabhas, which means “to do violence.”
25. Luis Negrón, Mundo Cruel, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2013; originally 2010).
26. Rosa Alcalá, Undocumentaries (Exeter, UK: Shearsman Books, 2010).
27. Other must-read contemporary Latina poets include Cynthia Cruz, Mónica de la Torre, Carmen Giménez Smith, Aracelis Girmay, Sheryl Luna, María Meléndez Kelson, Emmy Pérez, and Jennifer Tamayo. Many readers will likely be familiar with Ada Limón’s Bright Dead Things (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award.
28. Daniel Alarcón, At Night We Walk in Circles (New York: Riverhead, 2013).
29. Daniel Alarcón, Lost City Radio (New York: Harper, 2008).
30. Urayoán Noel, In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014).
31. Pedro Pietri, Selected Poetry, eds. Juan Flores and Pedro López-Adorno (San Francisco: City Lights, 2015).
32. Daniel Borzutzky, In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (New York: Nightboat Books, 2015) and The Performance of Becoming Human (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016). 
33. In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy, p. 16.