The Hispanic literature of New York has often been classified as belonging to a handful of canonical authors or selected national groups. However, examples from the early years of the newspaper "La Prensa" and Felipe Alfau's novel "Chromos", as well as consideration for New York's cultural climate during the first decades of…

This essay explores the relationship(s) between English and Spanish in the novel "Raining Backwards" (1988) by Cuban American Roberto G. Fernandez. While the many linked plots and characters suggest many protagonists, this study demonstrates how language itself takes on the role of protagonist. Through the author's use of calques and…

This interpretive study draws on data from a larger inquiry into teacher learning in a graduate-level course on Latino literature at a large southwestern university. The article focuses on a small diverse group of educators taking part in a literature discussion of the novel "Before We Were Free" by J. Alvarez (2002). Using a…

This article complements the existing body of Ruiz de Burton scholarship by providing the first sustained examination of her literary representations of American Indians in both "Who Would Have Thought It?" (1872) and "The Squatter and the Don" (1885), and by exploring how these representations serve her broader aims of social and political…

Rene Saldana, Jr., an assistant professor at Texas Tech University, is a writer of short stories, poetry, and novels. In order to get his storytelling right, he has relied on his memory when writing memoirs and consulted popular culture and family when writing fiction. In order to get his university teaching right, he reads seminal texts on…

"Code-switching," or the alternation of languages by bilinguals, has attracted an enormous amount of attention from researchers. However, most research has focused on spoken language, and the resultant theoretical frameworks have been based on spoken code-switching. This volume presents a collection of new work on the alternation of…

This essay examines the uneasy relationship that Arturo Islas's "The Rain God" has had with narratives of identity, focusing on how the representation of Felix's sexuality makes him a problematic figure for certain strains of Chicana/o and queer studies. In other writings, Islas criticizes Quinto Sol, the chief publishing house of Chicano…

This essay seeks to intervene in critical discussions about Arturo Islas's 1984 novel "The Rain God", as well as to suggest the potential for synthesizing discourses heretofore deployed in disparate conversations about disability, sexuality, and ethnicity. I first demonstrate how the novel's queer characters, Miguel Chico and Felix, pose critical…

"Curanderismo," a Mexican folk practice, is a prevalent subject in Mexican American literature. Because much of the presence of "curanderismo" in Mexican American literature is only explored in ethnographic studies, the purpose of this study is to examine the artistic representation of "curanderismo" in the novels "Bless Me, Ultima" by Rudolfo…

This analysis examined twentieth-century Spanish American works, geographically distributed throughout the area and including all genres. Results are given by genre and by nation. (RM)

Describes assignments that link Gary Soto's novel "Taking Sides" to a collection of Latino poetry. Notes that the students' final presentations were successful, as indicated by their enthusiasm and engagement throughout. (RS)