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Hispanic American Heritage: Literature

A Celebration of Hispanic/Latinx American Culture

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Books of Hispanic/Latinx Poetry

Versos Sencillos

This is the first bilinqual edition of the 19th century Cuban literary master's classic book of poetry.

On the Blue Shore of Silence

Aunque existe un sinnúmero de antologías de la poesía de Neruda, A la Orilla Azul del Silencio es la primera en reunir algunos de sus más bellos poemas sobre el mar. Algunas veces apasionados, otras veces serenos, los poemas de este libro -- presentado en formato bilingüe -- ofrecen al lector la posibilidad de imaginarse lo que habría sido sentarse con Neruda en Isla Negra frente al mar infinito, oyendo el eterno ir y venir de las olas. Con traducciones al inglés hechas por Alastair Reid,su traductor predilecto, y las extraordinarias pinturas de laartista Mary Heebner, A la Orilla Azul del Silencio es un nuevo pilar de la obra de Neruda, que combina con habilidad las sensibilidades del poeta, la artista y el lector.

Latin American Poetry

This study considers the ways Spanish American and Brazilian poets differ from their European counterparts by considering 'Latin American' as more than a perfunctory epithet. It sets the orthodox Latin tradition of the subcontinent against others that have survived or grown up after the conquest then pays attention to those poets who, from Independence, have striven to express a specifically American moral and geographical identity. Dr Brotherson focuses on Modernismo, or the 'coming of age' of poetry in Spanish America and Brazil, and the importance of the movements associated with it. He considers Csar Vallejo and Pablo Neruda, probably the greatest of the selection, Octavio Paz, and modern poets who have reacted differently to the idea that Latin America might now be thought to have not just a geographical but a nascent political identity of its own. Poems are liberally quoted, and treated as entities in their own right.

The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry

Here is the first anthology to present a full range of multilingual poetries from Latin America, covering over 500 years of a poetic tradition as varied, robust, and vividly imaginative as any in the world. Editors Cecilia Vicu~na and Ernesto Livon-Grosman present a fresh and expansive selection of Latin American poetry, from the indigenous responses to the European conquest, through early feminist poetry of the 19th century, the early 20th century "Modernismo" and "Vanguardia" movements, laterrevolutionary and liberation poetry of the 1960s, right up to the experimental, visual and oral poetries being written and performed today. Here readers will find several types of poetry typically overlooked in major anthologies, such as works written or chanted in their native languages, the vibrant mestizo (mixed) creations derived from the rich matrix of spoken language in Latin America, and even the mysterious verses written in made-up languages. 

Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral

The first Nobel Prize in literature to be awarded to a Latin American writer went to the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. Famous and beloved during her lifetime all over Latin America and in Europe, Mistral has never been known in North America as she deserves to be. The reputation of her more flamboyant and accessible friend and countryman Pablo Neruda has overshadowed hers, and she has been officially sentimentalized into a "poetess" of children and motherhood. Translations, and even selections of her work in Spanish, have tended to underplay the darkness, the strangeness, and the raging intensity of her poems of grief and pain, the yearning power of her evocations of the Chilean landscape, the stark music of her Round Dances, the visionary splendor of her Hymns of America. 

Taco Shop Poets

About Hispanic/Latinx Poetry

In a U.S. Latina/o context, poetry can be thought of in terms of both literary texts and expressive cultural practices, and the tension between these two understandings of poetry has been integral to the evolution of Latina/o literary and cultural studies.

Poets and poetry were at the forefront of the Chicano and Puerto Rican movements of the 1960s and 1970s that helped shape the interdisciplinary academic field of Latina/o studies, with epic poems such as Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales's “Yo soy Joaquín” (1967) and Pedro Pietri's “Puerto Rican Obituary” (1969) epitomizing this socially engaged and oppositional movimiento poetics. Such poems were at once blueprints for a movement, extensions of a movement, and an eccentric movement all its own: Gonzales helped spearhead the First National Chicano Liberation Youth Conference in Denver in 1969, while Pietri performed his poem during the 1969 takeover of the People's Church in East Harlem by the Young Lords Party, which published his poem in its journal Palante. These 1969 events gave us two foundational political documents from the movimiento era: “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán” (featuring a poem-prologue by the poet Alurista) (Anaya and Lomelí 1991, 1–5) and the Young Lords’ “13 Point Program and Platform” (Enck-Wanzer 2010, 9–10). Movement-identified poets such as Alurista and Louis Reyes Rivera were also instrumental to the development of Chicano, African American, Puerto Rican, and ethnic studies departments and programs in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Exerpts from: Noel, U. (2017). Poetry. In D. R. Vargas, L. La Fountain-Stokes, & N. R. Mirabal, Keywords for latina/o studies. New York University Press. Credo Reference: https://ezproxy.southern.edu/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/nyupresskls/poetry/0?institutionId=2258

Online Resources

Books of Hispanic/Latinx Literature

Herencia

Herencia (meaning "inheritance" or "heritage") is the first anthology to bring together literature from the entire history of Hispanic writing in the United States, from the age of exploration to the present. The product of a ten-year project involving hundreds of scholars nationwide, Herencia is the most comprehensive literary collection available, spanning over three centuries and including writers from all the major Hispanic ethnic communities, and writing from diverse genres. Here is the voice of the conqueror and the conquered, the revolutionary and the reactionary, the native and the uprooted or landless. 

The House on Mango Street

The best-selling coming-of-age classic, acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world. The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become. Told in a series of vignettes--sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous--Sandra Cisneros' masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery. Few other books in our time have touched so many readers.

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

Simply wonderful. --Los Angeles Times   Acclaimed writer Julia Alvarez's brilliant and buoyant and beloved first novel gives voice to four sisters recounting their adventures growing up in two cultures. Selected as a Notable Book by both the New York Times and the American Library Association, it won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award for books with a multicultural perspective and was chosen by New York librarians as one of twenty-one classics for the twenty-first century.  --The Cleveland Plain Dealer

One Hundred Years of Solitude

"One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. . . . Mr. Garcia Marquez has done nothing less than to create in the reader a sense of all that is profound, meaningful, and meaningless in life." --William Kennedy, New York Times Book Review  One of the most influential literary works of our time, One Hundred Years of Solitude remains a dazzling and original achievement by the masterful Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. 

Casi una Mujer / Almost a Woman

In her new memoir, the acclaimed author of When I Was Puerto Rican continues the riveting chronicle of her life. "Negi," as Santiago's family affectionately calls her, leaves rural Macun in 1961 to live in a three-bedroom tenement apartment with seven siblings, and inquisitive grandmother, and a strict mother who won't allow her to date. At thirteen, Negi yearns for her own bed, for privacy, and her father, who remains in Puerto Rico. Translating for Mami at the welfare office in the morning, starring as Cleopatra at New York's Performing Arts High School in the afternoon, and dancing salsa all night, she also seeks to find balance between being an American and Puerto Rican. When Negi defies her mother by going on a series of dates, she finds that independence brings challenges. At once a universally poignant coming-of-age tale and a heartfelt immigrant's story, Almost a Woman is Santiago's triumphant journey into womanhood.

Cuentos de Eva Luna

Eva Luna -- amante, revolucionaria, narradora -- reclinada en la cama con su amante, le cuenta una historia "que nunca ha contado antes a nadie," en veintitres vivdos y fascinantes relatos sobre guerrilleros y nigromantes, seductores y tiranos, diplomáticos y acróbatas. En esta estupenda colección de cuentos, Isabel Allende continúa la magia de su muy elogiada novela Eva Luna.

Nyuorican Spoken Word

About Hispanic/Latinx Literature

Even though there are important differences among Cuban American, Dominican American, and Puerto Rican American writers, several unifying themes are discernible in their works: the longing for a lost past somewhere outside the United States; the intellectual and emotional quest for a viable identity within a bicultural environment; the struggle for social equality and cultural assimilation within a structured class society; and, in some cases, the journey back to the writer's country of origin. There are stylistic similarities as well, since Latino writers often use Spanish words or phrases in their English texts to signal particular aspects of their cultures.

Even though parts of the United States, especially large cities such as New York and Chicago, have had a Latino population since the late nineteenth century, Latino literature as a separate category did not find a place within American culture until the late 1960s and 1970s, mostly through the efforts of a group of Puerto Rican writers from New York, who labeled themselves Nuyoricans. The salient characteristics of Nuyorican poetry are its denunciation of the ambiguous status of Puerto Rico, which is neither an independent country nor a U.S. state, and the effects of the consequent marginalization of Puerto Ricans in the continental United States. 

The massive migration of Cubans to the United States after the 1959 Revolution produced a great deal of literature written in Spanish (perhaps to be classified as “Cuban literature in exile”), which is not considered Latino literature; there is, however, a growing corpus of Cuban American literature written in English. One of its best-known exponents is Oscar Hijuelos's Pulitzer Prize—winning novel The Mambo Kings Sing Songs of Love (1989), which focuses on the lives of two Cuban brothers and their families in New York during the 1940s and 1950s and includes an excellent re-creation of the Latin music scene in the city during that period. 

The urban sensibility of the Latino community is best represented in the work of Junot Diaz in Drown (1996) and John Leguizamo in his performing pieces Mambo Mouth (1993) and Freak (with David Bar Katz, 1997). Diaz's stories introduce young, multiethnic characters in the throes of adolescence and describe their complex and often disturbing strategies for survival, adjustment, and assimilation. Leguizamo's satirical pieces, performed on Broadway to great acclaim, offer an irreverent and subversive view of Latino stereotypes.

During the 1990s Latino literature evolved and developed tremendously, both in terms of production and scope. 

Exerpts from: Ibieta, G. (2018). Latino literature. In S. Bronner (Ed.), Encyclopedia of American studies. Johns Hopkins University Press. Credo Reference: https://ezproxy.southern.edu/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/jhueas/latino_literature/0?institutionId=2258