Mercado Dreams

Abstract

The committed literary criticism discussed in chapter 1 laments the apolitical turn in post-Sixties Latino/a fiction, as contemporary writers move away from the Civil Rights narratives of Piri Thomas and Nicholasa Mohr. These critics identify Thomas and Mohr, along with Nuyorican poets like Pedro Pietri and Miguel Piñero, as the models for a politically progressive literary field because of the anticolonial ideology those writers embody. These writers have in common a particular sensibility—what we will call a ghetto aesthetic—that enables them to protest the Nuyorican condition and critique the hypocrisy associated with the American dream from a political position with a particularly revolutionary ideology. Chapters 2 and 3 will discuss the political contours of how contemporary writers deploy ghetto fiction. According to critics like Lisa Sánchez González in Boricua Literature (2001) and Juan Flores in From Bomba to Hip-Hop (2000), Latino/a literature beginning in the 1990s—the most frequent targets are the works of Esmeralda Santiago, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Cristina Garcia, and Julia Alvarez—simply cannot live up to the anti-colonial ideals of the Civil Rights generation. The post-Sixties writers Sánchez González discusses are uniformly inadequate politically, for reasons we will explore. For Flores, the one exception to this impoverishment of the political imaginary among post-Sixties fiction is the work of Abraham Rodriguez.