Find Yourself Here: Local Logics in Chicano and Latino Literature, 1997-2012
Contemporary political geography has generated exciting critical accounts of space in Latino literature, yet to date these readings have been limited to urban centers or general regions. More recent Chicano/Latino literary criticism has turned toward transnationalism, the study of new global patterns of immigration, as an interpretive lens. Cristina Rodriguez’s project combines the two approaches, bringing current transnationalist research to bear on an already existent critical discourse on space in narrative. Her dissertation focuses on the intersections between the transnational and the local in contemporary Latino literature, by analyzing the narrative strategies authors employ to depict their own local immigrant communities. She argues that these authors seek experimental stylistic forms to enact their neighborhood, using literary elements such as pastiche, shifts in narrative voice, and innovative page layouts to make their text embody a place. The four novels in the study, Salvador Placencia’s The People of Paper (2005), Junot Díaz’ This is How You Lose Her (2012), Helena María Viramontes’ Their Dogs Came With Them (2007), and Francisco Goldman’s The Ordinary Seaman (1997), each develop a tight relationship between their setting and narrative structure to represent what a neighborhood’s distinct character tells us about its Latino community. By interpreting the cultural modes of individual immigrant neighborhood spaces as enacted through literature, “Find Yourself Here” demonstrates transnationalism’s concrete effects at the most local level.
Cristina Rodriguez is a Ph.D. candidate a UC Irvine who has advanced to candidacy. Her dissertation, “Find Yourself Here: Local Logics in Chicano and Latino Literature, 1997-2012,” examines the experimental narrative strategies authors including Junot Díaz, Salvador Plascencia, and Francisco Goldman employ to depict Latino immigrant neighborhoods, seeking to thus inductively determine a vision of Latino immigrant experience through its literary production. She has presented portions of her research at MELUS, ALA, and MLA.
