Syllabus

“Canonicity” refers to the hidden principles of inclusion and exclusion that assign social value and hierarchical placement to literary expressions. Thus an investigation of these principles at work reveals the political force-field that surrounds both texts and authors in a given historical moment. The nascent subfield of U.S. Latina/o Literature poses multiple—and revealing—problems about the social valuation of texts: its canon is established on criteria of ethnicity; its canonizing institutions tend to be capitalistic rather than traditionally located in the academy; and within the academy it claims a dual location in two different language disciplines, English and Spanish.

In this course, we will explore a range of works classified under the Latina/o rubric, from the hypercanonical (The House on Mango Street, now one of the most-taught works in US secondary schools) to the obscure (two recently recovered novels). With each, we will also read relevant secondary criticism as well as general theoretical works on literary production in the Marxian tradition. Readings will be in English, although one of the main concerns of many of these writers is the creative deformation of English by Spanish/Spanglish/caló. When texts are translated, the Spanish readings will be made
available as optional readings for proficient students.
Texts:
The books listed below are available at the Literary Guillotine, 204 Locust Street downtown. There will also be an extensive Course Reader available at the UCSC bookstore containing other required readings listed on the syllabus (unless they are available online).
Thomas, Piri. Down These Mean Streets. Vintage.
Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory. Bantam.
Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. Vintage.
Garcia, Cristina. Dreaming in Cuban. Ballantine.
Ruíz de Burton, María Amparo. Who Would Have Thought It? Arte Público.
Venegas, Daniel. The Adventures of Don Chipote, trans. EC Brommer. Arte Público.
Goldman, Francisco. The Ordinary Seaman. Grove.
Alvarez, Julia. In the Name of Salomé. Plume.
Hernández Cruz, Victor. Panoramas. Coffee House.
Fusco, Coco, ed. Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas. Routledge. (optional)

Requirements and Expectations:
* Your participation in our seminar meetings will be the heart of your performance evaluation. Please come to class with some thoughtful questions and topics for discussion in mind. Part of the expected participation is a turn at discussion-leading (this may be done in pairs depending on enrollment): you should make sure you have looked particularly carefully at the assigned readings, and plan to do at least some of the optional readings in order to present those ideas to the group.
* The written component of the course will be a research paper of 10-15 pages, due at the end of the term. This could be a standard analytical essay focusing on any text, or historical/ theoretical issue relevant to the course; or it could be a well-researched, critical assessment of the reception history of a Latino/a text, documenting its marketing, publishing history, adoption in anthologies and curricula. To facilitate this kind of writing in the brief ten-week term, I’ll ask you to submit partial versions of this project as follows:
o by Monday, 4/26: 3-5 informal pages outlining and taking a position on a critical problem you want to address in your paper. You may discuss essays we have read in class or others that I can help you identify. This should form the backbone of the theoretical / critical portion of your bibliography, and our discussions about it should help you identify a methodology and a more precise field of study during the following weeks.
o by Friday, 5/14: progress report: a 1-2 page outline of the research project as it has now taken shape, with a near-final list of materials you plan to use.
o by Monday, 5/31: a rough draft of as much as you are willing to show me (but at least 5 pages).
o by Thursday, 6/10: the final version.

Background Reading Suggestions
For those who would like more background information about Latina/o groups in the US, I recommend Juan González’s Harvest of Empire over other popular, synthetic histories. Suzanne Oboler’s Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives is a standard point of reference in discussions about the vexed term “Latino” and contains useful chapters on the evolution of terms of identity within the diverse communities that are grouped under that umbrella. Of the several recent textbooks anthologizing key works in Latino Studies (a field, incidentally, dominated by social-scientific approaches), I like Francisco Vázquez and Rodolfo Torres, Latino Thought. Major journals that may be of use include Latino Studies, Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingüe, Nepantla: Views from South, Comparative American Studies, MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States), American Literary History, American Literature, American Quarterly, Cuadernos Americanos, Latin American Research Review.

Schedule of Topics and Readings
The “secondary” essays listed were chosen to foster a common critical language in the seminar; they are equally as important as the “primary” texts. Optional assignments, in contrast, are generally critical readings of the latter. Optional readings, if not available online through campus journal subscriptions, will either be on reserve at McHenry or available from the instructor.

THE "HYPERCANON" AND THE PROBLEM OF ETHNIC REPRESENTATION
April 8 Thomas, Down These Mean Streets.
Alcoff, Linda Martín. “Is Latina/o Identity a Racial Identity?”
Mendieta, Eduardo. “The Making of New Peoples.”
Silvio Torres-Saillant, “Problematic Paradigms: Racial Diversity and Corporate Identity in the Latino Community.”
Dávila, Arlene. Introduction to Latinos, Inc.

OPT: Sánchez, Marta, “La Malinche at the Intersection: Race and Gender in Down these Mean Streets.” PMLA 113:1, Jan 1998.
Lisa Sánchez González, Introduction and first section of chap. 4 of Boricua Literature.

April 15 Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory AND Cisneros, The House on Mango Street.
Guillory, John. Chapter 1 of Cultural Capital.
Palumbo-Liu, David, introduction to The Ethnic Canon.
OPT: Norma Alarcón, “Tropology of Hunger” and Rosaura Sánchez, “Calculated Musings”: articles on Rodriguez in The Ethnic Canon.
Moya, Paula, Chapter 3 of Learning from Experience.
Olivares, Julián, “Cisneros’s House on Mango Street and the Poetics of Space” in Chicana Creativity and Criticism.
Poey, Delia. “Coming of Age in the Curriculum”: Chapter 5 of Latino American Literature in the Classroom.
April 22 Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban.
Aparicio and Silverman, Introduction to Tropicalizations.
Spitta, Silvia. “Transculturation, the Caribbean, and the Cuban-American Imaginary.”
OPT: Pérez-Firmat, Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way, chap. 1.
*by Monday, 4/26: submit 3-5 informal pages outlining and taking a position on a critical problem you want to address in your final project.

RECOVERED TEXTS, ALTERNATE ORIGINS
April 29 Ruíz de Burton, Who Would Have Thought It?
José Aranda, “Contradictory Impulses: Maria Amparo Ruíz de Burton, Resistance Theory, and the Politics of Chicano/a Studies.” American Literature 70:3 (available to UC addresses via JSTOR)

OPT: Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita, Conflicts of Interest
Anne Goldman, “’Who Ever Heard of a Blue-Eyed Mexican?’ Satire and Sentimentality in Who Would Have Thought It?”, Recovering v. 2 (1996)

May 6 (Primary Texts)
1. 19th and 20th-century periodical literature: selections from Herencia.
2. José Martí, “The Truth about the US,” “Indians and Negroes,” “The Pan-American Congress,” “Our America,” “With all and for the good of all,” “The Statue of Liberty.”
3. María Cristina Mena short stories: “The Gold Vanity Set,” “John of God the Water Carrier,” “The Education of Popo,” “A Son of the Tropics”
(Critical Texts)
José David Saldívar, “Remapping American cultural studies,” chap. 7 of Border Matters.
Kinney, Thomas. “Remapping the Archive: Recovered Literature and the Deterritorialization of the Canon.” in Recovering v. 4.
Hames-García, Michael. “Which America is Ours? Martí’s ‘Truth’ and the Foundations of ‘American Literature.”
OPT: Tatum, Charles. Some Considerations on Genres and Chronology for Nineteenth-Century Hispanic Literature.” in Recovering v. 1; and/or Kanellos, Nicolás, Introduction to Hispanic Periodicals in the United States.
Susana Rotker, Rosaura Sánchez, and Ada Ferrer essays in José Martí's Our America: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies.
López, Tiffany Ana. “’Tolerance for Contradictions’: The Short Stories of María Cristina Mena.”

May 13 Venegas, The Adventures of Don Chipote.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera chapters 1, 5.
Raúl Villa, introduction and chapter 1 from Barrio-Logos
OPT: Brady, Mary Pat. Introduction and first section of Chapter 3 in Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies.
Pérez, Emma. Chapter 1 of The Decolonial Imaginary

*by Friday, 5/14: progress report: a 1-2 page outline of the research project as it has now taken shape, with a near-final list of materials you plan to use.

THE TRANSNATIONAL HISTORICAL NOVEL
May 20 Goldman, The Ordinary Seaman.
OPT: Ana Patricia Rodríguez, “Refugees of the South: Central Americans in the US Latino Imaginary.” American Literature 73:2 (available to UC addresses via Ingenta).

May 27 Alvarez, In the Name of Salomé.
Juan Flores, “Islands and Enclaves: Caribbean Latinos in Historical Perspective.”
OPT: Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island
Luis, William, Dance between Two Cultures: Latino Caribbean Literature Written in the United States.
*by Monday, 5/31: submit a rough draft of as much as you are willing to show me (but at least 5 pages)

EXPERIMENTAL WRITING: DEFORMATIONS AND VARIATIONS

June 3 Hernández Cruz, Panoramas.
pp. 1-22, 41-82, 97-114, 152-6, in Fusco, ed. Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña, “Border Brujo,” “The Last Migration”

OPT: Aparicio, Frances. “On Sub-Versive Signifiers: Tropicalizing Language in the United States.”
Fox, Claire, The Fence and the River chap. 5
**Thursday, June 10: submit final version of paper