U.S. Latino/a Writing

Including the Chicano southwest of California, Texas, Arizona, Colarado, New Mexico, and Nevada, together with the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and its Manhattan offshoot, Spanish Harlem, the Cuban America of Florida, as well as the many smaller communities whose origins lie in Central and South America, and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, Hispanic and Latino Americans are now the largest ethnic minority in the United States. Indeed, the USA is now the second largest Spanish-speaking country in the Americas.

As serious scholarly work on and around the literary output of Hispanic and Latino Americans flourishes as never before, this new four-volume collection, co-published by Routledge and Edition Synapse, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to help users navigate and make sense of the subject’s vast literature and the continuing explosion in research output.

U.S.Latino/a Writing is edited by A. Robert Lee, Professor of American Literature at Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan. He has organized the materials into a series of Latino/a overviews, to be followed by interpretations of Chicano/a, Nuyorican, Cuban-American, Dominican-American and other U.S. Latino/a authorship. These necessarily cross-refer, whether dealing with the southwest, Los Angeles or Manhattan barrio, island legacy as in the case of Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic, 1960s and after multicultural politics, or legacies of Aztlán and Boricua. The span is one of fiction, poetry, drama, life-writing and discursive work.

U.S. Latino/a Writing includes a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, as well as detailed bibliographies and timelines. It is destined to be valued by researchers and students as an essential work of reference.