The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence
of Post-Sixties Literature
By Raphael Dalleo and Elena
Machado Sáez
Published by Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007
Academic Responses to The Latino/a Canon
Resources for Teaching
Latino/a Literature
Progressive cultural criticism often tends
to lament the political scene today as unable to live up to the ideals of the
Sixties, a nostalgia that can make the Left seem irrelevant or unable to
engage with a changing present. At the same time, creative writers today are
imagining new political projects and new relationships with the social
movements of the past. In the first study of Latino/a literature
to systematically examine the post-Sixties generation of writers, The
Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature challenges the
ways that Latino/a studies imagines the relationship of art, politics
and the market. Dalleo and Machado Sáez engage with the major figures from the
field to dispute the consensus view of Latino/a literature from the 1960s as
politically committed and resistant to the market versus the literature of the
1990s as apolitical and assimilationist due to its commodification. This study
argues that post-Sixties writers Pedro Pietri, Ernesto Quiñonez, Abraham
Rodríguez, Junot Díaz, Angie Cruz, Cristina Garcia, Julia Alvarez, Nilo Cruz,
Chantel Acevedo and Ana Menéndez have not
abandoned politics, but are imagining creative strategies for revitalizing
progressive thought through the market.
About Raphael Dalleo About Elena Machado Sáez