This is the first inter-group and gender inclusive collection of scholarship in U.S. Latino literary criticism that begins with the assumption that the literature written by U.S. Latinos is as important an object of scholarship as U.S. Latino/a history, sociology, and culture, fields that have dominated previous inter-group anthologies. Some of the most important and insightful Latino and Latina literary scholars in the field write on authors from the four major Latino/a groups-- Cuban American, Dominican American, Mexican American, and Puerto Rican American.  The anthology evaluates the state of U.S. Latino/a literary study and projects a vision of that study for the twenty-first century. This book is divided into four major areas of literary inquiry: analyses of the psychic relations between the Latino/a subject and its mimetic others; explorations of the complexities of race and Afro-Latino/a poetics; studies of the representation of labor in the Latino/a literary imagination; and genealogical and archival assessment of U.S. Latino literature’s relationship with American, Caribbean, and Latin American literatures and histories. 

Lyn Di Iorio Sandín is the author of Killing Spanish: Literary Essays on Ambivalent U.S. Latino/a Identity (Palgrave Macmillan 2004). She has recently finished her first novel called Outside the Bones, and her short fiction has been published in The Bilingual Review, The Hogtown Creek Review, and The Texas Review, among other venues. She is also the author of articles and translations. She is currently a specialist in Latino/a and Caribbean literatures at The City College of New York.

Richard Perez is working towards his Ph.D. in English and American literatures at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is currently writing his dissertation on the Specter in Post-colonial and Trans-American literature. His work has appeared in Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies. Perez also writes book reviews for Tempo, the Latino section of The New York Post. He teaches at Hunter College.

“This collection brings together an impressive group of established and young scholars to produce a multi-layered, theoretically complex approach to the practices of Latino/a criticism.  These essays continue the dialogue about ambivalent identities and the usefulness (or lack thereof) of contemporary literary theory in helping scholars tease out the meaning of Latino/a texts.  It should prove a valuable and popular text for scholars and students of Latino/a literature.”--Lisa Paravisini, Vassar College