“Latinas/os” (or the more gender-inclusive and nonbinary term “Latinx”) are not one ethnicity but many, divided by national origin and by racial and ethnic categories within the sending nation: Mayan Guatemalans, Afro-Cubans, mestizo Mexicans, white-identifying Argentinians, and so on. Particularly in the increasingly cosmopolitan urban centers of the United States, an evolving sense of intra-Latino solidarity and panethnic Latino “community” has come into view in the literature produced by Latinx writers of the later 20th and 21st centuries.įor decades, scholars have debated the question of whether an umbrella term such as “Hispanic” or “Latina/o”-referring to a multiethnic and panethnic group-is a legitimate category and, correspondingly, of what “Latina/o writing” might mean. It then turns to a discussion of developing representations of inter-group interactions and tensions, including in the more recent emergence of “Central American American” literary production. This article traces the commonalities among these bodies of literary production, including in the “pre-Latino” period, the 19th to mid-20th centuries, before there was even a commonly understood concept of “US Latino literature,” as well as during the Chicano and Nuyorican Movements of the 1960s and 1970s. That is, while literature by different national-origin groups revealed some strong similarities in theme and form, the writing itself reflected the specific concerns, background, and history of the specific national-origin group, rather than giving evidence of intra-Latino group interaction or a developing sense of a shared intra-Latino culture. While literature by Latin American origin groups within the United States (e.g., Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican) has been treated as a single literary corpus-“Latina/o Literature” or “Hispanic Literature”-since the last decades of the 20th century, in practice, the commonalities among such texts were more comparative than panethnic in nature until significantly more recently.
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