2020 International Latino Book Awards Honorable Mention in Best Nonfiction (Multi-Author)
Latinx Writing Los Angeles offers a critical anthology of Los Angeles's most significant English-language and Spanish-language (in translation) nonfiction writing from the city's inception to the present. Contemporary Latinx authors, including three Pulitzer Prize winners and writers such as Harry Gamboa Jr., Guillermo Gomez-Pena, and Ruben Martinez, focus on the ways in which Latinx Los Angeles's nonfiction narratives record the progressive racialization and subalternization of Latinxs in the southwestern United States.
While notions of racial memory, coloniality, biopolitics, internal colonialism, cultural assimilation, Mexican or pan-Latinx cultural nationalism, and transnationalism permeate this anthology, contributors advocate the idea of a contested modernity that refuses to accept mainstream cultural impositions, proposing instead alternative ways of knowing and understanding. Featuring a wide variety of voices as well as a diversity of subgenres, this collection is the first to illuminate divergent, hybrid Latinx histories and cultures. Redefining Los Angeles's literary history and providing a new model for English, Spanish, and Latinx studies, Latinx Writing Los Angeles is an essential contribution to southwestern and borderland studies.
Ignacio Lopez-Calvo is a professor of literature at the University of California, Merced. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including The Affinity of the Eye: Writing Nikkei in Peru and Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction: The Cultural Production of Social Anxiety. Victor Valle is a professor emeritus of ethnic studies at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. A former journalist for the Los Angeles Times, Valle earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 with fellow journalists. He is the author of several books, including Latino Metropolis and City of Industry: Genealogies of Power in Southern California.
Title: Latinx Writing Los Angeles: Nonfiction Dispatches from a Decolonial Rebellion
Author: Victor Valle,Ignacio López-Calvo
ISBN: 9781496214577
Binding:
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Publication Date: 2019-06-01
Number of Pages: 246
Weight: 0.3401 kg
A vital addition to Latinx studies. -Y. Fuentes, Choice
Latinx Writing Los Angeles extends the archive of LA literature in provocative and meaningful ways. -Monika Kaup, American Literary History
This selection of writings from sixteen outstanding contributors presents a refreshing view of the Latinx experience in Los Angeles. -Martin Camps, Hispania
Whoever ventures into a course on Latino identity will be well served reading this volume in which one and all of its entries contain the keys as to why, after so many years, we continue feeling so close yet far from being American. In this book, Los Angeles serves not only as a global city but also a compendium of happiness and misery, due to the reiterated intents to immobilize us. Lopez Calvo and Valle confide in the chronicle. In times of uncertain journalism, it is more reliable. -Revista Iberoamericana
Ignacio Lopez-Calvo and Victor Valle have assembled an intriguing anthology of how and what Mexican Americans and other U.S. Latinx think about Los Angeles. Its other virtue, a provocative pair of essays on the city's literary culture, proposes a critical agenda for reimagining an urban practice of humanities at this time of anti-immigrant hysteria. -David William Foster, Regents' Professor of Spanish and Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University and author of Sao Paulo: Perspectives on the City and Cultural Production
This book will pump new life into future reviews of Los Angeles's literature, strengthen the city's grasp on the peoples and facts of its opaque history, and stimulate teachers to imagine, with their students, a better democracy for all. This finely written book, in both its critical vision and more than a dozen examples of liberating journalism, is a strong step toward an urban humanities that puts Latinx nonfiction writing about LA, for the first time maybe, into the 'We' of 'We the People' of the global city. -David Carrasco, Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of the Study of Latin America at Harvard Divinity School
With inspired juxtapositions, the editors give us a pathbreaking volume that contextualizes and historicizes their unexpected selections to reveal a too often unspoken genealogy of Los Angeles Latinx nonfiction. -Otto Santa Ana, professor in the Department of Chicana/o Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles
