The Politics of US Latino Literature and American Realism

Abstract

This chapter examines the development of Latino literature in the United States during the time when realism emerged as a dominant aesthetic representation. Beginning with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and including the migrations resulting from the Spanish-American War (1898) and the Mexican Revolution (1910), Latinos in the United States began to realistically craft an identity served by a sense of displacement. Latinos living in the United States as a result of migration or exile were concerned with similar issues, including but not limited to their predominant status as working-class, loss of homeland and culture, social justice, and racial/ethnic profiling or discrimination. The literature produced during the latter part of the nineteenth century by some Latinos began to merge the influence of romantic style with a more socially conscious manner to reproduce the lives of ordinary men and women, draw out the specifics of their existence, characterize their dialects, and connect larger issues to the concerns of the common man, among other realist techniques.