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The Latino Diaspora Is a Dystopia: U.S. Chicano and Latinx Experiences of Intersectional Oppression in Fiction - an Introductory Essay and an Original Short Story Collection: Good Burritos Don’t Fall Apart and Other Stories

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The Latino Diaspora is a Dystopia:

U.S. Chicano and Latinx Experiences of Intersectional Oppression in Fiction

An Introductory Essay and an Original Short Story Collection: Good Burritos Don’t Fall Apart and Other Stories

Noah Enrique Toledo

A Thesis in the Field of Literature and Creative Writing

for the Degree of Master of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies

Harvard University

May 2018

Abstract

The introductory essay of this thesis looks at U.S. Latino and Chicano writers such as

Junot Díaz and Sandra Cisneros, their craft, inspiration on my own work, and contribution to

Latinx literary fiction. I argue that all fiction reflecting the authentic experiences of Chicanos and

Latinx in the United States is, by definition, dystopian.

I also take a look at a few non-Latinx authors of other oppressed identities, such as U.S.

Afro-futurist Octavia Butler, and Canadian Margaret Atwood, whose dystopias describe socially and politically disenfranchised characters as well. Like the Latinx protagonists of my own work, their characters experience multi-layered oppression, including misogyny, systemic racism, economic and educational inequities, political terror, sexual abuse/assault, and other traumas.

The only way to guarantee authentic narratives of the lived Latinx/Chicano experience, even fictionalized, is for us to write them ourselves. In that spirit, I have written an original collection of my own socially dystopian short stories, with major and minor Latinx characters of varying intersectional identities. Among them are first-generation college students, immigrants, queer and transgender Latinx, and men from working-class backgrounds. As a whole, these characters paint a diverse portrait of the U.S. Latinx diaspora.

The setting of the collection is the current cultural and political landscape, where economic, educational, and social inequities are symptomatic of American policy, systemic racism, and capitalism. The parents of most of these protagonists grew up in Latin-American countries, resulting in fiction that reflects a very real inter-generational dystopian experience.

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” –Karl Marx

“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias.” –Oscar Wilde

“Wherever you go, there you are.” –Buddhist truism, attributed to Confucius, used in Alcoholics

Anonymous, title of book by Jon Kabat-Zinn

“We do this because the world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning.”

–Sandra Cisneros

Para mis padres.

Grampa Henry, Ashly, Vero, Susan, thank you for inspiring me. Rest in power and peace.

Acknowledgements

Eric: you are my precious baby brother, but spiritually, you’re my big brother. I look up to you. When we go on our sibling movie dates, play games at Dave and Busters, or just watch

TV together when I’m home, you inspire me. Do you know what it means to inspire someone?

Your joy in the little things reminds me to “Enjoy life,” as you say. When you laugh, it makes my heart sing. You remember everyone’s names and birthdays, and make everyone who knows you feel special. You make me want to follow your example. That’s what it means to inspire someone. You are a special boy, and you have such a good brain, like Mom says. I know a lot of smart people, but you are wiser, because you are smart at love. I know what unconditional love is because I can be my whole self with you and not be afraid that you’re ever going to stop loving me. I am so grateful for you, little buddy. You are my best friend and I love you.

To my family and friends who have supported me in both my academic and gender journey: mil gracias for the support, the care packages, books, hugs, company, and all of the love. The “Family and Friends” tattoo on my chest is for you.

Los primos: Sarah Lazarus, A.B. and David Maki, Caleb Turner, Devin Vindas, Zoey

Flores, Harrison and Gia Lazarus, the Gorham cousins, especially Alan, Laura, Marta, Raul and baby Sebastian, Irma and your precious girls; and Abel Macias. Thank you.

Love to: Brandon Brinson, Rita Tilson Vasak, Maggie McCarty, Toya Miller, Angelyne

Sewell, A.J. and Chasity Tarin, Korina Marcano, Elizabeth Eakin, Liz Sweigart, Jessica Lacey,

Liz Harmon, Jessica Lopez, Kateri Collins, Chase Parker, Owen Campbell, Greta Dedmon,

Shelby Lou, Heather Bechtold, Chastity Suquett, Erin Patterson, Erica Charis, Dee Dee

Edmonson, Julie Barnes, Kai Coggin, Lesley Bannatyne, Jennifer Cox, Godha Bapuji, Michelle

Gherardi, Stephanie Martins, Georgi Gold, Teri Nolan-Range, and all the “Harvard Chix.”

Big love to: Brandon Hall, Mickey Luna, Tracy Moon, Troy Goodrich, Selina

Maldonado, Angela McCutcheon, Rachel Hansbro, Madison Whitaker, Kera Washington, and all my other former bandmates and musical partners. Laura Petracca, Kiyomi McCloskey of Hunter

Valentine, Phanie Diaz of FEA/Girl in a Coma, Miriam K, Cassandra Quirk, and the babes of

Giant Kitty, and, Lucas Silveira—thank you for your friendship and inspiration.

Special thanks to the folks at Guitar Center in Houston and Boston, my friends at Berklee

College of Music, Merissa Magdael-Lauron, Alicia Ortiz, and the entire congregation of Unity in the City for the inspiration for GBDFA. Lenny Stallworth, rest in ultimate peace.

Extra special thanks to: Kerry Garvin, a truly kindred spirit. I love you.

Jerry Weinstein, Lee Ruelas, and Paul Phillips, thank you for being role models of the kind of man I want to be.

The entire Harvard Latinx community: you have been my rock. Special thanks to Erika

Carlsen, Cassandra Fradera, Norma Torres Mendoza, Edward Rocha, and too many more to name; to the Harvard Latinx Student Association, and the entire staff at the Harvard Kennedy

School Journal of Hispanic Policy, gracias por su Amistad y su inspiración, mi gente. Adelante!

My teachers, professors, and mentors: Talaya Delaney, Lindsay Mitchell, Michael Patrick

McDonald, Robert Kiely, and Francis Abiola Irele for enriching my Harvard experience. Jose

Aranda and Krista Comer at Rice University, for your mentorship, and encouraging my pursuit of graduate studies. Delonn McCall and Carol Ann Shipp for inspiring me to major in English.

Coach Anne Marie Franz, for teaching me to never ASSUME. Rafael Castañet, one day, we’ll

take Manhattan, then we’ll take Berlin. Ms. Garcia, for inspiring me to become an educator, without knowing it. Ms. Upshaw, thank you for gifting me A Wrinkle in Time in 5th grade. That book changed my life.

All of my former coworkers at YES Prep Southwest, and mostly, my “babies”—I still believe I learned more from you than you learned from me. I am so damn proud of all of you.

My therapists, past and present, especially Laura Cotton, and Meaghan Ross.

To all my roommates, past and present, thanks for not judging my strange hours and living habits as I finished this work. Quinn and Willow, thanks for the character inspirations.

The folks in the service industry who allowed me to take up space and write for hours:

Aubrey, Anne Marie, and the staff at Brownstone; Mondo, Morgan, Tom, Fabio, and staff at John

Harvard’s Brewery; Tricia and the staff at Costello’s; Heri and April, and staff at Tasty Burger

Harvard Square; Enid, and all staff at Trident Booksellers; the late night staff at El Jefe’s

Taquería; the staff at Grafton Street, Charlie’s Kitchen, and Noir. Thank you to Helen and the rest of the overnight janitorial staff working at Lamont Library. You are underappreciated.

To the city of Houston, TX: you are my forever home, wherever I go. Houston Strong, por siempre. Huge thank you to Maria, and the entire staff at Agora for providing me a writing home when I’m in town. Shout out to all my people in Montrose, The Heights, East End,

Magnolia Park, Garden Oaks, Oak Forest, and Independence Heights.

To every queer and trans person, especially QTPOC, who will read this collection: I am blessed to be part of this family. Our existence is resistance.

Al, Michael, John, and the rest of the homeless of Harvard Square: I see you. I love you.

Table of Contents

Dedication ...... iv

Acknowledgments ……………………………….………………………………………………. v

I. The Latino Diaspora is a Dystopia: U.S. Chicano and Latinx Experiences of

Intersectional Oppression in Fiction ………..………………………………..……… 1

Introduction: Another Brick in the Wall …………………………………………….. 1

Defining the Latinx Dystopia: The Future Was Yesterday …………………………. 2

A New Genre: Who Would Have Thought It? …………...…………………………. 3

From Pessimism to Activism: The Work of Junot Díaz……………………………... 6

Las Chingonas: Cisneros, de la Peña, and Viramontes …………………………….. 15

Make America Change Again: Butler’s Afro-Futurism …………………………… 23

Apocalypse, Now? …………………………………………………………………. 27

Works Cited ….…………………………………………………………………….. 29

Appendix …………………………………………………………………………… 31

II. Original Short Story Collection, Good Burritos Don’t Fall Apart and Other Stories

………………………………………………………………………………………. 34

Good Burritos Don’t Fall Apart …………………………………………………… 35

How To Solve a Rubik’s Cube ……………………………………………………... 61

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Transition ……………………. 109

Working With My Hands ………………………………………………………….. 129

Juan the Baptist …………………………………………………………………… 182

El Comediante …………………………………………………………………….. 215

The Latino Diaspora is a Dystopia: U.S. Chicano and Latinx Experiences of Intersectional

Oppression in Fiction

Introduction: Another Brick in the Wall

We live in a time in American history when DACA and DREAM ACT recipients, majority Latino, who work and go to school in the United States are at risk of deportation. Black men are the most statistically likely demographic to be incarcerated. Many women of color lack access to affordable healthcare. The 2016 election created a televised spectacle around one candidate’s promise of erecting a wall along the U.S./Mexico border. A fiery campaign reeking of xenophobia, and politicized fear reminiscent of the Cold War era, was bought into by enough

American citizens (including the majority of white women, despite brutally sexist comments that need not be repeated here) to get the “build the wall” candidate an Electoral College win. The presidential administration has, from campaign trail, to the present, continued to fill our daily news cycle with crass and racist rhetoric, calling Mexicans “rapists” and “drug dealers,” calling majority-Black countries—like the recently earthquake-ravaged Haiti—expletives never before publicly uttered by a commander-in-chief. Instances of police brutality against Black men spawned the Black Lives Matter movement. The mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico begged for government assistance after the territory was ravaged by Hurricane Maria, and the public responded with donations, while the President responded by throwing paper towels during a brief visit that was little more than a photo op. All of these events have created a new generation of politically active people of color concerned with racial and social justice. Many young people of color and women have been motivated to run for political office all over the country.

So, what does all of this have to do with literature?

Despite the political temperature, Latinos have slowly started to see ourselves more represented in the artistic output of American culture, whether in music, art, or film. At the time of this writing, the Disney animated feature Coco won the Academy Award for best animated feature. Still, there is much to be done. Herb Scannel, the CEO of mitú, was a panelist at the

2018 Harvard Kennedy School America Adelante conference, and shared a not-so-surprising fact: there have only been a handful of major television series featuring Latinos as protagonists that have had a meaningful run (more than a single season or two) since the beginning of the medium. Six, to be exact.

Where the most consistent American cultural contributions by Latinos lie is in books. For

Mexican-Americans in particular, our written word has been a recognized literary genre for almost a century and a half, but our lived experiences are just now becoming university departments and college majors.

Increased creative output and scholarship in the humanities and social sciences by U.S.

Latinos was born out of cultural necessity. Whether we are natural born citizens, immigrants, children of immigrants, documented, or not, we collectively grieve, and fight against, our shared dystopian nightmare through the arts. Literature is a living outlet for this grief. Like any other, its very production is often an act of protest and resistance.

Defining the Latinx Dystopia: The Future Was Yesterday

The Boston Review recently published an anthology of short stories and essays written by contributors from all over the world, aptly entitled Global Dystopias. In his introduction, editor Junot Díaz writes:

“Whether we’re talking about our cannibal economics or the rising tide of

xenophobia or the perennial threat of nuclear annihilation, it seems that the future

has already arrived. And that future is dystopian…it is precisely in dark times that

the dystopian—as genre, as a narrative strategy—is most useful.” (Díaz, 5-6)

Before going into a discussion on the craft of writing Latinx dystopias, it is important to consider definitions first. If the definition of dystopia as a bad place—socially, politically, or otherwise—is to hold, then Latinos in the United States have been writing dystopias since time immemorial. What, then, is the literary and social purpose of looking at the literature of

American Latinos in this way?

As Díaz continues, “Tom Moylan has identified…critical dystopias…Their highest function is to “map, warn, and hope”” (6).

We have been mapping and warning since we first started speaking and writing in the

English language. Critical dystopias are the literary products of Latinx hope and resilience.

A New Genre: Who Would Have Thought It?

The first published Mexican-American novel, titled Who Would Have Thought It? appeared in 1872. It was originally published anonymously for fear that the identity of its author, a Chicana woman, would impede an unbiased critical reception.

María Ámparo Ruiz de Burton was a novelist from Baja California who would also go on to write The Squatter and the Don (1885) and Don Quixote de la Mancha: A Comedy in Five

Acts, Taken from Cervantes’ Novel of That Name (1876).

With the economic and educational privileges afforded her by being born into an elite

Mexican military family, and then marrying into an American military family, Ruiz de Burton used her time and opportunity to write a biting political satire about the Civil War. She wrote convincingly about Americans during that era, and their attitudes toward Mexicans and other people of color, using first-hand knowledge. Not only did she live through the period, her husband was of high military rank, and her social circle and personal friendships included the wives of Presidents and Senators.

Ruiz de Burton constructed a socially critical novel-length narrative by weaving it around an easily-digestible common tale. The subplot of the novel is a love story between the main character, Lola, and her beloved, Julian. Lola is a Mexican child, rescued from ill-intentioned natives by a white New England doctor who becomes her guardian. Julian is his son, an officer for the Union army. Lola, unbeknownst to her, has a large inheritance being saved for her. Since only her guardian knows about it until later in the novel, Ruiz de Burton is able to effectively paint a portrait of a family concerned not just with race, but with class differences. This is a theme very often explored in Latino fiction, as issues of race and class are inextricable. My own work is no exception, as will be seen in the entirety of my collection to follow.

Ruiz de Burton is master of the show-don’t-tell school of thought, using dialogue to tell the social story, and prose to narrate historical events. Throughout the novel, she effectively showcases the hypocrisy of Anglo-Americans at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, using both major and minor character dialogue, often simply, and subtly, in order to critique the racism, contradictions, and problematic political thought of those on both sides of the Civil War.

Julian, speaking directly to President Lincoln regarding a false accusation of treason against him, states, “I wish to have my freedom. If the negroes have it, why shouldn’t I?” (Ruiz

4 de Burton, 243). While he loves Mexican Lola, it is clear how he feels about Black men. Other insidious displays of colorism and white supremacy are shown by the way most of Julian’s family members perceive dark-skinned indigenous people. They call Lola “pretty” (8), not because she is Mexican, but despite it. Unlike most indigenous Mexicans described in the novel,

Lola has fair skin.

While the narrative is satirical, and often sardonically comical, its characters are authentic to its period in American history. Through Ruiz De Burton, racism, as Mexicans still experience it, and colorism, as Latinos both experience it, and are guilty of perpetuating it, made its way into published American fiction by a voice most apt to tell it.

While Ruiz de Burton was certainly not the first U.S. Latina to ever write fiction, Who

Would Have Thought It? is important to recognize as the first novel published in English by a

Mexican-American in the United States, and by a woman, at that. Her work is enjoying a resurgence in popularity with Latino and Mexican-American Studies scholars because of its place in the timeline of our literary history. It marked the beginning of a new American literary genre: Mexican-American, or, Chicano fiction.

After Ruiz de Burton, other work by English-speaking Latinx authors began to be included on the bookshelves of American libraries, and the Dewey Decimal system eventually saw the inclusion of several new subcategories beyond Mexican-American and Chicano

Literature, i.e. Latin American Literature, Caribbean Literature, Native American Literature,

Post-Colonial Literature, Latino Studies, Afro-Latino Studies, Ethnic Studies, and many others.

Because of Post-Colonial identity and cultural politics behind literary categories, the existence of the works themselves were a socio-political gain in the New World, the same place that forced first Spanish, then English, upon most natives of the northern Americas. Once Latino

5 literature in English existed, it was crucial that these narratives eventually make their way into the American canon of literature. It is arguable that were it not for racism, these works would’ve been available to the general public as soon as the printing press made books accessible.

From Pessimism to Activism: The Work of Junot Díaz

Arguably, the most famous contemporary Latino writer in the English language at the moment is the Dominican-American Junot Díaz. His first collection, Drown, was the first work of literary short stories by a U.S. Latino that I was personally introduced to as a college student, on the precipice of embracing my own identity. Reading short stories that spoke frankly about the experience of Latinidad in the United States not only inspired my subsequent fiction and scholarship, but began the process of my personal healing from racial and intersectional oppression. This is the difference between writing that is purely for entertainment, and literature that awakens activism.

With his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and his second short story collection, This Is How You Lose Her, Díaz firmly secured his place in the canon of Post-Colonial Latino fiction. The work itself, while thematically pessimistic, is a beacon of hope to Latinx readers and writers because of the greater student activist movement that Díaz’ work has become associated with.

Díaz’s recurring character, Yunior, and his family and friends, live in individual and collective American dystopias. While dubbed fiction, it is clear upon learning Díaz’s background that one could take a biographical-lens approach when critiquing his work, which depicts the

American Dream as a delusion, passed on through the generations.

The creative output from Díaz—who immigrated to the United States from the

Dominican Republic as a child after his family endured the economic effects of the reign of

Trujillo—is inspired by his own bi-hemispheric trans-migratory experiences, a biography shared by his characters in fictional narratives that mark a very real shift in the social consciousness of the modern U.S. Latinx writer and reader.

In an anthology of literary criticism on his work, Junot Díaz and the Decolonial

Imagination, the editors and scholars accomplish the feat of taking Díaz’s entire canon of fiction, and analyzing major themes and subtext in his literature, helping the reader look at the work through various lenses, side-by-side with the biographical. The anthology helps place Díaz’s

Dominican-American fiction in its rightful spot as part of the larger U.S. Latino literary movement. In her chapter, “Against the ‘Discursive Latino’”, Arlene Dávila writes:

[T]wo elements that I consider central to his interventions into contemporary

Latino/a cultural politics and to what he informally refers to as “our Latino/a

project” or “movimiento”…provid[e] some additional texture to appreciate his

literary work. First is his critical and assertive engagement with Latinidad and

how this position impacts his work as well as his political involvements and

activism…Second is Díaz’s consistent critique of capitalism, which is best

appreciated as a critique of the simultaneity of global racism and capitalism…that

touches on all aspects of contemporary society, as well as Latinos’ position in

it…these two strands are informed by Díaz’s keen ethnographic eye, as both a

social observer and active participant in contemporary Latino/a cultural politics,

and…come together in what I describe as Díaz’s praxis-oriented and

antidiscursive Latino/a political project. (Dávila, 35)

Díaz dives right into his fiction’s political project from the first pages of his debut collection, establishing an authoritative voice and authenticity through dialogue. He accomplishes this throughout his work by interspersing Dominican-flavored “Spanglish” in both dialogue and prose, coupled with urban American street slang. He also includes Latino-relatable subtext about race and diaspora in Yunior’s narration, coupled with the inclusion of inherited ideas about sex and masculinity. These themes are surely derived1 from his own experienced male Latinidad in both the D.R., and his upbringing in Parlin, New Jersey.

Take, for example, this loaded paragraph from “How To Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl,

Whitegirl, or Halfie” from Drown:

You have choices. If the girl’s from around the way, take her to El Cibao

for dinner. Order everything in your busted-up Spanish. Let her correct you if

she’s Latina and amaze her if she’s black. If she’s not from around the way,

Wendy’s will do. As you walk to the restaurant talk about school. A local girl

won’t need stories about the neighborhood but the other ones might. Supply the

story about the loco who’d been storing canisters of tear gas in his basement for

years, how one day the canisters cracked and the whole neighborhood got a dose

of the military-strength stuff. Don’t tell her that your moms knew right away what

it was, that she recognized its smell from the year the United States invaded your

island. (Díaz, 145-6)

In “The Cheater’s Guide to Love” from his second short story collection, This is How

You Lose Her, Díaz uses the second-person point of view to bring the reader directly into the narrative. By using the consistent second-person “you,” Díaz’ narration casts the reader into the

1 See last paragraphs of this section, p. 14 8 guilty role of an older, but perhaps, not-so-wiser Yunior, who has been caught cheating, and lost his fiancée.

The reader becomes that “you,” accused of the transgressions of the character, who is the very embodiment of toxic masculinity in Latino culture. This unconventional use of point of view works, and works well. We become the character who needs to be redeemed.

Yunior, in this particular story, is still haunted by the machismo that he inherited from his own father, as seen previously in the stories from Drown that began this character’s personal development. He just can’t seem to let go of this way of viewing and navigating his world, despite all of the college education and self-awareness he gains in the short stories that continue the Yunior saga.

At the conclusion of This is How You Lose Her, it is debatable whether the Yunior character, at this point, is a sex addict, a serial cheater, or just a product of his imbedded machismo toxicity. Whether he ever recovers from this, or even improves slightly, is also not yet answered. In an interview from 2012, Díaz admits this of his character: “Yunior’s desire for communion with self and with other is finally undermined by his inability, his unwillingness, to see the women in his life as fully human” (Moya). This short story collection, as a whole, is

Díaz’s ultimate misogynist anti-love story.

This unconventional second-person storytelling style of “The Cheater’s Guide to Love” directly influenced my own short story, “How To Solve a Rubik’s Cube.” Here, I explore a toxic queer relationship that nearly destroys the narrator’s already-fragile psyche. Initially written in the first person, I found subsequent drafts of the story written in the second-person to be the most effective storytelling method for my intended purpose. This story is my most semi-

9 autobiographical to date. In workshops, I found the use of the second-person to make most readers find the protagonist relatable, no matter their own gender, or sexual orientation. The second POV is a magical use of literary craft when it is done just right, as it is able to cast the reader as the direct mirror reflection of the protagonist.

In my own short story, “How To Solve A Rubik’s Cube,” the main character is already under pressure as a first-generation Latinx college graduate, trying to show her parents the struggle was worth it. She is trying to make ends meet with a teacher’s salary, and is suddenly also assigned the role of provider for both her partner, who is toxic, and her partner’s child:

Your favorite purple Fender Stratocaster is still in the pawn shop. The first

time she went to jail, she needed bail. She got so blackout drunk, you lost her at a

dance club, and she got picked up by a cop after knocking on residential doors,

asking for you. And you haven’t seen your mother in months because your

girlfriend needs you at home. Your mom lives fifteen minutes away. Los

resentimientos matan el amor, Mom said to you once. Resentments kill love.

“What the fuck are you stressed out about,” your girlfriend asks with a

scowl, and just the right level of contempt that it won’t be a fight this time. About

a 4.7 out of 10. It’s a good day. (Toledo)

The narrator here is exhibiting obvious self-criticism, while also subtly reaching out for help.

The protagonist is narrating events that are obviously not her fault, but the second-person POV draws in the reader’s empathy, and an understanding of the character’s trauma.

Díaz’s short stories feel authentic in large part because a reader could easily feel them as an obvious fictionalization of his own traumas, beginning with his very real immigrant history.

His go-to character, Yunior, usually narrates these stories in the first-person, but in the

10 occasional second-person, the narration creates a total immersion reading experience for loyal readers. In either POV, Yunior brings readers into a certain time, and emotional place. As reflected in my fiction excerpt above, which is just one example, it is not a great leap to read not just Díaz, but many U.S. Latinx authors, through a biographical and historical lens. As we also saw with Ruiz de Burton, historical truths and lived experiences often make their way into our fictional dystopias.

Díaz accomplished this most impressively in his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of

Oscar Wao. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, it is an interestingly-woven novel of different perspectives, with several characters taking turns narrating the story. These characters share varying levels of belief in the “fukú” (Diaz), a supposed curse that migrated with the family, across time, and across geography, showing itself in their inter-generational dystopian fears.

In the following passage, La Inca, the old, wise matron of the novel, worries about the next generation, whether the girl she cared for would, or could, be safe in the United States:

His otherworldly advice was too terrible to consider. Exile to the North! To

Nueva York, a city so foreign she herself had never had the ovaries to visit. The

girl would be lost to her, and La Inca would have failed her great cause: to heal

the wounds of The Fall, to bring House Cabral back from the dead. And who

knows what might happen to the girl among the yanquis? In her mind the U.S.

was nothing more and nothing less than a país overrun by gangsters, putas, and

no-accounts. Its cities swarmed with machines and industry, as thick with

sinvergüencería as Santo Domingo was with heat, a cuco shod in iron, exhaling

fumes, with the glittering promise of coin deep in the cold lightless shaft of its

eyes. (Díaz, 158)

This scene, and the novel as a whole, describes the collective and inherited trauma of political violence that Latinx people often experience. Here, and in most of his fiction, Díaz expounds on the suppression and censorship of the voices of the colonized and/or dominated, colorism, (within and outside of, Latino community) and the overall feeling of “Otherness” experienced by those who are not in a position of power in the United States, i.e. white people.

The way that this is done, both thematically and stylistically, is what makes Díaz’ work stand out in craft:

You don’t understand, hija. You have to leave the country. They’ll kill

you if you don’t.

Beli laughed.

Oh, Beli; not so rashly, not so rashly: What did you know about states or

diasporas? What did you know about Nueba Yol or unheated “old law” tenements

or children whose self-hate short-circuited their minds? What did you know,

madame, about immigration? Don’t laugh, mi negrita, for your world is about to

be changed. Utterly. (160)

In scenes like this, Díaz gives important historical and cultural detail using a form of narration that is common in post-colonial Latinx narratives: it gives a retelling of an older character’s perspective, presenting the internal dialogue of one or more characters. The narration in this novel from several of the characters is almost fearful in tone, foreboding what is to come out of the family’s necessary migration to the New World.

The previous scene ends:

La Inca told you to leave the country and you laughed.

End of story. (160)

Because of rampant economic inequality in Latin America, and how it follows the immigrant, or descendant of slavery or colonization, to the New World, it should not be surprising that many diasporic Latinx authors, like Díaz, write with a Marxist view of capitalism.

Modern U.S. Latinx dystopian work is critical of the subsequent social, cultural, and political aftermath of the colonialism and imperialism of both ancestral homelands, as well as the

American societies used as their setting.

The economic lens makes for interesting text-to-text connections between the dystopian

U.S. Latinx narrative, and the classic literature from our economically oppressed European working-class counterparts, famously fictionalized by Orwell and Huxley.

If, for fun, we were to compare the denouement of 1984 with that of Oscar Wao (spoiler alert, like Orwell’s Winston, things don’t go very well for Díaz’s Oscar at the end, either), we would see mirror-reflections in the novels’ general tone.

Political trauma, even inherited from previous generations, often sneaks its way into the conclusions of Latinx dystopian work, as if we carry our ancestors’ historical memory of totalitarian regimes in our genes. (There are interesting psychological and sociological theoretical writings out there on this very concept.) My own short story, “Juan the Baptist,” while thematically different than the above-mentioned novels, nonetheless carries a similar tone in its denouement. The main character is dealing with personal strife stemming from religious and social oppression, has to decide what to do with it, before something outside of him makes the decision for him.

Also worthy of discussion is a published excerpt from Díaz’s apocalyptic novel-in- progress, written after the real-life horror of the earthquake in Haiti in 2010. His nonfiction essay on the earthquake appeared in The Boston Review in 2011, aptly titled, “Apocalypse”. This first

13 sneak-peek of his upcoming novel, a chapter titled “Monstro,” then appeared a year later in a special sci-fi issue of The New Yorker.

“Monstro” deviates from the realism of his past fiction in that this narrative is set in the near-future, and incorporates the use of the zombie trope. This is a symbolic representation of the

(un)deadly effect of the power structures in an unsustainable capitalistic economy based, by its very nature, on inequality. In “Monstro”, Díaz builds this futuristic world atop of his native

Dominican Republic:

Fact is I wouldn’t have come to the Island that summer if I’d been able to

nab a job or an internship, but the droughts that year and the General Economic

Collapse meant that nobody was nabbing shit. Even the Sovereign kids were

ending up home with their parents. So with the house being rented out from under

me and nowhere else to go, not even a girlfriend to mooch off, I figured, Fuck it:

might as well spend the hots on the Island. Take in some of that ole-time climate

change. Get to know the Patria again. (Díaz, 108)

Díaz was obviously inspired by science fiction and speculative nightmares from European and non-Latinx American authors, but brings this genre home to Latinx readers by placing the stakes of this dystopian narrative in the heart of the Caribbean.

The narrator goes home to the D.R., where a mysterious disease has developed in their neighboring Haiti—the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere—which has spilled into his motherland. This causes the upper-class Dominican characters, prone to colorism and racism toward their Haitian neighbors, to care. The novel-in-progress leaves us with characters about to cross the border into Haiti, to save their lives, and into unknown new dangers which, a reader can

14 assume by obvious context clues, have been caused over time by crony capitalism, greed, and lust for political power.

Díaz’s unnamed narrator is an Ivy-league student in a future United States, on vacation visiting the motherland, in what reads like history repeating itself economically, and environmental concerns too late to do much about. The futuristic component gives us a narrative that is not only apocalyptic, but a warning to readers of what the forces of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalist inequality can bring, especially when racism, human poverty, and environmental/natural disasters cross paths. In the context of current events, it reads like less of a warning, and more of a reminder, and call to action.

At the time of this writing, Díaz has published a new essay in The New Yorker, titled

“The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma” that is currently available online, and will be published in the April 16th print issue. Surely, this will better inform scholarship on Díaz’ work in the future, as it is his first time writing on his own childhood abuse and trauma, and how it informed his work. “Yes, it happened to me. I was raped when I was eight years old. By a grownup that I truly trusted” he writes (Díaz).

This, essay on his very personal history of trauma, is written in the second person.

Las Chingonas: Cisneros, de la Peña, and Viramontes

My own fictional work synthesizes the genres of Latinx, classic dystopian, and political fiction, blends them in a molcajete, and is best served with a variety of lenses, including race, class, queer theory, historical, and the trauma-sensitive lens. Further, I cannot effectively draw inspiration from dystopian literature of the oppressed without also reading and writing with a feminist/gender studies approach. As a Chicano writer, I naturally draw inspiration from

15 contemporary fiction from all U.S. Latinx and Mexican-American writers. However, if I am to truly read intersectionally, I must especially look at the women, specifically, las Chicanas.

The strongest Chicana authors touch on the general problems of the Mexican diaspora in the United States. They also focus on themes arising from the added political and social oppression, even within Latinx culture, that arises from their womanhood.

Easily the most popular writer in the Chicana subgenre is poet and novelist Sandra

Cisneros, author of the children’s classic novel of vignettes, The House on Mango Street (1984).

Published almost 35 years ago, it is still a quintessential work of modern Mexican-American literature. Accessible to elementary and middle school students, it is often the first book in

Spanglish that American students will read, and often the first work of Chicano fiction that many

Mexican-American children will see themselves in. From Generation X, to Xennials, to

Millenials, most living Chicanos in the United States see their childhoods described authentically in Cisnero’s powerful young adult book.

Mango Street is often used as a text in introductory Mexican-American and Ethnic

Studies courses. In 2010, under the watch of Arizona’s then-governor, HB2281 was passed, banning Ethnic Studies from public schools in Arizona’s Tucson Unified School District. This resulted in Mango Street and other texts being pulled from classrooms and school libraries. It seems supercilious that a conservative governor would ban the reading of this young adult book throughout the state, but this sort of academic racism is the current reality for many Latinx students of all levels of education throughout the United States.

Luckily, this particular fight has a happy ending: thanks to the work of Chicano and

Latino activists, like writer Tony Diaz and the Librotraficante movement, many children received free copies of House on Mango Street and other “banned” books on the public sidewalk

16 outside their schools, from donors unwilling to see students denied this piece of our cultural history. After a seven-year legal battle, the bill was blocked as unconstitutional by a U.S. judge.

Today, MAS (Mexican-American Studies) is becoming an area study department with several course offerings in community colleges and universities in states like Texas and

California. Like Díaz, Cisneros’ books have become flags to wave in an activist movement for more Latinx literary representation in public schools and state universities across the country.

Cisneros’ writing has directly influenced my own through its thematic elements and its authentic voice, which often includes the use of storytelling-style poetic prose, reminiscent of the oral histories often passed down by the women in Mexican-American families. In Mango Street in particular, the authenticity comes from the dreamy first-person prose, from a Latina child’s first-person perspective. A notable passage in Mango Street is the narrator’s description of her name, and her hurt at the anglicized way kids at school pronounce it:

At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin

and hurt the roof of your mouth. But in Spanish my name is made out of a softer

something, like silver, not quite as thick as sister’s name—Magdalena—which is

uglier than mine. Magdalena who at least can come home and become Nenny. But

I am always Esperanza. (Cisneros, 11)

Esperanza takes us on a journey around her neighborhood, through her puberty, and across her maturing thought process. In the end, she vows to leave Mango Street, and the short novel ends on a bittersweet note. The reader is not told if the character—an aspiring writer—was able to make her dream come true and have a place of her own to write. We do know, however, that the author, Sandra, did.

I often joke with friends and colleagues, about myself, that you can take the boy out of the barrio, but you can’t take the barrio out of the boy. This applies to Chicanos of all genders who grew up in American barrios, and were able to leave them. We attempt upward mobility, and our success rate is subject for an entirely different thesis. However, whether we are trying to acquire better-paying jobs than our parents, or enter academia, the struggle is real.

While many of us are able to physically escape our childhood dystopias, geographically, we soon learn that that’s not how this works. As members of a family, and/or the greater Latinx community, the place where we “grew up,” whether literally, or ancestrally, never leaves us. Our people are still experiencing systemic racism. As part of the Latinx diaspora, wherever we go, there we are. Wherever intersectional issues and inequalities still exist is where our literature helps us keep hope to fight the good fight.

A short list of literary chingonas who inspire that fight would be incomplete without the inclusion of Helena María Viramontes, best known for The Moths and Other Stories (1985). This short story collection is deserving of Latinx literary shelf space next to the stories of Gabriel

Garcia-Marquez, as Viramontes is the godmother of Chicana magical realism.

The Moths and Other Stories specifically demonstrates the influence of religion, namely,

Catholicism, and the patriarchal ideas of machismo on Mexican immigrant women and their offspring. Her female characters are prime examples of the lived intersectional oppression that

Chicanas experience.

In the introduction to the collection, scholar Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano puts this succinctly: “These women are conscious that something is wrong with their lives, and that what is wrong is linked to the rigid gender roles imposed on them by their men and their culture, often with the aid of the Church” (Yarbo-Bejarano, 10). Viramontes focuses on the intersection of

18 rigid gender norms within Latino culture, as they intersect with the class struggle Latina women also face in this country. As Yarbo-Bejarano’s literary critique assesses:

Viramontes is concerned primarily with the social and cultural values which

shape women’s lives and against which they struggle with varying degrees of

success. Most of the stories develop a conflict between a female character and the

man who represents the maximum authority in her life, either father or husband.

(11)

In the title story, “The Moths”, the unnamed narrator experiences this sort of upbringing to the extreme. Viramontes’ prose employs sharp sentences, and a rhythmic use of present-tense verbs. The harsh words from her narrator’s father, regarding his religious expectations, rattle up off of the page as if the words were on the table itself:

That was one of Apá’s biggest complaints. He would pound his hands on

the table, rocking the sugar dish or spilling a cup of coffee and scream that if I

didn’t go to Mass every Sunday to save my goddamn sinning soul, then I had no

reason to go out of the house, period. Punto final. He would grab my arm and dig

his nails into me to make sure I understood the importance of catechism. Did he

make himself clear? (Viramontes, 29)

In contrast to the work of Díaz, where the narrator is often the perpetrator of misogynistic actions, Viramontes writes from the point of view of those on the receiving end of them, from within their own culture, religion, and families. Her women live in metaphorical cages inside of cages, as dystopian birds with few songs left.

In “The Moths,” Viramontes’ masterful use of magical realism is a nod to Latino religious traditions: a synthesis of the Roman Catholicism of the colonizer, the Santería loosely

19 derived from indigenous practices, and the made-up superstitions (the use of Vicks Vaporub as a healing ointment for everything), plus inter-generational folklore (the “wives’ tales of Mexican women). Viramontes uses this signature magical realism, along with rich descriptions, using adjectives economically, and poetic imagery, in order to bring to life the very real concerns that bond many Latina women. One of these is the fear of losing each other, and having one less person who understands what it’s like to be under patriarchy’s thumb. In the final scene from this story, the narrator takes her dead Abuelita into the bathtub with her to perform an emotional cleansing of sorts. Viramontes’ word choice powerfully captures this Latina spirithood:

I stepped into the bathtub one leg first, then the other. I bent my knees

slowly to descend into the water slowly so I wouldn’t scald her skin. There, there,

Abuelita, I said, cradling her, smoothing her as we descended, I heard you. Her

hair fell back and spread across the water like eagles’ wings. The water in the tub

overflowed and poured onto the tile of the floor. Then the moths came. Small gray

ones that came from her soul and out through her mouth fluttering to light,

circling the single dull light bulb of the bathroom. Dying is lonely and I wanted to

go to where the moths were, stay with her and plant chayotes whose vines would

crawl up her fingers and into the clouds; I wanted to rest my head on her chest

with her stroking my hair, telling me about the moths that lay within the soul and

slowly eat the spirit up; I wanted to return to the waters of the womb with her so

that we would never be alone again. I wanted. I wanted my Amá. I removed a few

strands of hair from Abuelita’s face and held her small light head within the

hollow of my neck. The bathroom was filled with moths, and for the first time in a

long time I cried, rocking us, crying for her, for me, for Amá, the sobs emerging

from the depths of anguish, the misery of feeling half-born, sobbing until finally

the sobs rippled into circles and circles of sadness and relief. There, there, I said

to Abuelita, rocking us gently, there, there. (Viramontes, 32)

Viramontes’ stories of the inherited cultural struggle of Mexican-American women directly influenced the work of other Chicanas writing intersectional fiction. Among them is

Terri de la Peña, author of the culturally underrated novel Margins (1992). In her dedication, de la Peña expressed gratitude to some of the greats of Chicana fiction, including Viramontes.

Like Viramontes, Terri de la Peña successfully intertwines Chicano identity, womanhood, and the trauma of loss into a beautiful literary braid, tied at the end with a ribbon of

Mexican colors. Margins, which is unfortunately out-of-print, is the first Chicana lesbian coming-out novel, published by Seal Press in 1992. The main character, Veronica, takes on the challenge of finally addressing and proudly accepting all of her intersectional identities with her family, and a new lover.

At the novel’s onset, protagonist Veronica, a graduate student, is recovering from a car accident that took her long-term partner, and severely injured her leg. She is undergoing physical therapy and trying to reintegrate back into life as she once knew it. Veronica is juggling her physical recovery, family matters, and academic pursuits, all while attempting to push aside discussion of her politicized identity, including her secret queerness. She hides her physical and emotional trauma from others, in order to minimize her overall turmoil. Her reactions show obvious survival tactics to the reader, while her family struggles to catch up to understand her.

Throughout the novel, characters develop, stakes are set, and internal conflicts arise through dialogue. This results in an engrossing, and quick read:

“You’ve changed so much since—”

“Phil says the same thing.” Shrugging, she unsuccessfully tried to smile. “I

can’t help it. Once I’m back in school, I think I’ll get back on track.”

“Pero, are you ready for that?”

“Sure. Anyway, even if Zamora’s rooting for me, the English Department

won’t hold my slot open forever—Chicana grad student or not.”

Sara sniffed at that ethnic connotation. “Ay, that word ‘Chicana.’ Why do

you like to use it, Roni? Why can’t you just say ‘Mexican-American’?”

Veronica grinned, imagining her mother’s reaction to the word ‘dyke.’

“No political discussions now, okay? Frank’s the one who likes to argue over that.

Want some iced tea?” (de la Peña, 66)

Terri de la Peña’s novel expounds on the dynamics in relationships between Chicana lesbians and their families and colleagues. Cherríe L. Moraga, queer Chicana activist and scholar, takes things further in her work. She writes specifically on her own coming out, and how it impacted her relationship with her mother in the Chicana classic of poetry and prose, Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca pasó por sus labios:

When I finally lifted the lid to my lesbianism, a profound connection with my

mother reawakened in me. It wasn’t until I acknowledged and confronted my own

lesbianism in the flesh that my heartfelt identification with and empathy for my

mother’s oppression—due to being poor, uneducated, and Chicana—was realized.

My lesbianism is the avenue through which I have learned the most about silence

and oppression, and it continues to be the most tactile reminder to me that we are

not free human beings. (Moraga, 44)

This relationship, between a female-born queer child and mother, is explored in my short story,

“Good Burritos Don’t Fall Apart.” I drew a bit from de la Peña’s in-dialogue plot progression and character development, while also keeping some of Moraga’s prose in the back of my mind, being mindful not to let the child-mother relationship fall to the wayside of the narrative:

Every Good Boi Does Find a fucking cheap solution in desperate times.

Sales guy even threw in a crappy gig bag they were going to throw away. I

actually called my mom.

“Mami, ya tengo new bass, but I don’t know how I’m going to get by

because I still need to buy a bunch of damn books and they’re expensive.”

“Your tía says she’s going to send you some money each week for your

subway and for snacks, don’t worry about it.”

“Tell her thank you.” I was relieved, but not. “Ma, I’m the stupidest one

here.”

“Mija, no. It’s going to be okay. It’s just nerves.” (Toledo)

Make America Change Again: Butler’s Afro-Futurism

Along with these Chicana powerhouses, my fiction is also strongly influenced by literature by and about other oppressed non-Latinx groups, including women, LGBTQ writers, and African-American writers. Fictional narratives written by those who identify with any oppressed group, which address the theme of social inequality, are also arguably dystopian by their very nature. The ways in which they address these themes vary from author to author, but are no less effective in getting an empathetic reader onboard with the underlying activist message.

One need only look at the impact Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues has had on the lesbian/queer/trans community to be reminded of the social and political energy such fiction brings—not only to the genre, but to its readership. Works from Octavia Butler and Margaret

Atwood, when compared to classic American utopias/dystopias written a century ago, such as

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), (a short novel I often recommend to young feminists) show a progressively intersectional evolution in fiction by women. Still, dystopia, as a genre, begs for more women of color.

In my readings, it was no surprise to discover that Junot Díaz was also inspired by the work of American Afro-futurist, Octavia E. Butler. Her Earthseed series, including The Parable of the Sower (1993) and The Parable of the Talents (1998) was to include a third work to make it a trilogy. Sadly, Butler passed away in 2006 before any meaningful work could be done on the last book of the series, leaving the door open to fan fiction and what-could-have-been. The latest

Marvel superhero film, Black Panther, is a cinematic kiss to the genre of Afro-Futurism.

Butler’s Earthseed series is important to recognize as having laid the foundation for modern science fiction by women of color Parable of the Talents was a Nebula Award winner for best novel. Latina science fiction is a subgenre still in the making—it is difficult to find any published sci-fi work by Latinas at all.

Parable of the Sower is set in a futuristic United States, beginning in the year 2024.

Butler’s narrative style for the novel is comprised of excerpts from the narrator’s Earthseed

“bible” of sorts, and dated diary entries that include dialogue. Very similar in setting to

Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which came before it in 1985, Butler’s narrative is set in a realistic future society, where extreme Christian fundamentalism has taken over the political landscape.

The narrator, Lauren Oya Olamina, a young African-American woman, escapes her father’s Baptist indoctrination by starting her own religion, Earthseed, which defines God as change. In the diary entry for August 17, 2024, Lauren writes:

Everyone knows that change is inevitable. From the second law of

thermodynamics to Darwinian evolution, from Buddhism’s insistence that nothing

is permanent and all suffering results from our delusions of permanence to the

third chapter of Ecclesiastes (“To everything there is a season. . . . .”), change is

part of life, of existence of the common wisdom. But I don’t believe we’re dealing

with all that that means. We haven’t even begun to deal with it. (Butler, 26)

Earthseed, then, is not just the narrator’s new religion, but a way to attempt to explain the dystopian world around her, a city named Robledo, 20 miles from Los Angeles, in an America that has been destroyed by bad economic policy, and several environmental crises.

Butler built a not-so-distant future world that is, politically, prophetic of the current administration, in a country still suffering from the current American ills of racism and poverty.

Robledo, surrounded by a wall to protect itself, is a part of that world that the narrator eventually has to escape. On the road, she pretends to be a man in order to survive.

Parable of the Sower ends in 2027. Lauren and some fellow refugees from Robledo, and others picked up along the way, start a utopian society on land donated by Lauren’s future husband, with Earthseed as its foundational faith. The residents of this new town name their community Acorn. It is a semi-socialist, agrarian community, reminding readers versed in classic utopian fiction of the work of Robert Owen, and William Morris.

Parable of the Talents picks up in 2032. Lauren has died, and her daughter, Larken, continues the story, narrating it in similar fashion. The novel is mostly her mother Lauren’s

25 found journal entries, with commentary in between from Larken. The family is made up of writers, as the narrative also includes some entries from the writings of her father, Bankole, and

Lauren’s brother, Larken’s “Uncle Marc.”

Taking a different path than Lauren, her brother Marc keeps his father’s religion, becomes a preacher, and gets recruited by then-President Jarret. Marc writes:

If this country was ever to be restored to greatness, it wasn’t the little

dollar-a-dozen preachers who would do it.

Andrew Steele Jarret understood this. When he created Christian America

and then moved from the pulpit into politics, when he pulled religion and

government together and cemented the link with money from rich businessmen,

he created what should have been an unstoppable drive to restore the country.

And he became my teacher. (Butler, 309)

This President in Butler’s dystopia ran on the campaign slogan “Make America Great

Again,” which Butler borrowed from Reagan’s real-life campaign. However, reading these novels in the present is unnerving. The Earthseed series was eerily prescient, to say the least.

Her narrative style for this series was one I borrowed for my short story, “What We

Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Transition”. A story I originally wrote in sections with physical line breaks, I decided to experiment with writing scenes as dated journal entries, including semi-reliable dialogue retold by the narrator in these entries, as Butler did. I felt this to be a more effective narrative strategy to create intimacy between narrator and reader, especially in a story where the stakes are paced over time.

I also borrowed a narrative device from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Like that novel, my own story ends with a short epilogue/addendum explaining the source of the found journals.

Butler’s Earthseed novels, like The Handmaid’s Tale, are dystopias that speak to the intersection of gender-based oppression, and religious trauma, caused by a heavy dose of

Christian extremism. Around the world, religion taken to extreme/fanatical levels continues to be a rabid contributor to social injustices. I continue to explore this thematic element most profoundly in my short story, “Juan the Baptist,” borrowing from my own lived experience as a former Baptist church-goer with Catholic family. Inspired by Butler’s work, several of my short stories are social commentaries on religious pressure from family and society. Specifically, my own narratives often include women and gender non-conforming people in the Latinx diaspora, who are already oppressed by patriarchal ideas to conform to social mores and norms. Religion ad faith, for them, often becomes a source of additional trauma, rather than comfort.

Apocalypse, Now?

As a writer with my own intersectional identities—Latinx, child of Mexican working- class immigrants, assigned female at birth, transgender, influenced by both Catholicism and

Protestantism, a sexual abuse survivor, first-generation college graduate, etc., it has been important in my academic and writerly life to read narratives that speak to my own experience.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the search is always difficult.

In a 2013 Colbert Report interview, Toni Morrison, said, then wrote on her Twitter account, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must

27 write it.” My short story collection here, then, is my first contribution to the canon of American

Latinx fiction.

Were it not for the colonialism and imperialism of the New World, American indigenous and Latino writers would have a very different narrative today. As part of the Chicano movimiento, my activism involves writing narratives in an authentic voice, with characters who are relatable, no matter the background of the reader. The United States is still not a land of equal opportunity or justice for all. Once it is, our fiction can begin to reflect real gains in social, economic, educational, and racial justice. While my hope is that we can one day move away from constant dystopian themes in our lived experience, and write believable happily-ever-afters, for now, we’ll stick to writing what we know.

If our fiction is to reflect the real American experience of people of color, it can’t always, or should, have easy endings. The characters in my own work are created in the image of those before us who attempted to create a happy home in America despite systemic barriers, and those of us today who are still attempting, to put out the fires that continue to arise. Even if the future history of the Latinx diaspora in the United States looks bleak, hope is what keeps us writing. As

Junot Díaz aptly reminds us, “Apocalypse is a darkness that gives us light” (Díaz).

Latinx authors writing dystopian fiction, then, is a revolutionary act. We must continue to write authentic narratives, even if fictionalized. Magical realism is still realism. Through the arts, we can continue to have our voices heard in order to improve the state of the Latinx diaspora in the United States. The path to progress can only be mapped by a moving pen.

¡Adelante, a la victoria!

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Anchor Books, 1986. Print.

Butler, Octavia E. The Parable of the Sower. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1993. Print.

---. The Parable of the Talents. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1998. Print.

Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. New York: Vintage, 1984. Print.

De la Peña, Terri. Margins. Seattle: Seal Press, 1992. Print.

Díaz, Junot, “Apocalypse,” Boston Review, May 1, 2011, accessed December 11, 2016,

http://www.bostonreview.net/junot-diaz-apocalypse-haiti-earthquake

---. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead, 2007. Print.

---. Drown. New York: Riverhead, 1996. Print.

---. “Monstro,” The New Yorker, June 4/11 2012, 106-118. Print.

---. “The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma,” The New Yorker, accessed April 10, 2018,

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/16/the-silence-the-legacy-of-childhood

trauma

---. This is How You Lose Her. New York: Riverhead, 2012. Print.

Díaz, Junot, ed. Global Dystopias. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2017. Print.

Dávila, Arlene, “Against the Discursive Latino,” Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination.

Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. p. 43.

Hannah, Monica; Harford Vargas, Jennifer: Saldivar, Jose David, eds. Junot Díaz and the

Decolonial Imagination. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

Moraga, Cherrie L. Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios, 2nd ed.

Cambridge: South End Press, 2000. Print.

Moya, Paula M. L. “The Search for Decolonial Love: An Interview with Junot Díaz,”

Boston Review, June 26, 2012, accessed December 11, 2016,

http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/paula-ml-moya-decolonial-love-interview-junot-

d%C3%ADaz

Ruiz de Burton, María Ámparo. Who Would Have Thought It? New York: Penguin, 2009. Print.

Viramontes, María Helena. The Moths and Other Stories. Houston: Arte Público Press. 1995.

Print.

Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne, “Introduction,” The Moths and Other Stories. Houston: Arte Público

Press. 1995. Print.

Appendix

Glossary

Due to ongoing scholarly discourse on the meaning of certain words regarding Latino and gender identity, I feel it important to define these terms, as I use them, in this thesis.

@: When used as a suffix for terms, such as Latin@, or Chican@, makes the term inclusive of

the binary genders—male and female—and, sometimes, those identifying as gender fluid.

Afro-Latino/Afro-Latina/Afro-Latin@/Afro-Latinx: A person of African descent whose lineage

used to, or currently resides, in a Latin-American country or territory. See LATINX.

Chicano/Chicana/Chican@/Chicanx: A person of Mexican descent who was born in the United

States, or immigrated as a child, usually a self-chosen label. See LATINX.

Dystopia: While the term “utopia” is Greek for “no place” or “not a place”, implying its quality

of being too perfect to actually exist, a dystopia implies the opposite, a very real(istic)

place where social, political, environmental, and/or economic conditions are bad.

Genderqueer: A gender identity wherein a person does not conform to the gender binary

of male and female, whether in outward gender expression, personal traits, or the social

expectations for either. Usually, a self-chosen label.

Hispanic: A dated term, first used by the United States Census in 1970, used to refer to persons

from, or with heritage from, Spanish-speaking countries. A controversial and often

politicized term, as it is directly linked with Spain’s colonization in the New World, and

can exclude the non-Spanish-speaking indigenous population of colonized countries.

Latino/Latina/Latin@: A person of Latin-American descent, usually limited to Spanish-

speaking countries, sometimes including Brazil. Persons of Spanish and Portuguese

descent are sometimes included, while some Latino activists do not consider persons

from European countries as falling under the Latino umbrella due to the

colonizer/colonized relationship. Usually a self-chosen label, can include indigenous

people from the Americas, although some indigenous persons who have retained their

culture do not identify with the term. See LATINX.

Latinx: A new term in the Latino Studies lexicon that is a nod to the Latino LGBTQ and

indigenous two-spirit community, inclusive of Latinos of all gender identities, including

male, female, gender fluid, non-binary, genderqueer, transgender, or otherwise gender

non-conforming.

Latinidad: A noun encompassing the ways in which a Latinx person identifies with the term

Latino/Latinx, whether it be through family heritage, language, religion, food, literature,

customs, and traditions. It is important to note that many Latino cultural traditions

(including the practice of Catholicism and speaking the Spanish language) are the result

of Spanish colonialism. Some Latinxs express their Latinidad by rejecting some of the

colonizer’s influence, for example, by re-adopting the spirituality and languages of their

indigenous ancestry, including the Nahua, Mexica, Aztec, Toltec, Inca, and the Maya.

see: POST-COLONIAL.

Post-Colonial: Of, or relating to, the era after the colonization of the New World. Some Latino

Studies scholars place end of the Post-Colonial period in Latin America as late as 1961,

after the reign of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. Post-Colonial literature, by my

definition, touches on racism and inequality as symptom of colonialism and imperialism,

and calls for the “decolonization” of a people, through criticism, and sometimes rejection,

32 of certain aspects of the colonizer’s culture, from their language to their religion, to their economic and political systems.

Good Burritos Don’t Fall Apart

and Other Stories

Noah E. Toledo

[Short story collection redacted – PUBLICATION PENDING]