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Latinx Writing Los Angeles

Nonfiction Dispatches from a Decolonial Rebellion

Ignacio Lopez-Calvo editor Victor Valle editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of Nebraska Press

Published:1st Apr '18

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Latinx Writing Los Angeles cover

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 Gómez-Peña, and Rubén Martínez, 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 López-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 São 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.”—Davíd 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

ISBN: 9781496202413

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

246 pages