Immigrant communities evince particular and deep relationship to
place. Building on this self-evident premise, Walk the Barrio adds
the less obvious claim that to write about place you must
experience place. Thus, in this book about immigrants, writing, and
place, Cristina Rodriguez walks neighborhood streets, talks to
immigrants, interviews authors, and puts herself physically in the
spaces that she seeks to understand. The word barrio first entered
the English lexicon in 1833 and has since become a commonplace not
only of American speech but of our literary imagination. Indeed,
what draws Rodriguez to the barrios of Los Angeles, New York,
Miami, and others is the work of literature that was fueled and
inspired by those neighborhoods. Walk the Barrio explores the ways
in which authors William Archila, Richard Blanco, Angie Cruz, Junot
Di az, Salvador Plascencia, He ctor Tobar, and Helena Mari a
Viramontes use their U.S. hometowns as both setting and stylistic
inspiration. Asking how these writers innovate upon or break the
rules of genre to render in words an embodied experience of the
barrio, Rodriguez considers, for example, how the spatial map of
New Brunswick impacts the mobility of Di az's female characters, or
how graffiti influences the aesthetics of Viramontes's novels. By
mapping each text's fictional setting upon the actual spaces it
references in what she calls "barriographies," Rodriguez reveals
connections between place, narrative form, and migrancy. This
first-person, interdisciplinary approach presents an innovative
model for literary studies as it sheds important light on the ways
in which transnationalism transforms the culture of each Latinx
barrio, effecting shifts in gender roles, the construction of the
family, definitions of social normativity, and racial, ethnic,
national, and linguistic identifications.
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