U.S. Latinx Literature in Spanish remains an understudied field despite its large and vibrant corpus. This is partly due to the erroneous impression that this literature is only written in English, and partly due to traditional educational programs focusing on English texts to include non-Spanish speakers and non-Latinx students. This has created a vacuum in research about Latinx literary production in Spanish, leaving the contemporary field wide open for exploration. This volume fills this space by bringing contemporary U.S. Latinx literature in Spanish to the forefront of the field. The essays focus on literary production post-1960 and examine texts by authors from different backgrounds writing from the U.S., providing readers with an opportunity to explore new texts in Spanish within U.S. Latinx literature, and a departure point for starting a meaningful critical discourse about what it means to write and publish in Spanish in the U.S. Through exploring literary production in a language that is both emotionally and politically charged for authors, the academia, and the U.S., this book challenges and enhances our understanding of the term 'Americas'.

This study demonstrates the ways that Latina authors contest how power and space exploit women while simultaneously subverting the Nation-State through reimagining a counter-space where new definitions of the self lie beyond Power's reach. Moreover, this book delves into how both Power and Space collude to uphold the out-of-date sexist, racist, and classist societal norms that Eurocentrism and history continue to cleave to as the defining qualities of the nation and its citizens. With the proliferation of Latin literature within the United States, an ideological readjustment is taking place whereby several late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century authors contest the State's role in defining its citizens by exposing the unjust role that Space and Power play. With this in mind, the author examines several literary versions of identity to explore how certain authors reject and subvert the social mores against which present-day citizens are measured-especially within government or State institutions but also within families and neighborhoods. The literary works that are analyzed cover a period of twenty-five years ending in 2010. Several of these texts rewrite the national allegory from the point of view of the marginalized while others demonstrate how an individual successfully renegotiates her identity-gender, social class, or ethnicity-from being a disadvantage to being an identity marker to celebrate. The authors defy the place that women are still relegated to, by representing several characters who consciously decide that it is time to battle the forces that would keep them powerless in the public arena. Above all, these texts are anti-Power; the protagonists refuse to accept the societal forces which constantly barrage them, defining them as worthless. These authors and their characters challenge everything that historically has kept women relegated to a space of weakness.

This study demonstrates the ways that Latina authors contest how power and space exploit women while simultaneously subverting the Nation-State through reimagining a counter-space where new definitions of the self lie beyond Power's reach. Moreover, this book delves into how both Power and Space collude to uphold the out-of-date sexist, racist, and classist societal norms that Eurocentrism and history continue to cleave to as the defining qualities of the nation and its citizens. With the proliferation of Latin literature within the United States, an ideological readjustment is taking place whereby several late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century authors contest the State's role in defining its citizens by exposing the unjust role that Space and Power play. With this in mind, the author examines several literary versions of identity to explore how certain authors reject and subvert the social mores against which present-day citizens are measured-especially within government or State institutions but also within families and neighborhoods. The literary works that are analyzed cover a period of twenty-five years ending in 2010. Several of these texts rewrite the national allegory from the point of view of the marginalized while others demonstrate how an individual successfully renegotiates her identity-gender, social class, or ethnicity-from being a disadvantage to being an identity marker to celebrate. The authors defy the place that women are still relegated to, by representing several characters who consciously decide that it is time to battle the forces that would keep them powerless in the public arena. Above all, these texts are anti-Power; the protagonists refuse to accept the societal forces which constantly barrage them, defining them as worthless. These authors and their characters challenge everything that historically has kept women relegated to a space of weakness.

Although fictional-and often fantastic-representations of nature have been a distinguishing feature of Latin American literature for centuries, ecocriticism, understood as the study of literature as it relates to depictions of the natural world, environmental issues, and the ways in which human beings interact and identify with their natural surroundings, did not emerge as a field of scholarly interest in the region until the end of the twentieth century. This volume employs an ecocritical lens in order to explore and question the use of the river imagery in Latino and Latin American literature from the colonial period to our modern world, creating a space in which to examine both its literal and figurative meanings, associated as much with processes of a personal nature as with those of the collective experience in the region. The slow, meandering streams of nostalgia, the raging currents of conflict or the stagnant waters of social decay are just a few of the ways in which the river has become an important symbol and inspiration to many of the region's writers. This book offers a diverse collection of writings that, through a trans-historical and trans-geographical perspective, allows us, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, to reflect on the rich and dynamic image of the river and, by extension, on the vital context of Latin/o America, its people and societies.