not just for students
January 16, 2019 6:31 AM   Subscribe

The Literary Canon Is Mostly White. Here’s an Alternative Latin American Reading List

If you’re a high schooler or college student, there’s a list of books and famous works you know you’re going to have to read at some point in your career. A Shakespeare play or two, some Hemingway or Faulkner, To Kill a Mockingbird so you can talk about how white people were nice enough to end racism. And these books are all great, and important to understanding the culture – white/Western/American culture that is. And while there’s some overlap between that and Latinx culture, what if you want to read the foundational texts of Latinidad?

posted by poffin boffin (24 comments total) 67 users marked this as a favorite
 
Last year, I read The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo, and it would seem like here's the place to plug that novel-in-verse. I'm not sure it counts as a foundational text, but it's amazing! Here's a link to a review at Kirkus Reviews.
posted by platitudipus at 6:40 AM on January 16, 2019 [2 favorites]


Thrilled to see Cortazar's Hopscotch on here (as an alternative to Joyce's Ulysses, no less). It's long held the spot as my favorite novel.
posted by nightrecordings at 6:50 AM on January 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


I am in a serious reading rut and this is going to help a lot. Thanks!
posted by JanetLand at 6:58 AM on January 16, 2019


As an aside, while I am glad to see indigenous mythology presented as an alternative to scandinavian, it's varying levels of problematic to call indigenous american anything "latinx". The forced hispanization of the americas caused immense levels of indigenous cultural genocide in addition to the actual physical genocide, and further erasure of indigenous identity, especially in regards to precolonial culture, by categorizing it as latinx is Not Great. But again, I do appreciate their intent in this specific situation and support the spirit of inclusivity.
posted by poffin boffin at 6:58 AM on January 16, 2019 [22 favorites]


For me this was that rare thing: an enjoyable and worthwhile listicle. Many thanks for the link, poffin boffin. It's a list that could probably be extended much further, though I'd imagine there'd also be works in each canon without an obvious counterpart in the other. What might be the equivalent in English literature to Donoso's The Obscene Bird of Night, for example?
posted by misteraitch at 7:13 AM on January 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


Oh wow these look good and I might not have heard of them otherwise, thank you so much for this post!
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 7:23 AM on January 16, 2019


If you'd like Westworld without all the robo-rape and violence, try Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges.
posted by peeedro at 7:32 AM on January 16, 2019 [3 favorites]


Google image searching the author's portraits is interesting given the framing of the list. I do wonder how many of them consider, or would have considered, themselves latinx.
posted by Grimgrin at 7:50 AM on January 16, 2019


I think we need Gabriel Garcia Marquez here. That is a huge omission. 100 Years of Solitude, is one of the best books ever, by one of the best latin writers ever.
posted by The1andonly at 7:52 AM on January 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


We’ve also tried to go a little farther than the authors already on your shortlists (if you’re wondering where Gabo, or Cisneros, or Neruda are).

The 'alternative' in 'alternative latin american reading list' is not referring simply to the 'latin american' as a sufficient alternative.

I guess they are assuming everyone knows about Garcia Marquez and Borges already? Although Pedro Paramo is considered obvious canon I think so its inclusion in an 'alternative' list makes no sense...
posted by vacapinta at 8:01 AM on January 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


Google image searching the author's portraits is interesting given the framing of the list. I do wonder how many of them consider, or would have considered, themselves latinx.

Since the Latinx or any Pan-Latin American identity was created in response to the immigrant experience (primarily in the United States) and is only now beginning to be exported back to Central and South America, probably none of them (other than the American authors). They would conceive of themselves as Mexican or Colombian or Cuban or Afro-Cuban (itself unique).

This list would have been better framed as "literature from Central and South America, as well as books by people of those cultures in North America." But that's clunky, and there is a Latinx identity among Americans who come from these (many and varied) cultures and places, so the list authors used that as a shorthand.

I think we need Gabriel Garcia Marquez here. That is a huge omission. 100 Years of Solitude, is one of the best books ever, by one of the best latin writers ever.

I love this book, but I don't think it's an omission. 100 Years of Solitude is one of the few works that has made it from the Latin American canon into the Anglo-American canon - which is why I've actually read it (unlike everything else on the list). It's a great book, but not overlooked.
posted by jb at 8:02 AM on January 16, 2019 [3 favorites]


I'm somewhat surprised they didn't include Alejo Carpentier or Horacio Quiroga. They're kind of low key compared to the Borges and the García Márquez and the Vargas Llosa but they deserve a bit more recognition.
posted by sukeban at 8:07 AM on January 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


That is a huge omission.

that's who they're referring to as "Gabo" when they say that they didn't include the obvious and best-known choices.
posted by poffin boffin at 8:09 AM on January 16, 2019 [3 favorites]


While these are more college age, some more women writers for the list:

If you want to read a book similarly styled (and homage) to Hopscotch written by a woman, I suggest The Mixquiahuala Letters by Ana Castillo. Also I will take every opportunity here to plug Days of Awe by Achy Obejas, and for which I can't think of any real book to which it'd be an alternative. It's the story of a bi Cuban refugee struggling to understand her family's flight from Cuba and the people they left behind, all tangled up with her own identities, sexuality, and particularly her family's past and faiths: her mother's mix of various Caribbean practices + Catholicism and especially her father's extremely secretive practice of his Judaism as a descendant of conversos/cyrpto-Jews. IMHO it is criminally underrated; if you're a fan of Ocasio-Cortez, it may be of some interest to you re: her Jewish heritage.
posted by barchan at 8:10 AM on January 16, 2019 [5 favorites]


For all the problems with ethnic and regional identity and how to frame the list around it, I'm really happy for the little bit of modern K'ichee' representation in that "(present-day)" in the Popol Wuj section. It's a small thing, but it's real tiring to see Maya stuff presented as being ~*~from a magical lost civilization before the dawn of time~*~ or whatever bullshit.

Like, okay, it comes from an oral tradition — but that tradition was a bunch of regular people living regular unmysterious lives, they passed the poem on in recent history in a form that reflects their real-world concerns, and their descendants are still right there continuing to live their lives and sometimes write stuff. If someone took half the woo-woo stuff people say about the Maya and said it about Greece and Homer, we'd look at them like they had two heads.
posted by nebulawindphone at 8:12 AM on January 16, 2019 [3 favorites]


What might be the equivalent in English literature to Donoso's The Obscene Bird of Night, for example?

My book group broke down on that one and did not finish because it pulled up too much trauma for a couple of people - it's an astonishing book, but there's a lot of rape and abuse that IMO is not really understood as rape and abuse by Donoso and it is intentionally, effectively extremely bizarre and creepy. It's definitely a book for the ages and certainly no survey of Latin American or specifically Chilean literature is complete without taking a look at it.

In terms of "what is like it in English", the only things I can think of (and they're different but have some of the same feel) are City of Night by John Rechy and Dhalgren by Samuel Delany - both big books written in an unusual way with a lot of the sordid, bizarre and frightening and a portrait of/commentary on society at large.

You know whose work I really, really like (in translation, alas)? Horacio Castellanos Moya. I think Tyrant Memory is my favorite. In my head I bracket him with WG Sebald, even though they're nothing alike in style - there's just something about their concern with the past in the present.

~~
On another note, when I was in my teens I read a whole bunch of Isabel Allende (and then chewed through A Thousand Years of Solitude which was harder). Reading those books was totally transformative for me - I started to think more about the political history of Central and South America, I started to think about what I expected from novels because I started to think about magic realism, I started to think about grown-ups leading social and political lives in addition to the merely personal. I also started looking for more "weird" books and read some Donald Barthelme and other more experimental stuff. Allende may be simultaneously too well known and not as fashionable and not as challenging a novelist as some others, but man, I read Eva Luna and the The Stories of Eva Luna and House of the Spirits probably ten times each in my teens.
posted by Frowner at 8:18 AM on January 16, 2019 [6 favorites]


That's a good list.

Hang on, do people really teach Ulysses in high school? I thought teachers preferred shorter, more accessible Joyce for that curriculum, like Dubliners or Portrait.
posted by doctornemo at 10:14 AM on January 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


Honestly even those would have been super fucking ambitious for my high school.
posted by nebulawindphone at 10:22 AM on January 16, 2019 [2 favorites]


Yeah, no, with the rare exception of some super fancy private schools, nobody teaches Ulysses in high school.
posted by Ragged Richard at 10:24 AM on January 16, 2019 [2 favorites]


what if you want to read the foundational texts of Latinidad?

You learn Spanish?
posted by Segundus at 2:54 PM on January 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


Seconding platitudipus on Elizabeth Acevedo's The Poet X, which is fantastic. Another terrific novel about a teenage Latina poet is Isabel Quintero's Gabi, A Girl in Pieces; funny, moving, somewhat bilingual and beautifully put together.

The late Gregory Rabassa translated a ton of Spanish and Portuguese authors and wrote a great memoir about it, If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents.
posted by huimangm at 10:14 PM on January 16, 2019


Sorry, careless wording above. I should have said, Rabassa translated a ton of authors writing in Spanish and Portuguese; some were indeed from Spain and Portugal but most from Latin America.
posted by huimangm at 10:23 PM on January 16, 2019


I think we need Gabriel Garcia Marquez here. That is a huge omission. 100 Years of Solitude, is one of the best books ever, by one of the best latin writers ever

I know it was the 60s and all but trigger warning for multiple stories of grown men being attracted to pre-pubescent girls.
posted by LizBoBiz at 1:07 AM on January 17, 2019 [2 favorites]


The 60's? He was still doing the same in his last, Memories of My Melancholy Whores from 2004.
posted by sukeban at 4:48 AM on January 17, 2019


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