Resumen de Chronicling Contemporary Latinidad
Some of the most compelling and widely consumed US Latin@ literature being produced at the turn of the twenty-first century is literary journalism in the form of the chronicle, a transnational and transhistorical genre that draws on US and Latin American literary traditions. This essay elucidates the genre’s contemporary contours in the work of US Latin@ writers, including Héctor Tobar, Sonia Nazario, Daniel Alarcón, and Daniel Hernandez, whose lives and writings traverse multiple American borders as they cover issues like undocumented migration, narcopolitics, and cultural assimilation. The essay argues that an examination of how this genre portrays the present and imagines the future allows for an investigation into the current shape, possibilities, and limits of Latinidad as imagined by US Latin@ writers. Studying the chronicle’s genealogies, areas of thematic focus, modes of community imagination, and reception and distribution, the essay explores the ways in which US Latin@ writers are engaging the transnational literary imagination to intervene in historical portrayals, political debates, and the shaping of a Latin@ identity that is still under construction in the United States. It pays particular attention to the intersections of nationality, citizenship, and class that complicate concepts of Latin@ hemispheric unity.
