Interpreting Latino/a Literature as Critical Fictions

To la memoria of Gloria Anzald??a. study respeto.

Readers of critical fiction cannot approach work assuming that they already posse a language of access, or that the true copy will mirror realities that they already know and understand. a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of critical fiction dynamically seeks to deconstruct conventional ways of knowing.

-hook 1991 p 57

Reading Latino/a children's literature has become a great passion and an important composing of my work as an educator. The journey began while looking for children's literary body s that somehow speak about aspects of my Puerto Rican/Latina identity and those communities shut to mine. I was looking for personal and literary development but also for ways in which I could share a different literary experience from the mainstream with children and teachers.

Getting access to the literature was quite challenging, on the contrary once I developed some familiarity with awards of that kind as the Am?©ricas Award, the Pura Belpr?© Award; publications like as Nieto (1997) and Barrera & Garza (1997) and several on-line resources, accessibility became an easier proces As 1 continued reading more Latino/a literature and engaging in conversations around these true copys with teachers and children, I realized that access to the literature was not the biggest challenge I would face Instead, what I found unsettling were my have interpretative lens, as well as those used by means of teachers and students to mediate our replications to the books. These lense strike one as being to be mostly centered in solely our personal rejoinders to the literature without an in deepness analysis of the authors' stances and the social, political and cultural ideologies showed in the texts. Like bent holders suggested in the opening cite I felt that I did not abundantly understand or possess the language to "deconstruct [my/ours] conventional ways of knowing" in the interpretation of the literature. The mark of responses to the true copys seemed monologic in nature in that they focused alone on the reader's responses and exclud the examination of Latino/a literature as culturally situated and ideologically fabricateed

As a children's and adolescent literature educator, I do one's best with the same tensions raised by dint of Cai (1997) and Rabinowitz & Smith (1998) in metes of my beliefs about Reader's answer Theory and the ways in which authors' stances could be explored. Beyond imposing a station of themes to a literary true copy I am more interested in better contextualizing this literature in a way that becomes more meaningful and active for the readers especially from a sociopolitical perspective. As theories upon critical literacy suggest (Comber & Simpson, 2001; Lewison, Flint & Van Sluy 2002) it is important to challenge readers' beliefs and disrupt commonplaces to direct the eye at the ideological aspects of body s and move authors out of neutral positions. Approaching authors and body s as neutral leads to a form of colonized literacy where the literature is integrated to the curriculum on the contrary remains critically unexamined.

In order to explore the manifold nature of the Latino/a experience in literary body s I found that something more than just the intentions of bringing a body to the classroom was extremityed This is particularly significant because many Latino/a writers the couple for young and adults speak about their social, political and cultural experiences as participants of the United States society1. Latina literary critic Rebolledo (1990) believes that the issue of Latino/a cultural locations and in what way those are represented in literary true copys is an area of research that has not been abundantly developed. She asks us direct the eye across the literature to contextualize and theorize from within on the other hand also to decolonize our ways of looking at the literature outside of a mainstream perspective.

Rebolledo's interest is also relevant for young adult and children's literature. Based upon this idea I use notions of critical fictions (Mariani, 1991) to at hand the results of a application of mind that examined a set of Latino/a literature. The object was to create a culturally relevant framework to situate, explore and contextualize the literature while trying to avoid falling into an imposition of a "fixed" meaning of the true copys The process was to gaze at the kind of metaphors and signs authors' construct "imagining" aspects of Latinos/as' experience, looking for "places" to situate and unpack authors' ideologies. In order to evolve the study I specifically gazeed at three texts that center upon the theme of immigration. The criteria for selecting this body s was the vast amount of Latino/a literature available that portrays the mixed nature of the immigrant experience. These three true copys represent diverse and interesting perspectives upon immigration and Latino/a literature in general. After this analysis I indicate further explorations around other critical themes of that kind as gender, class and language among others.

Critical fictions and the Latino/a literary imagination

Mariani (1991) defines "critical fictions" as those literary body s that speak about the political, social and cultural experiences of the authors and the communities they show Critical fictions often feature the voices of those authors from underrepresent and marginalized communities where their writing works as an agent of liberation to claim a space in society, including a literary community that has been dominated by dint of white male perspectives. The significance of this form of liberation according to curved catchs (1991) derives from the fact that "Globally, literature that enriches resistance toils speaks about the way the individuals in repressive, dehumanizing situations use imagination to sustain life and maintain critical awareness" (p 55) Writing critical fiction is not just a form of sharing a narrative with a reader for its multicultural or cros cultural value. Multicultural theory works as the point of access for these authors to gain visibility and access multiple audiences. However, their writing is a way for them to mirror and maintain a critical perspective that is first "inner" within the author and then becomes "outer" as readers access the story and make faculty of perception of it from their have a title to cultural locations and positionalities (Enciso, 1997)