cover image The Floating Borderlands: 25 Years of U.S. Hispanic Literature

The Floating Borderlands: 25 Years of U.S. Hispanic Literature

. University of Washington Press, $18.95 (400pp) ISBN 978-0-295-97746-1

Since 1972, the Americas Review (formerly Revista Chicano-Riquena) has presented prose, verse, essays and visual art by Latinos living in the U.S.; this anthology celebrates the magazine's 25th birthday by reprinting work from its pages. TAR editor Flores divides her 27 prose writers and 52 poets into three stages meant to illustrate the development of Latino writing, from early concerns with group representation and political impact to more recent formal experiments. First-generation writers like Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Tomas Rivera and Lucha Corpi strove to unify and engage Hispanic cultures through literature; some of them wrote in Spanish, in forms called ""estampas"" (brief sketches). Rudolfo Anaya, Sheila Ortiz-Taylor, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Pat Mora and Alurista produced autobiographical works that code-switched effortlessly between English and Spanish. Second-generation writers like Julia Alvarez, Denise Chavez, Alberto Rios and Ana Castillo later achieved broader recognition; their early work, reprinted here, demonstrates both their craft and sophistication, and their awareness of audiences both Latino and Anglo. Flores calls the third generation of U.S. Latino writers ""New Navigators of the Floating Borderlands""; Kathleen Alcala, Sandra Benitez, Rane Arroyo and their coevals use their expanded technical resources to describe familiar elements of the U.S. Hispanic experience: family, language, inheritance, displacement, immigration issues, gender, myth, citylife. Readers will appreciate the breadth of Flores's selections. Others will regret the absence of Sandra Cisneros and Gary Soto (a footnote implies that Flores tried to include them); others may ask why neither biographical nor explanatory notes accompany the stories and poems. Still, this is a volume that's long overdue: readers (and teachers) seeking a good, wide-ranging anthology of short works by U.S. Latinos will be glad this book exists. (Feb.)