MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.

John Alba Cutler's Ends of Assimilation: The Formation of Chicano Literature and John D. "Rio" Riofrio's Continental Shifts: Migration, Representation, and the Struggle for Justice in Latin(o) America take nuanced approaches to the role assimilation plays in how Latina/os represent themselves and are represented by others. While Cutler's book focuses on the asynchronous relationship between Chicana/o literature and assimilation theory, Riofrio examines how, after 9/11, Latina/os have been increasingly represented in dehumanizing ways that highlight their unassimilability into the United States. As these texts make clear, the unassimilability of Latina/os has several causes and effects. Cutler notes that assimilation theory historically has failed to account for groups outside the black/white binary, such as Mexican Americans, and the role of gender. To remedy these gaps, he turns to Chicana/o literature, thus using literary models to illuminate assimilation sociology as another form of representational discourse (6). Riofrio similarly looks to representational discourses in his wide-ranging archive, which includes novels, movies, YouTube videos, and so-called "reality" prison programming. By focusing on the War on Terror, Riofrio emphasizes how contemporary discourses frame Latina/os as an internal threat, with the "perceived cultural shift" (12) of an ascendant Latina/o population "rais[ing] the alarm that the linguistic 'Reconquista' of Spanish over English is underway" (13). Ends of Assimilation and Continental Shifts are capacious in their reach, ranging in their analyses from canonical literature to new media. Both works are vital texts for Latina/o and Hemispheric cultural studies, particularly in their consideration of the roles of institutions and media in framing Latina/o identity. [End Page 227]

Cutler considers the misalignment between Chicana/o literature and assimilation theory as a productive gap that captures the blind spots and failures of assimilation theory even as it preoccupies Chicana/o literature. As Cutler explains, assimilation theory stemmed from progressive impulses to combat nativist notions of racial essentialism; however, in so doing, assimilation theory failed to consider the processes of racialization that groups undergo in the United States (5). Cutler considers such processes of racialization in his innovative approach to Chicana/o literary history, which grapples with the central role that institutions play in staging the encounter between Chicana/o representations and their communities and the assimilationist tendencies that ostensibly inform such institutions.

To that end, in chapter 1, "Becoming Mexican-American Literature," Cutler considers three foundational texts of Chicano literature: José Antonio Villarreal's Pocho (1959), Américo Paredes's George Washington Gómez (1990), and Jovita González and Margaret Eimer's Caballero: A Historical Novel (1996). Cutler's reading of Caballero is particularly incisive as he complicates assimilation theory by demonstrating how the novel offers a model of mutual assimilation, albeit predicated on a sense of shared whiteness. Chapter 2, "Quinto Sol, Chicana/o Literature, and the Long March through Institutions," discusses how the founders of Quinto Sol Publications, Octavio Romano and Nick C. Vaca, counteract negative representations of Chicana/os in the social sciences. Cutler brilliantly presents his argument about the founders alongside Rolando Hinojosa's Estampas del Valle (1973), which won the Premio Quinto Sol, and Estela Portillo Trambley's Rain of Scorpions (1975), which received an honorable mention. Chapter 3, "Cultural Capital and the Singularity of Literature in Hunger of Memory and The Rain God," examines how Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory (1982) and Arturo Islas's The Rain God (1984) contend with boundary-crossing assimilation, or the idea that "crossing over from a minority to the mainstream culture entails adopting the aesthetic tastes of that mainstream culture" (87). While Rodriguez more or less subscribes to the ethos of...