Progressive cultural criticism often tends to lament the political scene today as unable to live up to the ideals of the Sixties, a nostalgia that can make the Left seem irrelevant or unable to engage with a changing present. At the same time, creative writers today are imagining new political projects and new relationships with the social movements of the past.

In the first study of Latino/a literature to systematically examine the post-Sixties generation of writers, The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature challenges the ways that Latino/a studies imagines the relationship of art, politics and the market. Dalleo and Machado Sáez engage with the major figures in the field to dispute the consensus view of Latino/a literature from the 1960s as politically committed and resistant to the market versus the literature of the 1990s as apolitical and assimilationist due to its commodification.

This study argues that post-Sixties writers Pedro Pietri, Ernesto Quiñonez, Abraham Rodríguez, Junot Díaz, Angie Cruz, Cristina Garcia, Julia Alvarez, Nilo Cruz, Chantel Acevedo, and Ana Menéndez have not abandoned politics, but are imagining creative strategies for revitalizing progressive thought through the market.

“The clear and incisive discussions about canon formation, ideologies and the market are unprecedented and very much needed in the context of globalization.”

–Frances Aparicio, Director of the Latina and Latino Studies Program at Northwestern University

“As an overview of the field and of the fundamental paradigms that have informed much Latino/a literary scholarship, the introduction is, quite simply, indispensable; it would supply a valuable framework for any course on Latino/a literature.”

–Marta Caminero-Santangelo, author of On Latinidad: US Latino Literature and the Construction of Ethnicity