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Latino USA, Revised Edition: A Cartoon History

Amazon.com Price:  $22.25 (as of 01/05/2019 14:18 PST- Details)

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Description

Latino USA represents the culmination of Ilan Stavans’ lifelong determination to meet the challenges of capturing the joys, nuances, and more than one dimensions of Latino culture within the context of the English language. In this cartoon history of Latinos, Stavans also seeks to combine the solemnity of so-called serious literature” and history with the inherently theatrical and humorous nature of the comics.

Stavans represents Hispanic civilization as a fiesta of types, archetypes, and stereotypes. These more than one, at times contradictory voices, each narrating more than a few episodes of Latino history from a unique perspective, combine to create a carnivalesque rhythm, which is democratic and impartial. Latino USA, like the history it so entertainingly relates, is a dazzling kaleidoscope of irreverence, wit, subversion, anarchy, politics, humanism, celebration, and serious and responsible history.

If it’s a comic book, then it can’t be a work of serious scholarship, right? Mistaken. Ilan Stavans, a literary scholar and cultural historian, teams up with Chicano artist Lalo Alcaraz to craft an without end entertaining but painstakingly researched history of Latinos–often known as Latin Americans and Hispanics, and taking in peoples from in all places the Spanish-speaking world–in the US. Stavans’s text covers the ground from avocados to zoot suits, touching on such matters as the Puerto Rican independence movement, the Mexican American War, the Marielito flotilla, and the ongoing struggle for civil rights all through the hemisphere.

Stavans has great fun, it’s clear, twitting received wisdom. He observes, for instance, that Mexico’s “Niños Heroes” may be an invention of folklore, and wryly remarks that “nationalism turns egotism into an ideology.” Alcaraz has just as much fun, subversively borrowing stock figures such as the toucan (a symbol in much Latin American literature) and the skeleton to serve as one of those ironic Greek chorus. But creator and illustrator also fulfill an earnestly undertaken mission: namely, in Stavans’s words, to “represent Hispanic civilization as a fiesta of types, archetypes, and stereotypes” and to tell its story from many points of view. In this they succeed admirably, and Latino U.S.A. is required reading for anyone interested in democratic, inclusive historical writing. –Gregory McNamee

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