[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural works with “fool” in the title. Share your thoughts on foolish texts, with or without the word, for a fool-hearty crowd-sourced weekend post!]
First, a
bit of inside baseball: I haven’t yet had a chance to check out either of the
texts on which my last two posts in this series will focus. I don’t want to pretend
to have specific things to say about them, but I did want to both highlight them
and use them as a lens for broader AmericanStudies questions. So in honor of the
acclaimed recent sitcom
about cholo young men and their families and communities in LA, some thoughts
on three other Latino cultural works that each redefined their respective
genres (as that sitcom seems to have):
1)
Ruiz
de Burton’s novels: Between that post for the American Writers Museum blog
and posts here like this
one, I’ve said a good bit about María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, one of my
favorite 19th century American authors and a truly unique voice and
perspective on our history, community, identity, and more. Here I’ll just add
one thing: I wrote
in this post about my friend Larry Rosenwald’s excellent book Multilingual
America: Language and the Making of American Literature (2008), and while
Ruiz de Burton published her novels in English, I’d still say she exemplifies a
multilingual literary legacy that can help us radically reframe what American
literature itself includes and means.
2)
The
Salt of the Earth (1954): When it comes to this groundbreaking film
about Latino and labor history, I can’t say it any better than did the great film
historian Vaughn Joy in that first hyperlinked post for her Review Roulette
newsletter. In many ways Salt is in conversation with other films about
labor history, including one of my personal favorites from my favorite
filmmaker, John
Sayles’ Matewan (1987). But in the mid-1950s, with the horrific Operation
Wetback in frustratingly full swing, a film about Latino workers represents
a truly radical cultural work—and one that likewise embodies an alternative vision
of what the era’s “social
problem films” could be and do.
3)
In the Heights (2005): As
part of a 2016 series on Puerto Rican stories and histories, I wrote
about West Side Story (1957), which as I noted there started with very
distinct cultural backgrounds for its protagonists before evolving to feature a
Puerto Rican heroine (and her even more overtly Puerto Rican friends and
community). Given that multilayered evolution, I’d say that the title of “first
Latino Broadway musical” was still up for grabs, and that In the Heights
might well qualify. But such distinctions are ultimately less important than
what cultural works themselves feature and do, and there’s no doubt that the
voices and beats, the identities and communities, put on stage by Lin-Manuel
Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes added something significant to the genre
of the Broadway musical, as each of these texts has in its respective genres.
Last
foolish text tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Foolish texts you’d share?
No comments:
Post a Comment