Antonio López Writes About US Latinx Poets at Jacket2

"What are our roots?" asks López in his article at Jacket2. "This designation may come off as quibbling with semantics. Consider, though, that our people comprise 57.5 million, or approximately 18 percent, of the country’s total population — and that figure from the government census is already two years old.[1] " More, from there: 

Toward the bottom of the window, I reach the Library of Congress’s “Spotlight on US Hispanic Writers” (their words, not mine). I pause and smile at the warm faces I’ve grown to call my mentors and contemporaries: Francisco Aragón, Javier Zamora, Laurie Ann Guerrero, Rigoberto González (my beloved teacher while I was an MFA student at Rutgers-Newark), and several others. And it is this elation of seeing my literary parientes that reminds me of the greatest solace of being a Latinx poet right now: everyone I admire is still alive.

Whereas the Black literary tradition may harken back to the Harlem Renaissance, the antebellum writings of Phillis Wheatley and Charles Chesnutt, and even the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs that adorn every classroom in America, our literary tradition is much more recent. To be fair, Americanist scholars within the past ten years have nuanced the very argument I am making. Raúl Coronado’s A World Not to Come unearths the forgotten writings of José Antonio Gutierrez de Lara, Jose Álvarez de Toledo, and other escritores of nineteenth-century America.[2] Moreover, let’s not continue to erase the Afro-Latinx heritage and the interventions of towering figures like Arturo Schomburg, the Puerto Rican intellectual who is the namesake for the Center for Black Culture in Harlem. My claim’s focus, though, isn’t historical, but rather interrogates the American literary imagination. It bluntly asks: besides Cisneros and Soto, who are Latinx poets readily conjured in our students’ minds, let alone in the general American public’s?

Learn more at Jacket2.