“Public Negotiations is an important and prescient book for these times. Ariana Vigil offers us multitudinous engagements with the public sphere that tell us that the Latinx community is not a staid and silent entity. An excellent read.”—Amelia M. L. Montes
“Vigil’s triangulation of literary analysis, historical readings, and media criticism makes this a powerful book that will both speak to multiple scholarly audiences and also demonstrate what incisive criticism can look like and perform.” —Lee Bebout
Ariana E. Vigil’s interdisciplinary study, Public Negotiations: Gender and Journalism in Contemporary US Latina/o Literature examines how the boundaries of the Latina/o public sphere are negotiated through mass media. Focusing on a wide range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latina/o literary texts that feature Latina/o media figures—worksby Lucha Corpi, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Cherríe Moraga, and Rubén Salazar, among others—Vigil examines the relationship between Latina/o media and Latina/o publics and reflects on how literature demonstrates a sustained interest in this relationship.
Vigil also reveals how these conversations inevitably engage with gender concerns, showing how the role of gender in this relationship is neither static nor consistent over time. Examining how these works represent such things as gendered Latina/o counter publics, how Central American–American communities are gendered in relation to other US Latina/o communities, how and why gendered expressions of Latinidad are produced and marketed, and how print media provides an important space for dissemination of diverse ideas, Public Negotiations considers the way in which gender functions in terms of both the construction and reception of a Latina/o public in a transnational space. Through thorough examination and with deep insight, Vigil shows how literature can invaluably reflect current and historical issues surrounding media and the public sphere and help us imagine new, hopefully better, possibilities.
Ariana E. Vigil is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Part 1 Domestic Negotiations
Introduction Latina/o Literature, Journalism, and the Public Sphere
Chapter 1 The Many Lives of Rubén Salazar
Chapter 2 The Ends of Representation: Media and Activism in Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints
Part 2 Transnational Negotiations
Chapter 3 The Long Night of White Chickens and the Necessity of a Transnational Latina/o Public
Chapter 4 Solidarity or Spectatorship: Photojournalism, Militarized Conflict, and the Boundaries of Latinidad
Conclusion Publics Unbound: Undocuqueer Activism
Works Cited
Index
