Walk the Barrio: The Streets of Twenty-First-Century Transnational Latinx Literature by Cristina Rodriguez (review)
- Walk the Barrio: The Streets of Twenty-First-Century Transnational Latinx Literature by Cristina Rodriguez
In early 2023 the governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, former press secretary for President Donald J. Trump, banned the word "Latinx" from use in state documents. Her decree is a reminder that the controversies and conversations surrounding the advent and use of the word "Latinx" reveal how fraught our understanding of this wide and varied culture and people is. Setting political theater aside, the state of Latinx literatures, cultures, and histories, has generally progressed from a very narrow theoretical path to one that is ever expanding and wide ranging, often upsetting those who adhere comfortably to whatever the status quo happens to be. Though at times such conceptual expansion is not welcomed, it is nonetheless necessary. So I appreciate Cristina Rodriguez's Walk the Barrio and her efforts to put a figurative shoulder to the boundaries of Latinx literature and push with all her might. Taking her cue from an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates literary analysis, sociological concepts, personal interviews, and journalism (a nod to her earlier career), Rodriguez weaves the disparate threads of Latinx culture and gives us a more nuanced and certainly more complex way of thinking about Latinx literature. Her book is both thought provoking and emphatic in its humanization of Latinx subjectivity and the concretization of the lived spaces through which these Latinx lives—both real and fictive—must traverse.
As signaled in the title, Rodriguez takes aim at the physical spaces used as a stand in for so much of Latinx culture in the popular imagination: the barrios. She focuses on specific sites within works by Latinx authors that feature migrant or immigrant characters. Rodriguez claims that these writers—namely, Helena María Viramontes, Salvador Plascencia, Richard Blanco, Angie Cruz, Junot Díaz, Héctor Tobar, and William Archila—employ actual geographical places and spaces to create their fictive storyworlds. In turn, her process yields what she calls "barriographies," taking the inscribed storyworlds and mapping them onto the veritable neighborhoods themselves. This process, too, is signaled in the title: the imperative to walk. In doing so, a richer understanding of these texts, their authors, their subjects, and their settings reveals how these barrios are rendered and made manifest through diaspora and the migrant's relationship to place.
Thanks to her bold decision to bring an interdisciplinary approach to bear on her topic, Rodriguez presents a multifaceted understanding of the texts she examines. For instance, she opens the book with memories of growing up in her own neighborhood of Silver Spring, Maryland that was replete with many immigrant cultures. She begins by declaring her own unease throughout her upbringing with how she should identify—at [End Page 2005] times feeling not Latina enough or sometimes being teased because she was Latina (2-3). Thus, her experiences with identity, immigrants, and place provided the impetus for her work. Rodriguez is often the conduit through which she takes her readers from the histories of the neighborhoods to the authorsȇ fictionalizations and back to their geographical origins. And hers is not the only voice that seeks to capture the nuance and vitality of these places. As part of her process, Rodriguez interviews locals regarding their thoughts and posits interpretations of her own concerning places like East Los Angeles, El Monte, MacArthur Park, Westlake, Crown Hill, Van Nuys, New Brunswick, Washington Heights, and Miami's Little Havana. Walk the Barrio reaches beyond literary interpretation, often divorced from the places that inspired them, and urges movement and migration into these and other similar spaces. It is clear such an impulse was exacerbated by the COVID-19 lockdown, and Rodriguez briefly mentions how the pandemic had a shaping influence on the writing and publication of her book, insofar as it prevented her "from completing research on a nuyorican chapter" (16).
Of course, a book like this comes with its own set of constraints. It is obviously not boundless, and there are hundreds of spaces that might also be deserving...
