The Hispanic Condition

by Ilan Stavans

Book Overview

In The Hispanic Condition, Ilan Stavans offers a subtle and insightful meditation on Hispanic society in the United States. A native of Mexico, Stavans has emerged as one of the most distinguished... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060926937
• ISBN13: 9780060926939
• Release Date: February 1996
• Publisher: Harpperen
• Length: 242 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.1"
• Age Range: 6 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 1

Customer Reviews

Powerfully written!

Chicano. Jibaro. Mestizo. Latino Agringado. Gringos Hispanzados. Pachuco. Bracero. Cubano. Gusano. Hispanic. Indio. Latino. Latinoamericano. In his book, The Hispanic Condition: The Power of a People (1995), Ilan Stavans uses all of the above terms to describe a group to whom "[t]he American Dream has not fully opened its arms," a group who has, in his eyes, a "refreshingly modern" choice: "to live in the hyphen, to inhabit the borderland." (Stavans 1995: 4) Stavans' Fanon-inspired, Baldwin-influenced, commentary on Latino identity is evidence of what Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett labels "diasporic discourse." She further states that such discourse is "strong on displacement, detachment, uprooting, and dispersion - on disarticulation." Clearly, this is evident through Stavans' statement: "Latinos in the United States [are] citizens of both realities, representatives of doubt in a land of uncertainty[.]" (Stavans 1995: 245) But the process of rearticulation, that is, "how the local is produced and what forms it takes in the space of dispersal," for Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, is "trickier because of the risk of closure, essentialism, or premature pluralism." (Kirschenblatt-Gimblett 1994: 339) Stavans' work demonstrates the difficulties described by Kirshenblatt-Gimblett when he suggests that "[t]o become U.S. full citizens, Hispanics need more than a passport; we need to reinvent ourselves, to rewrite our own history, to reformulate the paths of our imagination." (Stavans 1995: 234) This essay examines Stavans' effort to rearticulate Latino identity through an examination of how he answers the question: "¿quiénes somos de verdad." "Latinos appear to be a homogenous minority," he writes, "thinking and acting and speaking alike; but nothing is further from the truth. Diversity is their trademark." (Stavans 1995: 31) For Stavans, Latino identity is anything but static. Constantly straddling the void between a past characterized by disjunction and disconnection, and a present that gives neither respite nor reconciliation, Latino identity is a pluralistic mélange of race and culture: "Latinos are not an ethnic group but a sum of multiracial, multicultural backgrounds." (Stavans 1995: 228) It is concerned with the present and the past: "Latinos are seen as being devoted to eternal truths, to the act of recalling, to continuity through oral tradition." (Stavans 1995: 215). It is simultaneously of this world and not of this world: "Latinos get lost somewhere between the reality and the dream."(Stavans 1995: 181) It is always betwixt and between: "Wherever we go, as Latinos we will always carry our idiosyncratic self with us." (Stavans 1995: 10) Even music exemplifies this dichotomy: "Latino music seems to oscillate between existential dilemmas and folklore." (Stavans 1995: 101) Latino identity, for Stavans, is forever fragmented: "Latinos, I believe, were, are, and will always be perpetual alien residents never fully here - strangers in a native land." (

Worth the effort!

I enjoyed The Hispanic Condition. It made me think.

Magnifico! I liked it a lot.

I was assigned this book in Latino class. I was really surprised by the freshness of the comments. It's very insightful.

Memorable

I loved this book. It is insighful, open-minded, intelligent, and unorthodox. A great read!

Already a classic

The attention--and place--this book has already earned in mainstream AND Hispanic America is well deserved. Try this book alongside earlier classics like Octavio Paz's LABYRINTH OF SOLITUDE and more personal, recent autobiographies and essay collections like Jack Lopez's CHOLOS AND SURFERS and Mary Helen Ponce's HOYT STREET/CALLE HOYT. Read together the experience is even richer.