The Hispanic Condition: Reflections on Culture and Identity in America - Hardcover

Stavans, Ilan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060170050 ISBN 13: 9780060170059

Publisher: Harpercollins, 1995

Synopsis

Examines the five major Hispanic groups--including Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Central Americans, and South Americans--describes their cultural characteristics, and draws conclusions about their eventual role in mainstream America.

About this title

About the Author:

Ilan Stavans received the 1992 Latino Literature Prize and was nominated for the National Book Critics Award for Excellence in Reviewing in 1994. He teaches at Amherst College.

From Booklist:

Stavans brings to this thoughtful, probing, often lyrical analysis of the history, culture, and identity of Latinos in the U.S. the perspective of his own experience of "life in the hyphen." As a middle-class Jew raised amid poverty in Mexico City, as a white Mexican student moving into the multicolored, multiethnic Latino communities of New York City, Stavan views each of his subjects--the ethnic groups that compose the U.S. Latino population, U.S. Latinos as a group, U.S. Anglo culture and politics, and the Americas as a region--as both insider and outsider. Exploring history and literature to understand backgrounds (in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Mexico) and attitudes (on race, machismo, and homosexuality, for instance) of ethnic groups, The Hispanic Condition insists that the focus of attention should not be Latinos as yet another immigrant group in the long succession of U.S. immigrant groups but "the hyphen" itself: the centuries-long, hemispheric "encounter between Anglos and Hispanics," an interaction in which assimilation and change flow in both directions. A provocative, often enlightening analysis. Mary Carroll

About this edition

• Publisher: Harpercollins
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0060170050
• ISBN 13: 9780060170059
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 242