The Art of Literary Trope L’oeil and the Craft of Literary Imagination: Patricia Chao’s Mambo Peligroso

Year 2006, Issue: 23, 75 - 86, 01.04.2006

Marta Lysik

Abstract

Chicano literary critics Francisco Lomelí, María Teresa Márquez, and María Herrera-Sobek maintain that Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, and other Latina/o writers “have forged what is considered to be a second Latina/o literary boom. This renaissance is now part of a multicultural forum in which Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, Chicanos/as, and other Latinos are creating a significant corpus of literary writings” 295 . According to these scholars, Latina/o authors in the 1990s produced work which involved “greater interethnic cross-fertilization, a Latin Americanization or ‘tropicalization’ in themes, a definite diversity in terms of experiential perspectives,…an experimentation with forms…, thereby producing a vital unpredictability and a hybrid freshness never before witnessed” 295 . In Show and Tell Karen Christian also marvels at “a ‘boom’ of U.S. Latina/o cultural production“ in the last decades 4 .

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