Jewish-Latino Literature

Literature from Jewish and Latinx-identifying authors shows that Latinx ethnicities are constructed differentially throughout the Americas because of the complexities of ethnonational identities stemming from countries of origin. The overlapping—and oven conflicting—experiences of Jewish Latinxs as Jews and Latinxs are recurrent themes throughout this corpus of literary production as well as in the scholarly works that have discussed them. While still a somewhat niche topic within literary studies, a growing contingent of creative and scholarly writers has emerged to grapple with the place of Jewish Latinx fiction within existing critical understandings of US Jewish fiction, global Jewish fiction, Latin American fiction, and US Latinx fiction. While many of the authors outlined below have published other works, those included here have tended to focus on the intersections of Jewish and Latinx identities, including their characters’ and authors’ relationships to their ancestors’ or their own countries of origin in Latin America. While the category of “Latino” can be somewhat ambiguous, given the importance of diasporic experiences to the definitional understanding of the term, this bibliography takes account of literature that explores diasporic and borderland experiences from Jewish Latinx perspectives, including the works of Marjorie Agosín, Ruth Behar, Ilan Stavans, Francisco Goldman, Eduardo Halfon, Alicia (“Achy”) Obejas, and Kathleen Alcalá. However there are certainly other authors who were born in Latin American nations and lived for decades or more in the United States (among them, Jacobo Sefamí, Ariel Dorfman, David Unger, Sergio Chejfec, Marjorie Agosín, Leo Spitzer, and Nora Glickman) but whose works of fiction do not focus on the experiences of the Latin American diaspora in the United States in particular. The works in this article explore the intersecting conditions of Jewishness and latinidad.