Latinx and Latin American Profiles

Popular Latina Fiction and Americanization in the Twenty-First Century

Tace Hedrick

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780822980995
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Winner, 2016 ALA-Choice Outstanding Academic Title In Chica Lit: Popular Latina Fiction and Americanization in the Twenty-First Century, Tace Hedrick illuminates how discourses of Americanization, ethnicity, gender, class, and commodification shape the genre of "chica lit, " popular fiction written by Latina authors with Latina characters. She argues that chica lit is produced and marketed in the same ways as contemporary romance and chick lit fiction, and aimed at an audience of twenty- to thirty-something upwardly mobile Latina readers. Its stories about young women's ethnic class mobility and gendered romantic success tend to celebrate twenty-first century neoliberal narratives about Americanization, hard work, and individual success. However, Hedrick emphasizes, its focus on Latina characters necessarily inflects this celebratory mode: the elusiveness of meaning in its use of the very term "Latina" empties out the differences among and between Latina/o and Chicano/a groups in the United States. Of necessity, chica lit also struggles with questions about the actual social and economic "place" of Latinas and Chicanas in this same neoliberal landscape; these questions unsettle its reliance on the tried-and-true formulas of chick lit and romance writing. Looking at chica lit's market-driven representations of difference, poverty, and Americanization, Hedrick shows how this writing functions within the larger arena of struggles over popular representation of Latinas and Chicanas.

Chapter 1

Genre and the Romance Industry

As I have noted, the formulae of women’s genre fiction—that is, the accepted and, most importantly, familiar plot patterns and conventions—particularly of the romance novel and contemporary chick lit, act as processes or “doings,” as Frederick Aldama and Ramón Saldívar note, for constructing as well as working through answers to questions about women’s cultural and economic options.¹ Yet the delineations of specific genres are always blurred, as scholars of popular genre such as Catherine Gledhill attest: they are “not discrete systems, consisting of a fixed number of listable items” (64). As we will see, the formulaic boundaries of chica lit are shared by, though its narrative concerns are also constrained by, those of contemporary romance, paranormal romance, chick lit, and career girl fiction. In fact, I argue that chica lit’s unusual (for popular women’s fiction) set of questions makes it necessary for its authors to choose from all of these plot conventions the elements that will best address such concerns. At the same time, I argue, these elements also impose constraints on chica lit’s overtly stated concerns with ethnicity and Americanization, as well as with the undeniable facets of Latino and Chicano poverty and a growing US anti-immigration sentiment. It is quite possible to work creatively and even brilliantly within a form’s constraints. Established writers may feel freer to experiment within the bounds of these forms but the more lucrative the romance and chick lit market, the more formulaic the writing tends to be, and the greater the emphasis is on new and up-and-coming authors to conform. And romance and chick lit publishing, including all the niche imprints and presses belonging to large houses, is very lucrative indeed. The Romance Writers of America (RWA), a nonprofit trade association, estimates from BookStats that by 2013 romance novels—a wide and encompassing category—sold 1.8 billion dollars’ worth of books (“Romance Industry Statistics”). Indeed, despite the assumption of new freedoms for writing and publishing opened up by the internet, these genre boundaries still constitute part of what is required by editors, publishing corporations, and retailers. And despite the growth of niche markets for African American romance and ethnic chick lit, we find upon closer examination that the nearer these books hew to strict genre elements, the more the narrative must struggle with the contradictory positions of its racially or ethnically marked heroines. In other words, the tools of popular genre cannot completely provide the narrative logic for putting ethnic women’s bodies center stage.

Chica lit is different from white romance and chick lit in its use of Latina characters, as well as its sometimes overtly didactic nature. Yet because the genre conventions and publishing requirements of contemporary romance novels have provided a template for both chick and chica lit, it is helpful to look at the ways in which such a template functions, especially now, in the context of early twenty-first-century US corporate publishing. This chapter examines, first, the genre outlines of contemporary romance fiction and its relationship to chick and chica lit. Next, I continue my argument that genre formulae now work in a feedback loop with the requirements of mass marketing. We will see how romance and chick lit, and by extension, chica lit, are by their very nature as genre writing, embedded both within the exigencies for successful sales and within the cultural logic, already discussed above, of current US economic policies and practices.

CHICA ROMANCE

Besides chica lit, Mary Castillo and Lara Rios have also written Latina romances, or have had their chica lit books published by presses that specialize in romance fiction. The publisher of the e-zine Latinidad, Marcela Landres, offers interviews, advice, and tips for Latina/o authors looking to get published, especially by a large company. In her September 2, 2006, edition Landres gave this advice to Latina authors: “I often advise writers to think of themselves as small business owners and their manuscripts as the product or service they sell. Mary Castillo took this concept one step further by composing a business plan for her writing career” (“Business Plan”). Landres then features a brief interview with Castillo, in which she asks readers, “Have you ever had an agent or editor who was not Latino tell you that the characters in your manuscript weren’t ‘Latino enough’? If so, you’re not alone. Mary Castillo didn’t let that stop her, and her persistence paid off in not one, but two book deals. Note that Mary met one of her editors at the RWA’s National Convention. Further proof that writing conferences can be worth the price of admission” (“Q&A: Mary Castillo”). The interview continues as Castillo discusses her experiences trying to get her first chica lit fiction published: “I walked into the Publisher Spotlight session for Avon Romance at RWA’s National Convention in New York, determined to take one more chance to find a home for Tamara. . . . So for those writers out there who are banging their heads against the walls because you don’t have a chola, a hoochie mama, a barefoot peasant, or a mystical all-knowing abuelita in your story (I’m being facetious!), there are publishers and agents looking for fresh and contemporary Latina stories” (“Q&A”). Besides the (seemingly requisite) rejection of “old school” Latina/o “stereotypes,” a large part of chica lit’s success, then, is found in the fact that its business side is rooted—in terms of genre as well as in market terms—in contemporary romance. Yet romance novels themselves have morphed over the last couple of decades. Wendell and Tan in their Beyond Heaving Bosoms delineate between “Old Skool” and “New Skool” romance novels. “Old Skool” are the kind we typically associate with giant romance publishers such as Harlequin (sometimes used as a kind of generic reference to all romances of a certain basic type). The Old Skool romance, pared down, according to Wendell and Tan, looks like this:

Boy meets girl.

Holy crap, shit happens!

Eventually, the boy gets the girl back.

They live Happily Ever After. (11)

As Wendell and Tan note, this formula is “deceptively simple” (11). Indeed, Pamela Regis notes in her A Natural History of the Romance Novel that the romance is “old, flexible,” and still ill-defined (7), although her work does attempt to define it: “The romance novel is a work of prose fiction that tells the story of the courtship and betrothal of one or more heroines” (14), and proceeds to enumerate its eight narrative elements. As she continues, she presents us with a pocket history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century changes in women’s status that effected changes in the romance: “We found three sweeping society trends—affective individualism (acting for one’s own happiness), property rights for women, and . . . marrying for love . . . that informed, propelled, and inspired the courtships” (108). Writing in 2000, Regis averred that in romance, these three motivations for courtship were already in place; now at the beginning of the US twenty-first century, these “books present portraits of women in command of their lives” (110). Regis’s contention that in the requisite happy ending “the heroine is freed [by overcoming the element of the barrier to love] and the reader rejoices” does not tell us why marriage or romantic love, rather than some other triumph, must be the end result of this process. Nor do all contemporary romance (or chick lit, or chica lit) women characters begin the narrative as “being in command of their lives.” Indeed, chica lit imbues the twenty-first-century romance’s concerns with discourses of “affective individualism” and the question of women’s property. In chica lit, these are translated into a neoliberal belief in the heroine’s individual power (sometimes helped by girlfriend power) to solve the seemingly private problems of her life—how to be a Latina in the United States, how to be a “modern” woman, how to have time for a career and a romance—and made even more complex by uncertainties about contemporary access to the means of property, here transformed into worries about work and careers.

Thus the road to rejoicing that Regis’s readers follow in the romance novel is often a rockier one both for chick lit and chica lit, although each chica lit novel faithfully if with difficulty brings its readers the requisite happy ending. In fact, the journey to that happy ending can be so fraught with problems that scholars of women’s genre writing have begun to argue that the immensely popular and influential subgenre of chick lit, like the inheritors of Bridget Jones’s Diary, are, in their representations of the advice and admonitions surrounding women, actually novels of parody and disenchantment. Leah Guenther asserts in her discussion of chick lit that its characters “struggle with conflicting social messages that compel them simultaneously to find a man, be independent, build a career, start a family, have sex indiscriminately and be chaste” (86).²

At the same time, like chick lit and contemporary romance, chica lit often exhibits a frothy style, accompanied by enticing descriptions of luxury items and beautiful homes. Despite these novels’ recourse to seductive scenes of luxury and ease, however, scholars like Suzanne Ferriss and Tania Modleski maintain that chick lit responds to actual social and financial fears and anxieties of young women at the turn of the century. Yet the idea that chick lit and romance fiction “respond” to their readers’ realities, or the claim that they “mirror” their audiences’ lives, is, especially in the case of chica lit, misleading. As we will see, these novels are written in such a way as to make their characters and situations “relatable” to the reader. In this way, what Regis calls “barriers” to women’s happiness are indeed set up in these fictional stories as they are in real life. However, as she notes, such barriers and conflicts only exist to be overcome; indeed they must be overcome if the reader is to be satisfied in her demand for a happy ending (15). If chica lit does, as I argue here, have its roots in popular women’s genres like romance and chick lit, then like in those genres the characters in chica lit will face conflicts, barriers, and even disillusionments. For chica lit, however, the impulse to a “corrective” narrative, wherein it is (with some narrative difficulty) demonstrated that Latinas can indeed be middle-class Americans, shapes the narrative into an instructive one. Here chica lit joins up once again with the generic goal of romance and chick lit to reassure both character and reader that in spite of many obstacles, those who learn proper (feminine as well as ethnic) behavior will indeed experience freedom and rejoicing. Particularly in chica lit, then, instructions for how Latinas can leverage their ethnicity into successful Americanization mirror, not so much their audience, but other romance and chick lit narratives as advice manuals, which show women how to behave in ways that tend to benefit the established social order of things.

If this is so, then chica lit’s origins in romance and in chick lit call for characters who will finally, through lessons learned and rewards earned, accept the neoliberal reshapings of their socioeconomic world. Yet chica lit must perform the extra step of reframing its generic connections to other popular women’s writing in order to accommodate Latina characters who are in real-world material terms less likely to wind up with successful, middle-class lives.

Shifting economic policies that tend to privilege privatization over government and state regulations and safety nets require a new set of economic relations between workers and employers. Although she is writing about paranormal romance, Erin Young argues that “the conventional romance narratives of the 1980s and prior reflect romantic relationships in the context of Fordist capitalism. The paranormal romance subgenre that emerges in the 1990s, on the other hand, explores the changing constructions of male and female subjectivity under flexible accumulation” (205–6). This insight may help illuminate the place chica lit occupies in relationship to its “disillusions.” Following David Harvey’s analysis of cultural changes in postmodernity, Erin Young defines flexible accumulation as the kind of labor that “marks the transition from mass production to small-scale production, the rise of the service industry, and the growth of ‘flexible’ employment arrangements (in terms of hours, contracts, work locations, etc.)” (205). Young argues that the instability of such arrangements, and the social changes they require, can give rise to “new configurations of gender roles and gender relations,” especially in the paranormal werewolf romances she examines.

Yet in paranormal as well as in “realistic” chica lit, such disillusionment and fiscal instability is not allowed to refigure gender roles; instead, these roles are reframed as a set of problems to be overcome specifically through the heroine’s working life, and which in the overcoming will also show our chica heroine the proper ways to leverage her ethnicity into a culturally American access to material well-being. Chica lit thus functions, as I have been arguing, as behavior manual and advice column for the Latina’s engagement with those changing socioeconomic structures to which Young and Harvey refer, in her vexed search for what Alisa Valdes has called a “Latino American biculturalism” (Lauren’s Saints np). Castillo’s Switchcraft, Kathy Cano-Murillo’s Waking Up, Rios’s Becoming Latina, and Acosta’s Cocktails at Casa Dracula series all provide examples of how chica lit borrows from career girl, paranormal, and coming-of-age narratives in order to map a “path to [assimilated, American] adulthood” for the didactic purpose of suggesting proper behaviors for romantic and material success in a (bi)cultural US citizenship.

For example, Switchcraft’s use of the omniscient narrator allows us to recognize, early on, that an accidental, paranormal body-switching will point its characters on the path to a self-understanding that includes material success for both main characters. As we meet the main character Aggie, her illusions about her carefree and materially successful life are already being shattered at the beginning of the book. Because she’s not married, still rents, and has a failing business, Aggie “felt so childish” next to her best friend Nely’s husband, house, and baby; Nely “seemed so . . . so grown up.” On the other hand, Nely herself feels fat, “heavy-footed and slatternly” in the presence of Aggie’s well-toned, child-free, “high maintenance” life (11, 14). Clearly, both women will be learning lessons, which result in their partnering in Aggie’s business: one about how to grow up and be a responsible businesswoman and wife, the other about how to value what she has while parlaying her skills as a mother into managing a thriving business. Meanwhile, Cocktails at Casa Dracula’s Milagro will learn that her prestigious degree will not land her a job, and subsequently she must encounter and overcome the fact that because she is Mexican American, her love of gardening may be perceived as merely the “natural” desire of a Mexican laborer; it is, finally, her feisty Mexican American temperament, coupled with her paranormal adventures, that provide her with a path to true adult self-understanding. Problems persist and the road to assimilation must be mapped out even without paranormal help; Marcela of Becoming Latina is shattered by news that the Mexican father she’s loved all her life is not her biological father, who it turns out is white. The nature of such disappointments are, as we shall see, specific to Latinas at the turn of the twenty-first century: though the characters are imagined, they must face real-world problems: access to education, barriers to material well-being, the maintenance of coupledom in uneasy financial and cultural circumstances.

At the same time, both disillusionment and its attendant problems and conflicts are also demanded by the generic armature of a long history of sentimental, romantic, and chick lit. For centuries, the popular women’s novel has presented characters who must overcome barriers to happiness. For the contemporary chica lit novels’ intended mode of reading—that is, superficial—such a framework is often familiar enough to the reader to help to paper over glaring contradictions, which really would be disillusioning. Instead, it is the required resolution of such conflicts—and even the “dissing” of illusions—that furthers the positive nature of chica lit’s underlying didactic mission, so that heroine and reader can derive the reward they deserve for learning their lessons, and follow the path to understanding themselves as grown-up, twenty-first-century cultural Americans. This resolution is the happy ending.

Even in those chica lit novels that voice muffled protests against structural inequality, endings are especially important. Radway discusses the importance of endings to women’s romance reading strategies by noting how many women in her study told her that before buying the book, they always paged to the back first to make sure the novel concluded properly. Radway noted that her romance readers chose “their romances carefully [reading the end first, for example] in an attempt to assure themselves of a reading experience that will make them feel happy and hold out the promise of utopian bliss, a state they willingly acknowledge to be rare in the real world but one, nevertheless, that they do not want to relinquish as a conceptual possibility” (100). Endings must give the reader that “conceptual possibility” that Radway acknowledges is part of the “romantic myth” (200). It is important to understand that in the chica lit novel, however, such seemingly mythic utopian bliss is written not as fantasy but as possibility. That actual ending, the reader knows, may not happen to her but it is always possible that romance and material well-being might be hers; this is particularly true with chica lit’s didactic map-making strategies. This element of possibility is why it is important to understand that, as Radway notes, readers also expect complexity and “reality” in their novels: “the novelistic character is intended to appear as a complex, human figure whose often contradictory traits and motives are a function of the need to deal . . . with an entirely contingent and particular reality that is . . . unpredictable as well” (200). In chica lit, material success is represented as opening the way to a certain kind of unpredictable possibility. In the happy ending, its characters finally now inhabit a world of more “personal choices,” particularly important for Latinas. In this way, chica lit gestures toward both the contingent and particular realities of “being Latina” in the United States even in its presumably “fantasy” plots and endings. Poverty, or the specter of it, is presented as the other side of accomplishment, and thus as rigidly predictable and closed. The material uncertainties and even chaotic lives often called forth in belonging to a generally disenfranchised group of people must be, once raised as problems at the beginning of each book, negotiated into a harmonious but apparently possible as well as open-ended order, through the romantic and chick lit convention of the “happy ending” opening the characters’ lives to options. Of course, not all options are on the table; indeed, as Acosta noted in a personal communication, “In my first version of my first book, Milagro tells the men pursuing her, ‘If you ever grow up, give me a call,’ and she walks out the door. My agent said that she couldn’t sell the book if it didn’t have a ‘happy ending.’ I told her that a young woman standing on her own two feet was a happy ending. Evidently, my idea of a happy ending is not the universal definition, so I had to change the end to get the book deal” (e-mail message to author, January 19, 2014).

As different as each situation may seem, endings must show how each character has learned those lessons necessary to point her on the way to a reordering of romantic, professional, and ethnic identities. Each chica must be, if not completely fulfilled (for example she might not yet be married), content with her journey toward her growth as a culturally enfranchised American. The iteration of such endings accustoms readers to a narrative that leads its characters to an opening-out—not into the unknowable but into what has already been envisioned by the book as a place where characters (and by extension readers) know who they are or at least who they are becoming. Despite the illusion of open-endedness, these endings are actually comfortable in that they point to plac...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: What’s a Girl to Do When . . . ?
• Introduction: A Regular American Life
• Chapter 1: Genre and the Romance Industry
• Chapter 2: Class and Taste: Is It the Poverty?
• Chapter 3: Latinization and Authenticity
• Conclusion: Not Even the Mexicans
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index