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Latinx Literature, Borders, image, Image Links: https://en.wikipedia…

- - - - Down These Mean Streets - Piri Thomas
        In Spanish Harlem NYC, Thomas navigates his bildungsroman via the expectations of masculinity in different neighborhoods (streets) in his youth.
      - We The Animals - Justin Torres
        The narrator’s harmful misconception of violence and masculinity is shaped and perpetuated within his hometown in rural New York.
        His core identity is challenged by his family as he explore his homosexuality.
    - - House on Mango Street - Sandra Cisneros
        Cisneros utilizes Mango Street (a fictionalized street in Chicago) as a means of navigating the narrator's coming of age.
        Esperanza learns that the societal expectations and norms that surround her give predefined roles for women. She believes that leaving Mango Street would break her free of this cycle of societal constraint, as well as poverty.
        However, she has difficulty leaving due to an overpowering sense of emotional and physical connection with her neighborhood.
      - Down These Mean Streets - Piri Thomas & We the Animals -Justin Torres
        Both narrators depict the struggles of independency faced by latinx individuals as they navigate a path where cultural expectations clash with authentic expression of their true selves. They both seek acceptance by physically distancing themselves from their neighborhood
- - - - Sugar Babies” - Kali Fajardo-Anstine “Explores parent-child relationships. The main character's virtual experience of motherhood, countered by her experience as a child, demonstrates how a lack of traditional familial structures and connectives with one's heritage can limit a child's sense of identity found through family.
      - Dreaming in Cuban - Cristina García, highlights the political, geographical, and personal disparities among the three generations of women. Their varying degrees of connection to Cuba play a pivotal role in shaping their perspectives on femininity, freedom, and identity.
- - - - Between Down These Mean Streets and The Borderlands/La Frontera, our Latinx authors present us with what it truly means to embody a liminal space, in Thomas's case, to exist as a Afro-Latinx Man (Puerto-Rican and Cuban) man who will always be visibly percieved as Black even though as he culturally he is not, the existence of his race, split between his life experiences from Spanish Harlem and his explorations of the south.
        For Anzaldua, in her discussions of what it means to be Chicana, what it means to be split across the U.S. Mexico Border, we develop an understanding as readers of what exactly it means to be divided across these spaces and identities, even as our authors exist in whole bodies.
        "1,950 mile-long open wound/dividing a
        pueblo, a culture, / running down the length of my body, / staking fence rods in my flesh, / splits me splits me/me raja me raja"
        Our authors force us to reckon with how there is an inherent need to call to indigenity and blackness, mixed-raceness, colonialism, imperialism, and queerness when discussing what exactly it means to be Latinx.
      - Plan de Aztlán & Young Lords, 13 Point Program
        Similarly to The Borderlands/La Frontera, these two texts work at determining a label, and subsequent freedoms/rights, to the greater Latinx community. They work at attempting to draw large connections across varying nationalities and experiences in order to mobilize most, if not all, Latinx groups in the hope of gaining improved civil rights.